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<\/a>Fig. #71. Remembering, remembering...<\/p><\/div>\n
I just finished P. D. James\u2019<\/strong> latest paperback, The Private Patient<\/strong>. It was smooth but long, and I didn\u2019t learn anything new about the series characters or the place, so it was just okay. The fun is choosing what to read next. It\u2019s a non-fiction day, and Tom Gjelten\u2019s Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause<\/strong> beckons, but Marilyn Stasio twice recommended (New York Times Book Review<\/strong> 10\/15\/09, 12\/3\/09) Emily Arsenault\u2019s The Broken Teaglass<\/strong> as a debut mystery with lexicographers as detectives, all pluses. I love to think about building dictionaries and the word authority they convey, and I need a belated Christmas gift for the fussiest librarian\/friend in the world who really knows reference books, also likes dictionaries and has surely read all mysteries, especially cozies, ever written. This could be a winner. Of course, I have to test it first, a one-handed challenge as it is only available in hardcover.<\/p>\n I hope I\u2019ve not been spoiled by K. M. Elisabeth Murray\u2019s Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary<\/strong>, my all-time favorite dictionary-making book. Great-granddaughter Murray writes a compelling biography of this most unusual man and uses family artifacts and lore to add the telling detail I love. Think rooms of cubbyholes full of 3×5 p-slip or learning languages from Bibles in vernacular. I know Simon Winchester\u2019s The Professor and the Madman<\/strong> is a good read, but his emphasis is on one OED word-reader\u2019s connection with James Murray, and okay I haven\u2019t read it, but I don\u2019t think it would add much to the dictionary-making processes that are the highpoint of Murray\u2019s book. Sometimes having savored the best, the best is enough. My worry is that Arsenault\u2019s mystery may fall short for the same reason.<\/p>\n *** Today is very cold (7 above, -11 windchill) and very beautiful with Alberta Clipper snow swirls, especially against the barn red garage. Mine is a lively, urban backyard, seen through a big H window, though the squirrels, rabbits, and birds … Continue reading
\nThat was yesterday. Today, ever colder and 100 pages into Arsenault<\/strong>, I think The Broken Teaglass<\/strong> may be just offbeat enough to be giveable. But the issue of giving a book about something to someone who knows A LOT about that something remains a hazard. If there is a choosing rule somewhere in all of this, maybe it should be: don\u2019t give someone who knows a lot about something a book about that something, especially a novel. But how, then, does unconventional thinking ever have a chance to jar the mainstream mind? I hate rules. They so rarely fit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"