In The Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent

Klingon. Say what you will about Star Trek fans, and sci-fi fans in general, but just try to say it in Klingon. The book begins and ends with Klingon, because of all the attempts that have been made at inventing languages, Klingon has been apparently the most successful. And facts like this are just par for the course in the story of language invention.
I know I'm supposed to be an engineer, but reading this book made me feel as though English is a completely reasonable set of lexicon and grammar, as even the simplest and most obvious changes never seem to take.
The book explores some of the major movements in language invention. And for the record, a minimum of 900 well-documented invented languages in the last 900 years gives us enough examples to identify trends and movements. The movements seem to largely attempt to get increasingly logical as time progresses, with a fixation on making every aspect of the language come from some logical foundation, from spelling to pronunciation to infixes to case markers.
One reason why invented languages have never taken hold is because it takes a certain, particularly strong, personality to undertake the task. Unfortunately, this personality is thoroughly incapable of taking the language from dictionary and grammar book to actual real-life product. It doesn't help that all were convinced that their language would soon spread around the world and change everyone's life, and when that didn't happen they took it personally.
One of the best-known invented languages, Esperanto, suffered from some flaws but was ultimately brought down by a clash of personalities all intending to move it forward. One of the major modes of death, or at least destruction, is the irresistible urge to continue improving the language. While this is an understandable impulse, after all the would-be-reformers are themselves interested in making a perfect language, a language can only take hold if it remains relatively static. After some infighting, a number of derivative languages were invented, of course just as mutually incompatible as natural languages. And the reformers, intent on saving the world in their own way, end up losing the 90% of the world that didn't go with them.
Another problem with language inventors is heavy-handedness of the inventor. Blissymbols, invented by Charles Bliss, are an ideographic system, which of course have the only obvious and logical meaning possible. And they look vastly different from other logically obvious symbols. Blissymbols, however, were used for mentally disabled children in Canada with great success, including as a bridge to reading English. And when the organization using them didn't use them exactly to Bliss's standard (they sometimes didn't give the "correct" explanation for combinations of symbols), he naturally sued. That's right, he ended up stealing $160,000 from disabled children who committed the offense of using his invented language.
Loglan (logical language) is perhaps , paradoxically, the most intractable of all. In an effort to eliminate ambiguity, the language only has one possible parsing for each sentence - different senses of any word get different markers, and relations like subject-object are always clearly specified. As a result, it's unlikely that any two loglan speakers have ever held a "real" conversation. One upshot is that flamewars on loglan sites are virtually impossible, as an attempt to successfully render "fuck you" in a thread led only to heated discussion about whether the right constructions were used.
Which brings us to Klingon. Like other invented languages, it pulls directly from other existing languages, but rather than attempt to match common word roots and grammatical constructions, the idea seems to be to select only the most difficult parts of existing languages. And yet people learn it and use it. It has one central authority for decisions on new words and disputes. It is complete, at least in the sense that you can at least work around to any idea you want to express. There's even a Klingon Hamlet. And this is where the story ends so far. Perhaps we will never come up with a truly neutral and universal lingua franca, as testified to by the fact that one of the only languages not meant as such is about the most successful.
Read it now!