Dictionary of Lost Words - interesting!

 Thank you to Sally Ashburn for hosting at her absolutely lovely home, it was just great! And we had a short but interesting talk about The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. It starts with the early years of creating the Oxford English Dictionary, an effort of gargantuan proportions at the time, run by a collection of professorial men, focused on the words used in written language - by men. 

Among them all, Esme, the daughter of one of the men selecting and defining words, grows up literally at the feet of the activity and is smitten with words, so much so that she takes them for her own collection. That finally catches up with her when the word "bondmaid" is found to be missing from the OED, pointed out by a reader, and all suspicion goes to Esme. 

As it turns out, she does have the missing word in her private box of words. That word, and her relationship with the housemaid Lizzie, lead her to find her own words, this ignored by men, used by women, that define their lives. 

Interesting, fun to read, historical, good! It had an interesting perspective, a new take on who gets to read the history, or in this case, the language. Not our best option, not our worst, it was very readable. 

And so on to our next book which is The Widow Clicquot by Tilar Mazzeo. This is an amazing, inspirational story about an indomitable woman who accomplished the all but impossible for her time, being a successful entrepreneur. 

We are scheduled for March 10, at 6:30 pm. My notes say we will be at Wendy's but I will confirm. 

The April book is Lessons by Ian McEwan for those who want to read ahead. See you all in March!

James was a really good book

It turns out that all the book reviewers and book prize judges were right, Percival Everett's James was really really good.  We had a great discussion about it, and it seemed to capture most if not all of us. One interesting thing (to me at least) was that the people who listened to the book liked it just as much as the people who read it. The dialogue would seem hard to follow to me but I was assured that the recording was amazing. 

The use of language as a tool of survival was brilliant. The overt use of "slave dialect" (my term) to avoid provoking those in power and the way James gradually abandoned its use added a lot to the understanding of his own character growth as the book went on. 

Many of us did not remember much of the original story line of Huck Finn. Lacey said this book tracked pretty closely, and in this content the plot line seemed pretty ridiculous, or at least improbable. That wasn't the point here of course, it was all about someone finding and using their own agency after being denied that agency for a long time. 

The violence that James wrought on his former captors was much less troublesome that perhaps it should have been, but after so much injustice with no recourse, perhaps it was only to be expected. Frankly, it was hard to root against him.

So all in all, this was really a great choice and well worthy of having had three people bring it to the Christmas swap! Thanks to Margo for hosting us, we certainly ate well and had a lovely time. 

On we go, our next book is Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. We are lucky enough to go to Sally Ashburn's lovely house with a beautiful view of a lake! In order to fully enjoy, Sally has agreed for us to come Sunday, February 9 at 1 pm instead of the 10th in the evening. It seemed to work for the group at Margo's, weigh in if this doesn't (or does) work for you. 

See you all then!