Mark Abley has some ideas about what is going to happen to language in the future, none of it all that good. But his new book. The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches From the Future of English, certainly provides some interesting information. Here’s one, since you are reading a blog: 175,000 new blogs are created every day, and some fear that blogs are having a negative impact on people’s ability to read. He also predicts that by 2015, the world’s population will be learning English or speaking it, partly because of the way English is sucking up words from other languages and incorporating them into the English language (Spanglish being the most famous example).

Also new in nonfiction is Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of China, which might an interesting read as the Olympics get closer. The author, Philip P. Pan, is a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. He writes that “a momentous struggle is under way for the soul of the world’s most populous nation. On one side is the venal party-state, an entrenched elite fighting to preserve the country’s authoritarian political system and its privileged place within it. On the other is a ragtag collection of lawyes, journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, hustlers, and dreamers striving to build a more tolerant, open and democratic China.”