Scrumptious, delightful. I had to actively slow myself down as I read it; it would have been easy to gobble up in a day or two. Reminds me in some ways of Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg, the questioning of language and authority and the ways queerness is entirely load-bearing in the way the novel asks such questions. And how much room they both devote to play... ( )

"I always disliked the expression sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me. It is one of the least useful ways of understanding one another, or how words work."

A novel for people who love language and who perhaps experience a sensation of being on the outside of the human confraternity looking in. It is equal parts whimsical and profound, and split into alternating timelines centering on a late 19th century failed effort to create an encyclopedic dictionary a la the Oxford English Dictionary.

It is 1899 and Peter Winceworth has spent the past five years working on the letter S for the dictionary, scrivening and researching among 100 other lexicographers. A socially awkward and lonely man, he faked a lisp to win his interviewer's sympathy and get the job and has kept up the mask and shield since. He notes the gaps in the English language that mirror the gaps in his own life and invents words to fill them, such as when he thinks "there really should be a specific word associated with the effects of drinking an excess of alcohol. The headaches, the seething sense of paranoia - language seemed the poorer for not having one." [Google's ngram viewer shows "hangover" didn't come into notable use until around 1910, while Wiktionary points to 1904 for its first use in this sense].

It is also the current day and Mallory is the sole employee of the dictionary's inheritor, working on a project to digitize the never completed dictionary while updating definitions as appropriate. An anonymous caller makes daily threats, angry that the dictionary has redefined "marriage" following the resolution of the contemporary debate around that institution. She is in a long term relationship with her partner Pip but has not come out as a lesbian, holding up a mask and shield for her true self. She learns that many "mountweazels", or invented words, have been inserted amongst the legitimate words by someone originally working on the project, and she and Pip start working to ferret them out.

Winceworth has his world shaken up when a fellow lexicographer, who hails from the aristocracy and essentially funds the whole enterprise, returns from a year in Russia "researching" word origins with his new fiancee, Sophia Slivkovna, who is evidently engaged in a nebulous agenda of her own. Miss Slivkovna builds a sympathetic rapport with Winceworth, who feels so seen that he completely forgets to lisp when with her. As he falls for her in a hopeless infatuation, he becomes more disengaged from the dictionary's real project and into the creation of his own.

slivkovnion (n.), a daydream, briefly

Mammonsomniate (v.), to dream that money might make anything possible

The two storylines are brought to conclusions that lead the characters into opportunities to more fully realize their true selves, and to embrace those words that fully reflect themselves. Words, this novel argues, are powerful things, and we create them as we create ourselves. ( )

About halfway through The Liar's Dictionary, I found myself wanting to enjoy Eley Williams' novel more than I was. The interplay between present and past, between 30-something intern Mallory's quest to uncover all the false entries hidden within Swansby's Encyclopaedic Dictionary and awkward lexicographer Peter Winceworth's struggle to contribute to the same-said work, should engage a reader's imagination. But layer in Mallory's inability to profess her lesbian relationship to her employer and parents, add a bomb threat to Swansby's, provide ne'er-do-well Peter with a love interest who turns out to be engaged to his nemesis, send him on an ill-fated train ride to the site of an industrial accident, and suddenly you have a plot that runs on longer than this sentence.

Maybe it was the incongruity of the behavior one expects of gentlemen of the late Victorian age employed in writing a dictionary versus their actual behavior. Maybe it was the endless stream of esoteric and arcane words strewn across the pages (admittedly to be expected in a book about words) which I tired of looking up in my own dictionary. Maybe it's just all these events compacted into two forty-eight-hour timespans occurring more than a century apart that made the plot feel more than a little contrived.

In the end, Mallory's story ends with a bang literally, Peter's with a whimper. What should be a satisfying conclusion to Mallory's struggle to out herself is overshadowed by the deus ex machina quality of the plot twist leading up to it, while Peter's emergence from his shell is likewise marred by the underwhelming circumstances surrounding it.

A Book Based Entirely On Its Cover has proven to be a tough category on my reading list, one I'm zero for three in. ( )

Not sure what to make of this oddity. An unfinished Victorian dictionary has been sprinkled with fake words and definitions. It's the job of a present-day employee of said dictionary's publisher to identify all of them so that they can be deleted from a planned digital edition. Not much to hang a story on, and at times I found myself wondering why I was sticking with this (admittedly very short) novel. It seems the author really has a thing for strange words, both real and made-up. Throw in a couple of explosions, a dash of quirky comedy, and a few really sharp characterizations, and it actually kind of worked for me. ( )

This is a fun book about dictionaries and the people who write them. Can we trust them not to drop in some made up words reflecting events in their own life? How can we edit those words back out? There are 2 timelines in this book, one of the 19th century dictionary writer, one of the present day editor trying to remove his made up words so the dictionary can be published online. Its a little daft, but enjoyable and funny. ( )