Here are 100 books that Sleeping with the Dictionary fans have personally recommended if you like
Sleeping with the Dictionary.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
As a child I did not enjoy reading of any kind, detested English class, and loathed poetry in particular. I simply couldn’t comprehend what relevance poems had to my life. Then, while living overseas, in my mid-twenties in a country in which I didn’t speak the language well and had no friends, I took refuge in an English-language bookstore. There, I would find the slimmest books I could find, which happened to be poetry collections, and I’d pull one down hoping for commiseration. At some point, I realized that I could make certain friends with certain poems. Twenty-five years of growing friendships later, now I read and write poetry for a living.
Czesław Miłosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. But that isn’t the reason to seek out this book. In fact, the book contains none of his poems; it’s an anthology of poems he selected from across the ages and across the globe. The poems are idiosyncratic to Miłosz’s taste—and he has excellent taste, offering us brief personal header notes to guide our reading. Most of the poems are less than half a page long, none more than a page and a half—and some just a handful of lines. These are delicate, thoughtful poems that never become syrupy or stringent. Even after decades of reading poems, I’ve returned again and again to this book when I want to remind myself of why I turned to poetry in the first place.
Selected by Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, an inspiring collection of 300 poems from writers around the world.
Czeslaw Milosz's A Book of Luminous Things—his personal selection of poems from the past and present—is a testament to the stunning varieties of human experience, offered up so that we may see the myriad ways that experience can be shared in words and images. Milosz provides a preface to each of these poems, divided into thematic (and often beguiling) sections, such as “Travel,” “History,” and “The Secret of a Thing,” that make the reading as instructional as it is inspirational and remind us…
As a child I did not enjoy reading of any kind, detested English class, and loathed poetry in particular. I simply couldn’t comprehend what relevance poems had to my life. Then, while living overseas, in my mid-twenties in a country in which I didn’t speak the language well and had no friends, I took refuge in an English-language bookstore. There, I would find the slimmest books I could find, which happened to be poetry collections, and I’d pull one down hoping for commiseration. At some point, I realized that I could make certain friends with certain poems. Twenty-five years of growing friendships later, now I read and write poetry for a living.
Frank O’Hara is most talked about as a “city poet” who, on his time off from working at an art museum, walked around Manhattan writing about what he felt and saw. A poet of “I do this, I do that,” O’Hara is lauded for his finding the beautiful in the quotidian. But that’s the lesser half of the story. O’Hara’s greatest feat is writing tender, quirky and deeply satisfying love poems. If you are not enviably moved by his poem “Having a Coke with You,” there’s little reason to continue reading poems at all.
Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.
As a child I did not enjoy reading of any kind, detested English class, and loathed poetry in particular. I simply couldn’t comprehend what relevance poems had to my life. Then, while living overseas, in my mid-twenties in a country in which I didn’t speak the language well and had no friends, I took refuge in an English-language bookstore. There, I would find the slimmest books I could find, which happened to be poetry collections, and I’d pull one down hoping for commiseration. At some point, I realized that I could make certain friends with certain poems. Twenty-five years of growing friendships later, now I read and write poetry for a living.
Pablo Neruda is the Chilean poet everyone knows. But Nicanor Parra is the Chilean poet everyone ought to know. If you enjoy sending up poetry’s preciousness, Parra is your poet. From daily living to romantic love and from political upheaval to climate disaster, Parra parses irreverence and satire in ways that make his sentiments cut much deeper than other poets’ straight-forward sincerity. “Butterfly:” he writes, “you have to pull off its wings / to see how it flies.”
"Real seriousness," Nicanor Parra, the antipoet of Chile, has said, rests in "the comic." And read in that light, this newest collection of his work is very serious indeed. It is an abundant offering of his signature mocking humor, subverting received conventions and pretensions in both poetry and everyday life, public and private, ingeniously and wittily rendered into English in an antitranslation (the word is Parra's) by Liz Werner. Of the fifty-eight pieces in Antipoems, the first twenty-three are taken from Parra's 1985 collection, Hojas de Parra ("Vine Leaves" or "Leaves of Parra"), two others appeared in his Paginas en…
As a child I did not enjoy reading of any kind, detested English class, and loathed poetry in particular. I simply couldn’t comprehend what relevance poems had to my life. Then, while living overseas, in my mid-twenties in a country in which I didn’t speak the language well and had no friends, I took refuge in an English-language bookstore. There, I would find the slimmest books I could find, which happened to be poetry collections, and I’d pull one down hoping for commiseration. At some point, I realized that I could make certain friends with certain poems. Twenty-five years of growing friendships later, now I read and write poetry for a living.
This book will challenge your notion of what a poem is or can be. Let it. Subtitled “Diagram poems,” these works mix both word and illustration to get at their playful effects. The illustrations come from “found” or ephemeral sources, e.g., a manual on textiles, or a guide to common beetles of North America, or a grammar on computer languages, or the layouts of American playgrounds. The interplay in the poems creates a wonderful uncanniness. The friction, say, caused when you read “You are special” next to a few numbered puzzle pieces in Figure A. and “Everyone is special” next to a completed puzzle in Figure B, and yet when you try to superimpose the one on the other, you realize that some of the pieces have had to adjust themselves to fit the whole. The sudden epiphany is: How special is anyone? And yet answering that question…
With an entirely new approach to poetry and the art of collage, Jessy Randall transforms diagrams, schematics, charts, graphs, and other visual documents from very old books into poems that speak to the absurdities, anxieties, and joys of life in this modern age.
I never thought I’d be a poetry lover. I got my Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature. During that time, I took quite a few poetry classes, even though I didn’t consider myself a huge poetry fan. Over the course of those classes, I learned that poetry isn’t all about abstract, obscure themes, and academic language. It’s also a way for humans to communicate the feelings and experiences in one heart to another. Once I learned that poetry doesn’t have to be difficult and confusing, I found that I really enjoyed it, and I’d like to help other people discover that poetry can be more accessible and satisfying than what they may have studied in school.
This book blew me away. It looks deceptively simple with short poems and regular language, but the emotion of the poems is intense, direct, powerful, and breathtaking. Poem after poem just made me think “Wow!” I don’t usually read poetry for fun, but the pretty pink cover and the title of this book grabbed me at the bookstore and I bought it on a whim. It was definitely one of those cases where the right book gets you at the right time. I love this book!
International best-selling author of Love & Misadventure, Lullabies (Goodreads Readers Choice Award), and Memories, Lang Leav presents a completely new collection of poetry with a celestial theme in The Universe of Us.
Planets, stars, and constellations feature prominently in this beautiful, original poetry collection from Lang Leav. Inspired by the wonders of the universe, the best-selling poetess writes about love and loss, hope and hurt, being lost and found. Lang's poetry encompasses the breadth of emotions we all experience and evokes universal feelings with her skillfully crafted words.
* International Bestseller: Over 26K copies sold in the UK of Love…
I am a philosopher of language (and of art) and have been for 30+ years. Why philosophy of language? Well, it encourages a certain salutary kind of self-consciousness—which is extremely valuable to philosophy—and facilitates greater rigor. But it only got going some one hundred and twenty years ago. So it's modern(ish) as well as deep. And whereas it might seem a narrow slice of the philosophical pie, it isn't; it seems to provide fruitful ways of thinking for almost any philosophical subject. For example, rather than 'What is X?', we ask 'What do we mean by "X"?'; a subtle difference perhaps but the change in perspective might be a key.
I found this book's scientific rigor, systematicity, depth, and wisdom unmatchable. I liked "the passion for desert landscapes" together with the wit.
It’s not easy, at first, to see the philosophical significance of the discussion until you do, and you’re attracted to the idea that philosophy is too often a mere verbal tangle. Quine agrees, and he tries to explain why.
Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when." As Patricia Smith Churchland notes in her foreword to this new edition, with Word and Object Quine challenged the tradition of conceptual analysis as a way of advancing knowledge. The book signaled twentieth-century philosophy's turn away from metaphysics and what Churchland calls the "phony precision" of conceptual analysis.
In the course of his discussion of meaning and the…
I’ve been fascinated by languages since my teenage years, when, in addition to my native Russian, I learned English, French, Spanish, Latin, Hebrew, and Esperanto to varying degrees of fluency. But it was in college that I decided to pursue linguistics as a profession, in part influenced by one of the books on my list! After 20 years of doing scientific research and teaching linguistics at different universities, I switched gears and now focus on bringing linguistic science to the general audience of lifelong learners. Even if you don’t change your career, like I did, I hope you enjoy reading the books on my list as much as I have!
I must admit that I’m somewhat biased here, as Mark Baker was one of my professors in graduate school, but I love this book on its merits!
It’s very easy to think of languages as endlessly dissimilar from each other: what do English and Edo (one of the many languages in Nigeria) have in common? Or Navajo and Japanese? Or Tsotsil (spoken in Mexico) and Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar)?
It blew my mind how Baker takes a seemingly far-fetched parallel between language and chemistry and manages to show that the state-of-the-art linguistic theory allows us to find order and logic in the ostensibly chaotic variety of human languages, much like Mendeleev’s Periodic Table provides a structured way to see the tangible world around us.
Whether all human languages are fundamentally the same or different has been a subject of debate for ages. This problem has deep philosophical implications: If languages are all the same, it implies a fundamental commonality- and thus mutual intelligibility- of human thought.We are now on the verge of solving this problem. Using a twenty-year-old theory proposed by the world's greatest living linguist, Noam Chomsky, researchers have found that the similarities among languages are more profound than the differences. Languages whose grammars seem completely incompatible may in fact be structurally almost identical, except for a difference in one simple rule. The…
I never thought I’d be a poetry lover. I got my Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature. During that time, I took quite a few poetry classes, even though I didn’t consider myself a huge poetry fan. Over the course of those classes, I learned that poetry isn’t all about abstract, obscure themes, and academic language. It’s also a way for humans to communicate the feelings and experiences in one heart to another. Once I learned that poetry doesn’t have to be difficult and confusing, I found that I really enjoyed it, and I’d like to help other people discover that poetry can be more accessible and satisfying than what they may have studied in school.
This is unlike any poetry collection I’ve read before. The language is accessible, the material is creative, rich, and a little on the dark side. There’s so much unique imagery and beautiful phrasing that it just delighted me to read it. It’s the kind of poetry book that doesn’t try to be verbose and obtuse just for the sake of poetry. Although it explores some gritty themes, it’s a lot of fun.
That’s the sound of the clocks getting ready to fall back. The nights stretch longer as the days shrink shorter. Creatures of the night come out to play; to fill autumn’s twilights and winter’s chills.
And at the edge of this mist infused scene, Derek R King stands and drinks in this dream. Muse by his side (or is she within), her whispered breath caresses his ears, as she drapes him in words: “Let the poetry begin.”
I never thought I’d be a poetry lover. I got my Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature. During that time, I took quite a few poetry classes, even though I didn’t consider myself a huge poetry fan. Over the course of those classes, I learned that poetry isn’t all about abstract, obscure themes, and academic language. It’s also a way for humans to communicate the feelings and experiences in one heart to another. Once I learned that poetry doesn’t have to be difficult and confusing, I found that I really enjoyed it, and I’d like to help other people discover that poetry can be more accessible and satisfying than what they may have studied in school.
I love this book because it’s like a collection of very short stories, in poem form. It reads like slices of real life, captured in verbal snapshots.
Again, one of my favorite things is poetry which uses everyday language and captures the beauty, sorrow, struggle, and joy of normal life. This book is excellent to dip in and out of for a quick little glimpse of life to enjoy and inspire. There’s something in this book for everyone.
I have published a great many novels and stories and been translated into more than 20 languages, but long before I began to publish fiction I wrote poems, a number of which were published in poetry magazines, newspapers and suchlike – until the day I decided that, while continuing to write poems, I no longer wanted to see them in print. NUDES & VICTIMS contains a hundred of the poems written from 1967 to 2001, plus 30 song lyrics written between 1975 and 2012.
Growing up with two languages, I always wondered how one ‘retrieves’ the right words. Later, I worked on how children acquire a language. I looked at when they understood words like IN and ON; BIG and LOW; FATHER, SISTER, or COUSIN; HERE, THERE; BEFORE and AFTER. I tracked when children could produce such words, too. And I found that designing experiments was fun and rewarding. I also worked on when and how children coin words to fill gaps: TO OAR = row; a CUT-GRASS = lawn-mower; a CLIMBER = ladder. I found that learning a first language is a long journey, with many steps along the way.
This is a great introduction to what linguists do when they analyze languages to see how they work.
Bolinger spent his life observing how speakers use language, making notes on how and when they hesitate as they plan what to say, common errors they make, and what all this tells us about how language functions as a tool for communication.
And he drew on his observations to tell the story of what is involved in studying how languages work. I regularly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what linguistics is. (It is not being a polyglot!)
