Book Thoughts

If you are watching a movie or a TV show, you can turn it off or walk out if you are done with it. In the same way, you can just stop reading a book. That doesn’t happen often for me, but I almost stopped reading both of them. Both of them just seemed slow to me.

That being said, it may have seemed slow because of my schedule change. I find myself not reading as many pages a day as I was. When I get home now, I usually go right to bed. If I do stay up and read it is usually a chapter and then I call it a night. So maybe the issue is that “I” was reading slower.

Both stories weren’t bad. They both had satisfying conclusions, one of them was a complete surprise. I thought I would write about them in case one of them (or both) peaked your interest.

The Dictionary of Lost Words

This is a fictional tale woven into historic events. It takes place during the time the Oxford English Dictionary was being compiled.

Here is the Goodreads Synopisis:

In 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.

One of the real people in the book is Dr. James Murray, who was one of the main people responsible for the Oxford English Dictionary. The book goes deep into the process of writing words on slips of paper with definitions and sentences with the word being used. You can see the slips in pigeon holes behind the real Dr. Murray below.

The fictional story of Esme is woven between real events and the historical timeline. I was amazed at how much time it took to put the dictionary together! It wasn’t a bad story, but it just wasn’t my normal read.

The Only Survivors

I was intrigued by the title of this book. I wasn’t sure if it was a mystery or a thriller. It was a story full of secrets.

Here is the Amazon Synopisis:

From the New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls and “master of suspense, Megan Miranda” (Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Girl), a thrilling mystery about a group of former classmates who reunite to mark the tenth anniversary of a tragic accident—only to have one of the survivors disappear, casting fear and suspicion on the original tragedy.

Seven hours in the past. Seven days in the present. Seven survivors remaining. Who would you save?

A decade ago, two vans filled with high school seniors on a school service trip crashed into a Tennessee ravine—a tragedy that claimed the lives of multiple classmates and teachers. The nine students who managed to escape the river that night were irrevocably changed. A year later, after one of the survivors dies by suicide on the anniversary of the crash, the rest of them make a pact: to come together each year to commemorate that terrible night.

To keep one another safe.
To hold one another accountable.
Or both.

Their annual meeting place, a house on the Outer Banks, has long been a refuge. But by the tenth anniversary, Cassidy Bent has worked to distance herself from the tragedy and from the other survivors. She’s changed her mobile number. She’s blocked the others’ email addresses. This year, she is determined to finally break ties once and for all. But on the day of the reunion, she receives a text with an obituary attached: another survivor is gone. Now they are seven—and Cassidy finds herself hurling back toward the group, wild with grief—and suspicion.

Almost immediately, something feels off this year. Cassidy is the first to notice when Amaya, the annual organizer, slips away, overwhelmed. This wouldn’t raise alarm except for the impending storm. Suddenly, they’re facing the threat of closed roads and surging waters…again. Then Amaya stops responding to her phone. After all they’ve been through, she wouldn’t willfully make them worry. Would she?

And—as they promised long ago—each survivor will do whatever he or she can do to save one another. Won’t they?

This book moves between the present and the past and how they all tie in together. As the story progresses, you get bits and pieces of the story and get a sense of the distrust that the survivors have for each other. I found myself suspecting that each of them were hiding things from each other. There were plenty of twists and an ending that was a complete surprise.

I’d love to hear your book thoughts. What are you reading? Did you read either of these? What can you recommend to me?