Because of the Fagradalsfjall eruption’s location near both the capital and the country’s biggest airport, it quickly established itself as Iceland’s latest volcanic mass-tourist attraction. On my computer, in New York, I’d seen videos of people cooking eggs on cooling lava, playing volleyball there, and getting married as craters oozed behind them.
It was therefore disconcerting when, on that late-May afternoon, I drove to the end of an access road and entered a brand-new—but empty—parking lot. A sandwich board was leaning against an uninhabited white trailer, advertising “LAMB SOUP / FISH N’ CHIPS / HOT-DOGS.”
As a writer, I’m always trying to rekindle that feeling, of connecting to words through their sounds, not just their meanings. So I read poetry every day, and my reading takes a particular form: On the first day of every month, I pick a poem, and then I read that poem every day that month.
With grammar approaching the status of anachronism, Bryan A. Garner’s Taming the Tongue is not a screed for the return of grammar, but rather a joyous review of 100 items in Garner’s personal collection of almost 2,000 grammars published during what he sees as the heyday of English grammar. It is not intuitively obvious that a book about 18th- and 19th-century grammarians and their work could be seen as a romp, but a romp it is!
It’s natural to think of the Renaissance in Italy in purely visual terms. But focusing on striking paintings or architectural splendors alone gives us an incomplete picture of that era.
“[E]qually if not more important for the centuries to follow,” King writes, “were the city’s lovers of wisdom” — people like Vespasiano da Bisticci, who is the subject of his engaging new book.