Babel: Around the World in Twenty LanguagesAtlantic Monthly, 2018. 316 pages. Nonfiction
To speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages. Dorren sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Witty, fascinating and utterly compelling, Babel will change the way you look at and listen to the world and how it speaks.
Perhaps it's the linguist in me, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's so fascinating to have a look at twenty of the world's most popular languages and their phonetics, grammar, and scripts. I know it's unrealistic to think that I could learn all of these languages fluently, but it's fun to imagine.