Wordy Reads

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And now, onto this month’s recommendations:  

When you saw the title “Wordy Reads” you may have thought I meant unwieldy tomes and quivered in your boots. But no – I meant books about words!

I didn’t set out to read two novels about women compiling dictionaries in Oxford almost back-to- back –  it just sort of happened that way. But I’m not sad about it. As someone who loves words, these wordy reads hit the spot, and I learned a lot about how words are chosen for inclusion in dictionaries and who influences those choices. Not only that, but I now use the word lexicographer willy-nilly. I also want to learn more about dictionaries, so I’ve put a hold on Unabridged: The Thrill of and Threat to the Modern Dictionary, where author Stefan Fatsis gets “embedded as a lexicographer-in-training at America’s most famous dictionary publisher, Merriam-Webster, to learn how words get into the dictionary, where they come from, who decides what they mean, and how we write and think about them.”

While both these stories revolve around dictionaries, they’re very different. The first is a modern-day mystery with an old-fashioned feel; the second is historical fiction that inserts fictional characters into real-world events.

Guilty by Definition by Susie Dent

I’ve had this wordy mystery on my list to read for ages, but it wasn’t available in book format on this side of the pond. So when I saw I could get it as an audiobook before it had come out in North America, I jumped at the chance to listen to it (the narrator’s great!). And apparently, I was ahead of the game, as the New York Times recently reviewed it (gift link).  

Small NYT aside: they also recently recommended Tuesday Mooney (hoorah!).

Martha Thornhill returns to Oxford after years in Berlin to lead a team of lexicographers at the Clarendon English Dictionary. Coming home isn’t an easy choice—she’s haunted by the unsolved disappearance of her sister, Charlie, who was working in the same dictionary offices when she vanished.

Soon after her return, anonymous coded letters and postcards arrive for Martha and others who knew Charlie, prompting her and her colleagues to follow the clues and uncover what really happened.

Dent specializes in languages and is a UK word expert and author, so it’s no surprise that this, her first novel, is centered around words and codes using words and interpretations of words. She occasionally digresses into word-related musings that take you out of the story a bit, but she loves words so much it’s easy to forgive her these transgressions.

More Agatha Christie than Lee Child, this one’s perfect for mystery-loving word nerds. 

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

Most of us know that women are underrepresented in medical trials, which limits our understanding of how diseases and treatments affect them/us. Until now, I hadn’t extended that line of thought to dictionaries—originally compiled by middle and upper class men—and how women’s words were probably excluded from them as well. 

With the great war looming and the women’s suffrage movement booming, motherless young Esme spends most of her childhood beneath the sorting table in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father is part of a team of lexicographers gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. One day when the word “bondmaid” falls under the table near her and she overhears that it’s not being included in the dictionary, she doesn’t return it but instead squirrels it away. And thus Esme’s own lexicographical journey begins. 

As she grows up and the dictionary remains central to her life, she collects other words that have been misplaced, discarded, or ignored by the men compiling the OED, becoming fascinated by words used by women—especially working-class women. 

While Esme isn’t based on a real person, many of the other characters are drawn from the men who actually compiled the original OED. Williams discusses the history of the first edition of the OED at the end of the book, which is a fascinating addition. This book is hard to fit into a specific category and there’s so much more to say than I’ve shared here but I’m trying to avoid being too wordy (see what I did there?), so hopefully this is enough to get you intrigued! Historical fiction word nerds will enjoy this one!

A Little Something Extra

For my little something extra this month, I’m sharing a few of my most-anticipated fall reads:

The Impossible Fortune  by Richard Osman: The newest addition to the Thursday Murder Club series. I’m reading this right now because I needed something gentle and this fits the bill. It’s like a warm (slightly murderous) hug.

The Black Wolf by Louise Penny: The sequel to last year’s The Grey Wolf. Though her latest books seem to be jumping the shark a bit, I remain committed to Penny’s Gamache series. True story: one of my claims to fame is interviewing Penny at Chapters lo these many years ago, before the days when she’d sell out the Chan Centre in hours. Also, I appreciate that she’s boycotting America for her current book tour.

The Book of Dust: The Rose from the South by Philip Pullman: The long-awaited final volume in the Book of Dust trilogy. I’ll be picking up a copy as soon as I can. If you recall, I listened to the first two books of the trilogy earlier this year after reading them when they first came out. I’m so primed for this one, but I’m also a little sad, knowing I’m unlikely to ever get another new book featuring Lyra and Pan. But that's what rereading is for!