by Kelly Pickerill
Maggie triumphantly paraded her latest review acquisition at the desk last week: she got a copy of Mark Dunn’s new book, Under the Harrow. After she read aloud to us the description (it sounds great: some sort of social experiment where orphans are left to create their own society when the only books available to them are an encyclopedia, a bible, and a complete set of the novels of Charles Dickens), she turned to me and asked, “You’ve read Ella Minnow Pea, right?” I had to admit I hadn’t. “I’ve always meant to,” I said. I know it seems like I say that a lot. But as Mark just hinted at a few entries down, the list of books that we readers and (maybe more so) booksellers want to read is so long, and our stacks can get quite high, and there are always those books that get passed over time and again, waiting to catch our eye and interest when the time is right. Apparently, the time was right for Ella Minnow Pea; the book made it into my carry on for Thanksgiving vacation and I read it in a day.
As I recovered from stuffing myself with stuffing, Dunn swept me up into his “Novel in Letters” which features a fictional island people who revere a man named Nollop, the supposed author of the pangram sentence (one that uses every letter in an alphabet) “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” When the story opens, the “Z” in the phrase has just fallen off the statue of the island’s namesake, and the leaders of the community believe it’s a sign: no more Zs may be spoken or written. As other letters fall from the monument, more letters (and thus more words) are stricken from the islanders’ (and the book’s) vocabulary, until Ella decides that disaster is definitely imminent if something isn’t done. The best part about reading this book was getting a sense of the tedious work it must have been for Dunn to write during increasingly restrictive conditions. Dunn goes 165 pages, letters steadily dropping out of use, until he cannot write any word that contains B, C, D, F, J, K, Q, U, V, or Z, before he allows the characters to communicate using homophones and misspellings (“ph” for “f”). Prior to that point, Dunn just masterfully avoids words, which in most cases is undetectable. Brilliant. Or should I say, more acceptably to Nollop, astonishing.
I’m glad the stars aligned or the fates conspired or simply that two events — the arrival of a new book combined with my pushy coworker’s insistence (love you, Maggie) — coincided to put Dunn’s book in my path. Now I can’t wait to read his new one.
When I drive Harper (4 years) to pre-school we have to drive right past the bookstore. One day a couple of weeks ago she said, “There’s the bookstore,” and I said, “I like the bookstore.” Her response? “Me too, I like the book part”. No better response could she have given. “I like the book part” sums up what we’re trying to do at Lemuria almost perfectly. We’re about the books and we want to stay about the books and it’s a thrilling thing to hear your daughter say.
I have this thing with leaves and it’s kind of strange. It started two years ago when I was taking a few design classes and getting pretty arts-and-crafty at home. With the array of beautiful trees on the ole miss campus in Oxford, I began picking up more and more fallen leaves to and from class. I’m fascinated with leaves and the intrinsic design qualities they hold. It’s like each one is a little piece of symmetrical artwork. In a large way, they allow the trees different personalities. This leaf collecting became a problem when it ate up all my space. Delicate leaves that I didn’t want to crush were everywhere around my place. Leaves that I wanted to draw or paint on or epoxy. But after a while most of these leaves got crushed. This habit of leaf gathering has died down but not subsided. I’m sure springtime will be a different story.