The Seasonal Reading Challenge discussion

This is the thread where you can submit reviews for the Best Review contest. The thread is open for submissions and will close at Midnight EST on August 17, 2022. Voting will start the next day and run until the end of the GR day on August 31. The person whose review gets the most votes will have the opportunity to design a 20 point task for the Fall Challenge.

To be eligible for this task opportunity you must have achieved at least 100 points on the Summer 2022 Challenge Readerboard by midnight Eastern Time on August 17, 2022. Only one task per person per challenge.

Just a reminder that each person can only submit one review - but you can make edits to your review up until the end. The review does not have to be any particular length and doesn't have to be a positive one (i.e. you can choose to review a book you didn't like).
Please include your Readerboard Name.

PLEASE DO NOT comment on people's reviews in this thread - this is for submissions only - you will be able to comment when voting begins.

SPOILER ALERT!- These reviews may include spoilers

My submission is for the

In 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This story takes that small, seemingly insignificant fact & builds a story around it.

When the members of the Philological Society of London decided in 1857 that a new dictionary was needed to replace the incomplete & deficient volumes currently in existence, a team at Oxford University Press, under the guidance of James Murray, were commissioned to work on the project. It was anticipated that this would take around 10 years to complete and that the end result would be around 4 volumes, each of 1500-2000 words that would encompass all English language vocabulary from the 1100s onwards. Five years later, the team had only reached “ant” and they realised that this was a mammoth project as the team were trying to include new words & new meanings/usages of existing words whilst also researching 700 years of the English language’s development.
The book is set in the early 20th Century in Oxford, where young Esme’s father is employed as a lexicographer working for James Murray, collecting words for the new Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s mother has died and she has a very close bond with her father, spending many hours in the “scriptorium”, a corrugated metal shed in the garden of James Murray’s house. From her place under the table, Esme collects a dropped slip of paper with the word “bondmaid” written on it. She stashes it in an old wooden trunk that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Although Lizzie is just a few years older that Esme, she forms a bond with the little girl that encompasses the roles of mother, big sister & friend as well as cook/maid/helper. Over time, Esme collects other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the lexicographers and starts to understand that some words are considered more important than others.
“If there isn’t enough information about them, they’re discarded.”
When Esme comes across Mabel in the covered market, she discovers a whole set of words that had never been considered for inclusion in the dictionary & starts to wrote them down. She soon realises that many of these words are “women’s words”, commonly spoken, but not commonly written down and thus excluded by the educated men compiling the dictionary. Esme starts to collect these words, realising that these are the words of the poor, the marginalised and the uneducated as well as of women – and argues that the policy is wrong. She starts to collect all of these “unwritten” words, ultimately creating a Dictionary of Lost Words. The word that were deemed irrelevant, unimportant or unsubstantiated enough for “the dictionary”.
There should be a warning that the book does contain some words that are not currently considered “suitable for polite company”. I am very much against vulgar words being used for shock-factor or even laziness as so many authors seem to do these days, but the vulgar words in this book are very relevant to the story – they are words that belong to the women, the poor, the marginalised. They are words that were in common usage in 17th, 18th & 19th Century Britain – every day words for actions, parts of the body etc.

The characters are very real, very believable and whilst “typical” they don’t fall into the trap of being very cliched or stereotypical. There is a beautiful bond between Esme & her father and friendships that cross traditional class boundaries.
The book does start quite slowly but quickly becomes the sort of book you will keep reading long into the night. It is beautifully written and very well researched – the authors notes/acknowledgements section gave me a glimpse into the creation of the dictionary which I found fascinating, never having considered before how such things may have been compiled.
I listened to the audio book, narrated by Imogen Sage and she kept me engaged throughout, providing just enough differentiation between characters to help the listener follow the story without it becoming theatrical.

One of my favourite types of book is historical fiction-based-on-fact. With historical facts included accurately (dates, locations, people – detailed in the acknowledgements/author’s note section), the author has woven a story that is ultimately about the place of women and the importance of hearing every voice, not just the voice of the educated males!
I highly recommend this book for anyone who is a lover of words – it is so much more than a novel, it is a snapshot of history, both social & philological, and a book unlike any other that I have read.

The author explains her thinking, and decision to keep the historical facts as accurate as possible in an interview recorded at: A secret feminist history of the oxford english dictionary

It is fascinating to realise that despite never making money from it, Oxford University Press remain committed to the dictionary (though it is now an online resource rather than a shelf-full of paper volumes). The Oxford English Dictionary is a living document that has been growing and changing for 140 years with supplements, additions, notes and revisions over the years but work has started to update the entire dictionary for the first time since 1928 – it remains an important record of the evolution of the English language & is widely regarded as the definitive authority on the English language.


https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki

Reviewed by trishhartuk: 5 stars

I don’t give a huge number of 5* reviews, and the Summer challenge has been no exception. Thus far, I’ve had two: A Snake Falls to Earth, by Darcie Little Badger (a wonderful young-adult book blending Apache mythology and the real world); and this one.

Goodreads describes Light from Uncommon Stars as: “An adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts.”

Had it not been nominated for this year’s Hugo Best Novel, I would probably never have heard of it. If I had come across it for some reason, and just gone by the blurb, I expect I wouldn’t have bothered to pick it up (although the cursed violin might have piqued my interest). But first impressions would have resulted in my missing out on what has ended up being one of my favourite reads of the year.

Written with wry humour combined with darker aspects (after all, cursed violins and deals with Hell aren’t exactly light and fluffy), it follows three main characters: Katrina Nguyen, a transgender violin prodigy who had to run away from an abusive home; Shizuka Satomi, a former concert violinist turned teacher, who made a deal to send the souls of seven other musicians to Hell, to save her own; and Lan Tran, captain of an alien star ship which is now masquerading as a donut shop.

The combination feels like it shouldn’t work, but it does, and it does so wonderfully.

Satomi is at the centre of the three, in my view, with Katrina as her seventh student, and Lan who becomes the love of Satomi’s life. My favourite strand was between teacher and student, and their different approaches to music, but I also enjoyed the love story (and the donuts kept making me hungry!), as well as Lan Tran’s rather unusual family/crew. The idea of the inevitable “Endplague” for civilisations (see the bottom of this review* if you’re interested), which Lan and her crew fled from in the first place, was also intriguing.

In the end, all three of the main characters are changed by their interaction, to become more than they were when we first met them, and even Satomi finds a new reason to live. I just love the final image of running away from the devil in a starship, to be with the person you love and to try to change the inevitable through music.

Definitely an example of never judge a book by its cover blurb!

*For those who are interested, here’s a quote where the Endplague is explained: (view spoiler)[

“Ever wonder why,” Lan finally said, “if there is intelligent life out there, that the universe isn’t teeming with activity?”

“Maybe the universe is filled with introverts?”

“Shizuka.”

“Well, you asked.” Lan took another breath.

“As a civilization progresses, it goes through wars, pandemics, catastrophes. Those that survive grow more astute, more perceptive, more advanced. Diseases are conquered, infirmity eliminated. Life spans increase. Suffering becomes largely a memory.

Meanwhile, their explorers and historians find evidence of past cultures, and cultures before that. At first it is exciting. But all they keep finding are ruins. And slowly, either through science or history, every advanced civilization becomes aware of a disturbing possibility— that their future may end in ruin, too.

The civilization then rushes to probe other stars, even other galaxies; it increases its research, attempting to manipulate space, time, in the hope that somewhere, someone might have found an escape, a loophole.

But eventually, they find, and solve, the mathematical equation that explains the entire universe. And that will be your death sentence. For in that equation, there will be no forever, no eternity. Nothing. And this collapse, and all its attendant despair, is the Endplague.” (hide spoiler)]