 Hello, everyone. It's time for another book haul. Once again, a book haul is just just the books I've been reading. I'm interested in books about languages, about linguistics and other stuff as well. So I just like sharing what I've been reading with you guys. These are the books that we're going to be discussing, I guess. I'll start with this one, Guy Deutcher Through the Language Glass. This was a fantastic book. And I highly recommend it. I was ready to hate it at the beginning because I thought it would talk about, you know, how people say language affects how you think. You know, from the German language, it has so many rules and it's so punctilious that that's why the Germans are so precise. While the French language is more free flowing and that explains how the French are and the English language is somewhere in between. And that's why they're and it's complete crap. People like to say it just like cocktail parties or whatever, which is fine. But you see it written sometimes in articles that theory originally came through what is what is called is the Sapir Warf theory. And it's two people, Sapir and Warf, Benjamin Warf, who basically came up with this theory and they had all these elaborate reasons why and all of this has been debunked, by the way. So he goes through all that and explains how that came about and then how later the pendulum swing swung the other way with Noam Chomsky, who came up with the universal grammar is what it's called. His example was basically that if an alien came down to earth, it would say that we all speak the same language, but just different dialects of it because there's so many things that all languages, not only, you know, all European, but all European and East Asian and indigenous languages from here and there and everything, they all have all these things in common. And so he's saying it's this universal grammar. Now, since then, people have been chipping away at it slowly, but surely he goes through all that. And at the end, in fact, he swings the pendulum a bit towards the other way again. He goes through a lot of the history, for example, why in all these ancient old texts, like from the Torah to the Bible to the the the Iliad, their colors are so weird and odd compared to what we know. And, you know, they don't even mention that color blue, even when talking about the sky and stuff like that. It's very interesting if you have any interest in language, then I definitely recommend this book through the language glass by Guy Docher. Next one is one that I don't recommend as much. It's called Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows. She lived in China for a while, but it seems like she never learned Chinese past a certain level. There's some interesting tidbits about China in here, but a lot of it I thought was It seems like she was trying to extrapolate stuff that wasn't really there. She starts off talking about love. She has a character, I, which means love. That's a simplified version, by the way. That's not the traditional. She's saying how they don't have a past tense or a future tense for love in China. So that means love in China is different from love in the West. And I think she's sort of hinting that that's why people in the West get divorced more often or something. Anyway, it is complete crap. Obviously, the divorce rate there is increasing. I've heard this argument before. There's actually a very good writer from about 100 years ago called Lin Yitang. Actually, this ties into how language can affect the way you think and how people think that it affects the way you think. He was saying that Chinese doesn't have tenses. So when someone says something, that's the way it is. And so he said that was proof that basically China would never fall for communism, that they would never get rid of the emperor, and that change would not happen or would happen very, very slowly in China. All three of these have been debunked. Communism took hold shortly after he wrote that book. There's no more emperor and Shanghai is probably the fastest-changing city in the world. So I don't buy any of that. I mean, having said that, this guy, Lin Yitang, he's like... Actually, I really like him as a writer. He wrote a lot of interesting stuff, but he was off the mark on that one. Anyway, if you don't know anything about China, it is an interesting read. Actually, I was surprised quite a bit of what she says. Oh, the Chinese do this, Chinese do that. Absolutely does not apply in Taiwan. Some other things do, and it does have some interesting factoes about Chinese language. I would give this a five star. This is two to three star, two and a half, maybe. This one I picked up for free, but actually it was sort of interesting. If you're at all interested in Tuscany, in the plague, I guess. So this takes one town, Montelupo, and it talks about the plague in the 1600s, how there was basically a fight between the clergy and the health officials, because the health officials are trying to get rid of the plague, telling everyone to stay home. Well, the clergy was telling everyone to pray a lot, go on these processions, come to church, spend all their time in church, and so the health officials are like, no, no, no, don't spend time all together in a crowd, because that's how it spreads more. So it was this big thing going on, and kind of the head priest of this town was very smart and very much on the side of the health officials, but it's kind of caught in the middle. It's interesting, it's just taken through old documentation that they have from the old town of the 1600s. Another one I have is two memoirs of Renaissance Florence, keeping on more or less the same theme. I guess I should have done this one first, since it's a bit earlier. The two guys are Buona Corso Pitti, who was basically a noble, rich, Florentine, had a gambling problem traveling all over the place. He went up to England several times, to France all the time, he's going up to Germany. It's just his journal, and the other one is the journal of Gregorio Datti, who was just a merchant, basically kept track of everything he was buying and selling, and it's a bit more dry, I have to say, but if you're interested in old journal stuff, which I really am, then I recommend it. This one, last but not least, of the ones that I've read, is Joan of Arc. This, as you can see, is by Mark Twain. It's really different, though, from Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, or anything like that, if that's what you're used to. And actually, I knew nothing of this book. He wrote it a bit later on in life. It's very different, because this is full of gravitas, and it's quite a serious book. It's really well researched. And in fact, he said, I was reading up about it, that it took him 12 years to research the whole thing, and pretty much everything he wrote stands now. And he extrapolates from the facts and tries to fill in the gaps, obviously, to make a whole story out of it. But it's, anyway, very interesting. And written by Mark Twain. I mean, you can't go wrong with the writing style and everything. That's about it. I've also been listening to some audiobooks, as I mentioned before. Usually, the audiobooks are mystery books, because my wife really likes them, so we both listen to them. Harlan Cobin, we've been going through the Myron Bolotar series, which is a series starting in the 90s, and I think they're like 13, 14, or more of them. We're on number four, I think now. So you can look up the Myron Bolotar series. The one I'm reading right now is called Backspin, which I think is number four in the series or something, and I will give all of them a high rating. Four, let's say. Usually I give five to real game changers. Oh, one last one. Yeah, that I read a business book. It's called The Willpower Instinct, How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It, by Kelly McGonagall. It turned out to be a pretty good collection of all the research thus far on Willpower, basically, because there's a lot of behavioral economics in it. If you studied behavioral econ, or if you're into it, or if you've read about motivation, time management, productivity, stuff like that, then you probably read at least a couple of the concepts that are listed in the book, but it is a good compendium of everything that's been out there so far. That's about it. Right now I'm reading this, Sam Walton. So I'll let you know how it is. Obviously, he's the founder of Walmart. I found it at a used bookstore. I'm gonna leave a link in the description to my Goodreads account, so you can feel free to add me if you have a Goodreads account. And if you have any recommendations for other books, I hope you found this interesting and I didn't ramble too much. And let me know what you think. If you disagree with the books that I mentioned, or if you have other books that you recommend, because I'd love to hear about it. And otherwise, I'll see you on the next video. Thanks, bye.