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Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren. A breezy but knowledgeable nonfiction tour through the world's twenty most popular languages, as measured by their number of speakers, including both those who know the language as a first and as a second language. Dorren starts with a chapter on the smallest of the top languages (Vietnamese, at 85 million speakers), and progresses up the numbers through Korean, Tamil, Turkish, Javanese, Persian, Punjabi, Japanese, Swahili, German, French, Malay, Russian, Portuguese, Bengali, Arabic, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Mandarin, and finally, at 1.5 billion speakers, English.

Each language gets a chapter devoted to it, which opens which a brief introduction of the language and then does a deep dive into one particular issue, which might be linguistic, historical, or political. For example, the Japanese chapter discusses gender and language (not in the sense of la chat/le chatte, but how men and women use different vocabulary and grammar styles); Persian covers the past of the language, how it's spread over time, the empires it has ruled, and how various immigrant groups have shaped the modern language; Bengali looks at different types of writing systems; Swahili examines how multilingualism works in countries with many spoken languages; Punjabi takes on tones, how they evolve and how they function; and Tamil tells the story of official language repression and the civil war that resulted.

It's not the sort of book that will make you an expert on any topic, but if you enjoy learning interesting facts, it's a fun, easy read.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

The Snake, The Crocodile, and the Dog by Elizabeth Peters. The seventh Amelia Peabody book, a comedic murder mystery series starring a female Victorian archaeologist. Amelia and Emerson are now happily married, happily parenting their son and recently adopted daughter, and generally living a content and successful life. But sometimes you miss the passion of the early days, you know? Amelia confesses a wish that Emerson would look at her like he used to, which is promptly granted by a far too literal fate when Emerson is hit over the head and suffers amnesia. He doesn't remember Amelia or anything that's happened since their first meeting, and refuses to accept that she is his wife. Amelia has to slowly win him back, protect him from the latest villain, participate in their current Egyptian excavation, and hide the existence of their son from him (Ramses being far too much for anyone to take in all at once). Oh, and deal with their friend Cyrus Vandergelt (a rich American dilettante who has provided funding for their expedition), who is a little too excited by the fact that Amelia's basically a widow now, if you know what I mean. Amelia does not know, as she remains oblivious to his increasingly obvious attempts to comfort her in her grief.

The Snake, The Crocodile, and the Dog is an absolutely fantastic addition to this series. The humor is abundant and genuinely laugh out loud, the mystery is puzzling enough to keep me from guessing the solution (and there's a twist at the end that I completely did not see coming), there's several fantastic adventure setpieces (including a truly horrifying one with a rabid dog); it's basically everything you could want out of an Amelia Peabody book. Which was very reassuring to me, since I hadn't much liked the previous book (The Last Camel Died At Noon), and I was afraid the series had entered a decline. The Snake, The Crocodile, and the Dog proves that is definitely not the case, and I'm looking forward to more Amelia.