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The Stuff of Thought

by Steven Pinker (Viking, $30) Steven Pinker’s probing yet playful inquiries into the hidden structure of language can make a reader rethink everything philosophy has ever taught us about mind and matter, said William Saletan in The New York Times. Looked at another way, his sweeping theories about human nature might be merely the logical outgrowth of a language geek’s idiosyncratic love of verbs.

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by Maryanne Wolfe (HarperCollins, $30) Tufts psychologist Maryanne Wolfe writes like an academic, said Carlin Romano in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Yet despite its flat prose, Proust and the Squid is a “brilliant and eye-opening” account of how our brains rearrange themselves as we learn to master reading. Wolfe is especially interesting when explaining reading disorders, and she worries how the workings of the mind will change if our digital age erodes reading’s importance.

Filthy Shakespeare

by Pauline Kiernan (Gotham, $20) Everybody knows that the collected works of Shakespeare include scads of sexual double- entendres, said Joseph B. Frazier in the Associated Press. This 300-page “romp of a read” reveals how much dirtier the plays sounded to the Bard’s red-light-district audiences. It’s a fun way to develop an appreciation for the rough edges of 16th-century daily life, and the line “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” will never sound the same to you again.

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Sixth Edition

(Oxford, $175) The new, two-volume, 3,745-page “SOED” is “a work of heroic distillation,” said Edward Short in The American Spectator. The complete OED currently stands at 20 volumes and doesn’t include the 2,000-plus new words and phrases that this edition adds. Though many obsolete words have been culled, it remains the “most reliable and capacious” of all abridged dictionaries.

Divided by a Common Language

by Christopher Davies (Houghton Mifflin, $11) Christopher Davies’ guide to the differences between British and American English is a “very fun” read for any language fan, said Marjorie Kehe in The Christian Science Monitor. This reprint will be especially cherished, though, by crossword puzzlers and British murder-mystery aficionados. For these readers, “there could hardly be a more useful book.”