Dictionary Days is nominally about dictionaries, the back of the book making claims about the multilingual history of dictionaries and that's a subject that I am very interested in. So I read it, to discover that it's in a style I'm not fond of at all, the rambling, havering even, personal essay, with interjections of experimental literature. I don't really care about the troubles your friends had illegally immigrating to my country. I'm not really interested in a discussion you might have with Samuel Johnson if he were to show up at your house with his words written in quotes from his works. Mexican theater is also not on topic. He's a decent writer, but not enough to make me really enjoy these wild diversions.

As for dictionaries and language in general, there's a lot of meandering about the subject, including vague touching on the subject of obscenity (or even just the phrase "sexual intercourse") in dictionaries and multilingual definitions of love. It's interesting, but not solid. Given that he's the author of a dictionary of Spanglish, I would have thought he could have devoted one good section to the subject.

A couple errors did annoy me, and make me wonder what else might be found, though there was little enough to be concretely wrong about. The creation of Esperanto was described as mathematical, a term better used to describe Interlingua and friends which had mechanical aspects to their creation. (It is a big deal to some Esperantists, as the one of the values of Esperanto is the hand-crafted artistry that was put into it.) Another implied that the Normans had a hand in the language of Beowulf which predates them (and tosses in the Celts in the short list of influences on English, despite Celtic having a best a minor influence on the language.)

I'm sure that there's other, essay-loving people who would enjoy this book. It's well-enough written, if you don't mind the fact that it doesn't have a topic and is largely a stepping stone for the author to talk about his life and whatever else comes to mind. ( )