Book Club

Do you enjoy reading? Do you enjoy sharing your reading experiences with others? A book club is a wonderful way to get the most out of what we read and enjoy friendship with other readers. All are welcome. Contact Amy Wazny (arwazny23@gmail.com) for further information or to be included on the distribution list for future activities.

We meet next on Monday, October 20, at 3 PM. Our reading selection is The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. I’ve included the overview from the Barnes & Noble website below.

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Calling all lexicographers, lovers of language and devotees of the Oxford English Dictionary. Pip Williams’ clever and charming debut introduces us to Esme, the daughter of one of the lexicographers working on the first edition of the OED. This delightful page-turner will make readers think about the power of language, who decides which words get written into our shared history, and whose stories may have been left out.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.

As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.

Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.