Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Not All Books about Books are the Same

The Keeper of Hidden Books by Madeline Martin

The Bookbinder by Pip Williams

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As my semester ended and the break began, I indulged in my usual ritual of checking out lots of books to binge over the holidays.  I hit up both my community college library (which has a stellar YA collection) and my local library. At the library, I ended up grabbing two novels from the New Reads bookshelf that on the surface had a lot in common but ultimately were very different reads. The Keeper of Hidden Books by Madeline Martin is set during World War […]

“Words define us, they explain us, and, on occasion, they serve to control or isolate us.”

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

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The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) by Pip Williams was chosen by my book club. I began this book with high expectations. It has 4.4 stars on Amazon, and is a New York Times bestseller. The blurb stated that this book is: “[d]elightful…[a] captivating and slightly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on The Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.” Well, I love reading and words and feminist literature, so I figured this was right up my alley. Esme is a young girl being cared […]

You are not the arbiter of knowledge, sir. You are its librarian.

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

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CBR14 BINGO: Question square (I was going to give this the Gaslight square until I read the author’s note: “This book began as two simple questions: Do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, is it possible that we have lost something in the process of defining them.” Question square it is.) This one will definitely be on my favorite books of the year list. Hearbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure. Esme’s father is an Oxford lexicographer working on creating the […]

“Words are our tools of resurrection.”

The Dictionary of Lost Words: A Novel by Pip Williams

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I would not have expected the story of the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary to be a gripping topic for a novel, but I stand corrected. Pip Williams’ historical fiction encompasses not only the work of compiling the first Oxford English Dictionary but also events of historic importance that occurred during that same time period— WWI and the women’s suffrage movement. Many of the characters in this novel are real people, such as Dr. James Murray and Edith Thompson, but through the main […]



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