It’s not like me but, I guess I’m just in the mood for fiction right now, any fiction. Lucky for me, I just happen to have a lot of fiction on my TBR shelf! I picked up The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams this morning after reading about ten pages of Haves and Have-Nots by Mortimer J. Adler, saying to myself, “Nope. Not happening.” I’m just not in the mood for politics or government, especially older ones. This one was written in 1991 and within a couple pages, I knew it would just depress me, so I shut it and looked for something else.

The Dictionary of Lost Words is another book I picked up at Barnes & Noble while “just browsing” and getting a cup of coffee, a.k.a. “escaping the heat.” This morning when I started reading, it sounded so familiar. A garden shed at a university used as a workshop to sort words and meanings to create and update a dictionary in the late 1800’s.

I googled, of course. Yes! The Professor and the Madman. Different story, same subject. But the movie was based on a true story, and there was a book. Yes, it’s now on my TBR list.

It was huge relief to find that movie. I was starting to think this was another one of those books I’ve read in the past and had completely forgotten about. And it would have been doubly bothersome because I paid full retail price for this novel.

So far as I’ve read this morning, only about twenty pages because my son is here visiting and we have BIG plans for pancakes and bacon when he wakes up, it seems like an adorable story. The professor’s young daughter plays under the table in the morning while he works and discovers lost words that drop from above and no one retrieves.

The back cover says, “As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded.” And “Set in the early twentieth century during the height of the women’s suffrage movement, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a missing narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men.”

The title is what prompted me to pick the book up off the table, and description is probably what prompted me to buy it.