Looking for books that will expand my vocabulary and general language diet. In English, obv. Please don't hesitate to recommend very advanced ones. Open to any recommendations, fiction, non-fiction, books that are for pleasure reading or specifically for vocab improvement although I prefer books for pleasure reading. If you read a book and had to look up a lot of the words, that's what I want.
Thanks!
by tmrtdc3
2 Comments
*The dawn of everything* by Davids Graeber and Wengrow
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar – an absolutely gorgeous novel that uses (primarily) Latin and Greek derived vocabulary & was written in the 1950s (and so uses more obscure or dated vernacular).
I actually recorded a list of words that I noted as I went along, here’s a sampling (the list was actually far longer):
Laconism,
Calumny,
Adducing,
Approbation,
Specie,
Prodigal,
Dropsical,
Investiture,
Hellenic,
Attican,
Vinous,
Intransigence,
Colonnade,
Portico,
Peristyle,
Impelled,
Epicurean,
Servitor,
Effrontery,
Nonagenarian,
Clepsydra,
Propitious,
Cupola,
Abstruse,
Expiatory,
Importuning,
Torpid,
Pugilism,
Repasts,
Fomentors,
Conciliate,
Somnambulistic
So – if you’re unfamiliar with any number of these words, I’m certain the book would help expand your vocabulary! It’s also just a very beautiful meditation on life itself & the effort that the author went into in order to ‘become’ Hadrian without leaving a shadow of herself on the novel is quite impressive – she wrote and rewrote it over several decades!