Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing Book Review

Category: Birds of Paradise-a nonfiction title that is magnificent

Genre: Nonfiction, Biography

You know me: I love reading. I will stumble upon the used bookstore in whatever town I’m in. My body is covered in tattoos based on books. I delight in the act of reading and the intrigue of the plot as much as I enjoy the craft of the author telling his story. In Daniel Tammet’s Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing, I seem to have found a bibliophile and logophile in similar reverence. I would put this story on par with Muriel Barbury’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog and you know how much that book means to me.

This is Tammet’s autobiographical narrative about his struggle to understand and relate to his native language of English. As he says, it was “the language in which I was raised and schooled…my mother tongue” but he never belonged to it; it felt like his second language. The language that made the most sense to him was the language of numbers, a language he could feel and smell and taste. Snow meant nothing to him, but eighty-nine was the “pure white and thick-flaked pile many inches high upon the ground” and nine hundred and seventy-nine was “the shimmer and beauty of eleven expanding, literally multiplying eight-nine’s wintry swirl.” Dialogue and social expectations placed upon him in school also made no sense. At night he would dream of conversations like this: “Twelve seventy one nine two hundred and fifty seven.” “Two hundred and fifty-seven?” “Two!”

This was before autism and synesthesia were understood, and so we get Tammet’s journey into language untainted by medical diagnoses. We get to watch his appreciation of words blossom and unfurl its petals on the wind as he travels to other countries, seeking out languages in the world that are as different, complex, and nuanced as his own.

Tammet has some beautiful lines that make you sink into your seat a little deeper and breathe a sigh of happiness at the art of such an image. Throughout the story, I felt that eternal reader’s struggle between wanting to underline as I went so that I could remember all my favorite lines or stay in the moment to savor his words. This time, I chose the latter.