Book recommendation time! Martha’s reading Dictionary Stories by Jez Burrows, short stories based on example sentences from dictionaries, and Grant recommends Julia Durango’s The Leveler, a techno-thriller for teens about virtual worlds. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Books We’re Reading”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. From time to time on the show, we share books that we’re reading, whether they have to do with language or not. As it happens, the one that I’m reading is called Dictionary Stories, Short Fictions and Other Findings. It’s by Jez Burroughs. And this grew out of an experience that Jez Burroughs had when he opened the new Oxford American Dictionary, and he was looking up the word study, but his eyes were drawn to the example sentence that accompanied the definition. And the sentence went, he perched on the edge of the bed, a study in confusion and misery. And that sentence just tickled his mind and he started thinking, wow, who was perched on the edge of the bed? Why was he upset? Why did he feel miserable?
And then he started looking at other sample sentences in the dictionary and started wondering, gosh, could I put some of these intriguing sentences together and form stories? And he started doing that with sentences like, the horses were lame and the men were tired, which was an illustration sentence for the word lame, or for double, the double life of a secret agent. And he put some of these together in short stories that he published online, and they were so popular that he got a book contract. And now there’s this whole book of very, very short stories, some of which are wry or funny or dramatic or kind of noir.
And it’s very intriguing. You’ll never look at sample sentences in the dictionary the same way. There’s another layer to this, which is one of the first jobs that I had as a lexicographer was to come up with example sentences for the new Oxford American Dictionary.
So he may be using sentences that I chose. Oh, that’s wild. Yeah, he takes them from about 12 different dictionaries. Yeah, so a few of them anyway. And Oxford had for a long time this project where they hired a bunch of freelancers, including me and my wife and a bunch of other people, to go through this database of programmatically selected passages to shorten them up a little bit, to edit them down to be that concise, picky thing that you need.
Because most of the example sentences in most dictionaries are based on real writing. Because one of the things you know as a dictionary editor is if you create a sample sentence or examples inside of whole cloth, it’s almost always flat and a little affected, if that makes sense. Sure. It doesn’t have the ring of something genuine. Yeah.
Well, I think you would enjoy this book then. Yeah, Dictionary Stories by Jez Burroughs. I’ve got a book for you. And this is a book that my son and I read. He read it first and loved it so much that he insisted that I read it too. And it’s The Leveler by Julia Durango. So this is young adult fiction. And the whole premise is that there’s a girl, Nixie Bauer, who is paid by parents to drag their children out of a digital paradise known as the Meep. She’s basically a bounty hunter or a skip tracer, but she’s a teenager. And so this Meep is an immersive thing that you can only get out of under certain circumstances. You can’t just take off the headset and go back to your regular life.
So she gets money doing this. And the whole story centers around Nixie having to rescue the son of the man who invented the Meep, who owns the Meep, to get him back. And of course, there are lots of complications. My son loved this because he’s a big video game player, or fancies himself as one and knows a lot about video games. And I liked it because even though the, oh no, I’m stuck in a video game genre is kind of played out, I thought it was original enough that I could ignore the fact that this has been done before. And I think it’s none the worse for wear.
Julia Durango, the author of The Leveler, doesn’t preen at her own writing, which is something I often find that really irritating, particularly in young adult fiction. The plot is fast moving. And I think she does a pretty good job of talking about our societal worries about video games in general, obliquely or indirectly referencing them without being preachy or pedagogical or didactic. In any case, that’s The Leveler by Julia Durango. It’s young adult fiction. Easy read.
We’d love for you to share what you’re reading. You can send it to us in email. That address is words@waywordradio.org or give us a call 877-929-9673 or hit us up on Twitter at Wayword.
