Book recommendations based on data from real readers.
Books like The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson—the acclaimed author of The Lost Continent—brilliantly explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world's largest growth industries.
Liked The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson? Here's what readers who loved it picked up next.
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (1997) · 4★
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006) · 3.89★
- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt (2005) · 3.93★
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss (2003) · 3.86★
- Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel (1995) · 3.95★
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976) · 4.11★
- The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester (1998) · 3.84★
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (2000) · 3.92★
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2003) · 3.85★
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (2003) · 4.05★
- Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945) · 3.87★
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979) · 4.2★