Say it ain't so, Lee!

I recently discovered a tremendous thriller author, Lee Child - and his uber macho hero, Jack Reacher. While on a Spring vacation I'd picked up a book for my Mother. When she'd finished it - and praised it highly to me (the last time we went through this little literary dance, she read One For The Money by Janet Evanovich and said "you'll love this", and off we went on a rollicking madcap whirl with Stephanie Plum, reading all her books one after another) I went out and bought her all the rest of the Reacher books, and started in reading from book 1, Killing Floor, myself.

And I was hooked. Utterly, completely in the thrall of the long, tall, taciturn Jack Reacher (as a romance writer, I'm a major Alpha male lover anyway!). Reading a book every day or two I finished up the first 13 and then had to make due with some other favorite authors until the next release, 61 Hours, on May 18. (WARNING: SPOILER ALERT! THIS POST CONTAINS INFO ABOUT THE CLIMACTIC ENDING OF THE NOVEL - DO NOT READ FURTHER IF IT WILL MAKE YOUR BLOOD BOIL TO KNOW THE END!!!!!)

On Tuesday, May 18, I was on vacation again (I'm a gardener and Spring vacations are fairly close together), and the car had to be taken in for repairs. In a torrential downpour I ran it in, walked home, and then made the reverse trip to pick up the car at 3:30 in the afternoon. BUT as it was the 18th, I did not head home but, instead, made a bee-line for the Barnes & Noble to get my very own copy.

Now, if you don't know me, you may be like me - and you may understand the quivering I felt as I dashed through the doors, breathless with anticipation, eager to the point of silliness to get my hands on Jack Reacher, um, I mean, the new Jack Reacher title. And there he, er, it was - a major front of store display with the sticker on the upper right-hand corner (be still my heart) indicating it was being sold at a 20% discount (which, with my B&N membership, means 30% off, total! Whoopee - what a savings, I suppose I should pick up another book, too?).

I ran home, and dumped it in my Mother's lap (I'd promised her first dibs) and said, "Read. Fast."

And she did. Thursday night she passed it off to me and I snuggled on my bed at 9:30 to read. But Thursday had been a long, physically exhausting day, and while I tried my best to keep reading - I'd been hooked from page one - I couldn't keep my eyes open.

On Friday morning, a sleepy, hazy, overly warm for May day, I did a few chores, all the while hearing Jack calling to me from the house. After planting, weeding, and a variety of other spring gardening type chores, I showered and said, "Now, I can read!"

And I did. Throughout the afternoon, despite phone calls from friends and interruptions from Mother inquiring as to my progress ("I want to talk about the ending with you!" - it should have been a portent) I read and read and read. I felt the chill of the South Dakota blizzard taking the heat off my May Long Island afternoon. I fell for the intrepid heroine (unlike the prior Reacher novels, no love interest at hand, other than telephonically, for our boy Jack) the aged librarian Janet. I was repulsed by the vicious horror that was the antagonist, Plato (and let it be said that Child knows how to craft a compelling and worthy adversary for Reacher). I puzzled about the insider who'd gone over to the dark side. Was it Peterson, the young, earnest cop? Was it one of the two cops on desk duty as a result of an unknown incident? And what WAS that weird building that no one could identify?

On I read, and on, forging through the afternoon until I'd gotten too hungry and had to set aside time to make dinner. And there was the final day of the Jeopary ournament of Champions that I couldn't miss. Then, in the twilight (what better time to read a thriller as the sun sets and the darkness begins to close in, like a villain stalking his prey), I finished the book.

WTF?

Where's Jack? What happened to Jack? The building blows sky high, the ashes of the bad guys strewn about the countryside, along with the meth that leaves an entire town speeding and there is NO SIGN OF JACK REACHER!?!?!? ARRGHGHGH!

Okay. So you may have gathered I'm supremely unhappy with this tidbit. I wanted answers! This morning I scoured the net looking for stories with my Google question, "Did Lee Child kill off Jack Reacher?". And I can see that I am not alone in my anguish.

However, one of the posters commented that at the end of the book there is a "to be continued" and that another "Lee Child thriller" is to be released on October 19, 2010. It doesn't say another "Lee Child Jack Reacher novel", though. Is Child toying with us? Cold, cruel man!

Another poster quoted a scientific detail about the description of airflow in the chamber where Jack is battling desperately to escape. Flames upward, air sucked downward in a vent. Was that where Reacher managed to survive? If so, why have the very dum-da-dumdum ending of Susan, the aforementioned telephonic love interest closing the drawer on Reacher's file? Why no mention of the indominatable and (heretofore) indestructible Reacher walking on his laconic way (hitching, or grabbing the next bus out to parts unknown, as usual sans luggage and with just that toothbrush in his pocket)?

Please, please, pretty please - Mr. Child - Say it ain't so! Say that you've merely decided to leave your rabid reading public hanging by their fingernails off the proverbial cliff-hanger! Say that you have not grown weary of the tall man's escapades and moved on to another protagonist!

Say that Jack Reacher will be back - to kick bad guy ass and leave the women's hearts a flutterin' !

Vacation Reading (& book buying!)

I never travel or go anywhere for my vacations. I work at home, cook, lounge around and - you guessed it - read up a storm. I also tend to take a trip (or 5) to the book store, thus adding to my already Everestian to-be-read (or "TBR") book pile(s).

This week I've actually gotten sidetracked by internet work and writing (National Novel Writing Month - NaNoWriMo for those "in the know" - begins on Sunday and I'm participating again this year, but with great hopes for a successful conclusion, unlike last year's crash and burn ending).

But I have been reading. Regency romances mostly - Julie Quinn's "Mr. Cavendish I Presume", and a Stephanie Laurens. Plenty more where they came from too!

What I'll be picking up today, however, will be the various writing research and craft books that I'll steep myself in (again in prep. for NaNo to get my authorial juices flowing and my mind back in 'writer mode').

I got the newest Nora Roberts ("Bed of Roses") but Mom got to it first. I also have to find my copies of Gilgamesh that is the first Great Books project I have undertaken. (See other blog for that challenge!)

You know what? I suddenly feel a bookstore trip coming on!

Gotta run!

The Holy Grail

It costs $1,000. There are 20 volumes. It is the one, the only, Oxford English Dictionary. And I WANT IT.



Of course, I haven't got $1,000. Haven't got the space for 20 volumes, either, but I'd get rid of a chair if I had to. Instead, I started small. The fat paperback Oxford American Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus. Then I got the condensed, 2 (massive) volume $75.00 OED. That's when the hankering got really bad. I keep coming across ads, offerings, sales (imagine, for just $900 I can have the entire thing ... but I don't have $900 either).

I love dictionaries. Thesauri, too, if I'm going to make a full breast of it. I have numerous dictionaries, large and small, hardcover and paperback, etymological dictionaries, synonym and antonym dictionaries. Slang dictionaries. Foreign language dictionaries. American Heritage, Random House, Oxford, Websters and many more. Old and new. Dictionaries so old there is no reference to the atomic bomb. And so new they have entries for blogging (imagine that!).

But at the bottom of it all, its all about words.

It's rather like being a part of a secret society. We lust after words. We covet the dictionaries of others that are filled with words - words we crave. Words that, somehow, we can't truly touch or feel or experience unless we OWN them.

The legendary book about the compilation of the OED, The Professor and the Madman, details the initial operation that put together this massive undertaking and the sources from whence the selections were made (everyone was invited to suggest words for inclusion and one of the primary collaborators turned out to be a man sequestered in an insane asylum. And it continues to be a huge event - the annual revision of the OED. What words have evolved into a usage popular enough to warrant their inclusion in the bible of linguists? What words, sadly, have failed to meet that standard and must be abandoned? Arguments ensue. Debates proceed. There is always an American editor involved in the practice, but such jargon as applies to the internet, for example, and high-tech industries and current situations (witness the inclusion of WMD, after the misspent 8 years of the Bush presidency) will be included because of their popular appearance in everyday use.




Of course, sadly, not every word can be included. There are antiquated words - fun, amazing, ingenious words - that have been left out, abandoned by the literary wayside as the world moves on, embracing such words as are deemed au courant. Relevant. Can you imagine the number of volumes required to include every word in the English language that has ever been uttered or used? The words of Medieval London. Elizabethan London. 1776 US. 1100 Scotland. 1888 Dodge City. Words that will never be uttered again. Never be used in writing or known by the vocabulary-curious.

It makes me want to find those words. Investigate and unearth them and then use them. Speak them aloud. Write them down. Ensure that they will stay alive in the lexicographic universe. Prevent them from extinction. Even if it is only in my own mind that they live. Perhaps I will begin a journal. A word journal. A rescue mission, if you will, wherein I will record and save them. Keep the words safe for whosoever discovers my journals later. An alien, perhaps? Perhaps this being from another world will find my journal and believe these words to be the most important of words. Imagine a wealth of words disappearing, in favor of Middle English phrases, Regency slang or 1970's hip. Nodcock and groovy rule!

People whose business and hobby it is to study words - The Linguistic Society of America, for example - must lament these losses. Do they squirrel away old editions of dictionaries? Do they seek out the thesauri of days of yore? Are their homes repositories for a wealth of words?

I know I do my part. I have so many dictionaries and thesauri that I never want for a source for pronunciation, definition, etymology. And as I am my Mother's daughter, not a day goes by that I don't reach for one of these tomes. To look up a word, to confirm my belief about a tertiary definition of a word. To determine how, really, a word like "sepulchral" is pronounced. Or simply to find a word that means what I want to say more closely than any of the pedestrian choices that may immediately come to mind.

Am I peculiar? An oddity who would rather read a dictionary than watch a QVC show? Someone who would prefer to investigate a linguistical mystery than figure out who will be voted off the island?

Perhaps. But I am not alone. There are many others, however secluded and hidden. Subscribers to the magazine, Verbatim. Crossword puzzle afficianados. Writers. Poets. Scrabble players. People such as Ammon Shea, who spent an entire year reading the unabridged OED, cover to cover, wading through the "uns", the interminable "s" section - but who found a veritable treasure trove of knowledge about words, their use, their origin and his affinity for certain ones that just, well, tickled his fancy.




So I am in good company. Weirdos, one and all, but hey, weirdos with most excellent vocabularies.

Ka-ching.

Can you hear that? It's my new OED piggy bank. I'm saving up. One farthing, yen, Euro, deutschmark, penny, quid, pence, buck, franc - at a time.

I Never Met A Book I Didn't Like

I'm a librarian's daughter. I blame that for my obsession with all thinks bookish. Of course, it probably has little to do with that. But for whatever reason, I am a book fiend. I once bought a humorous book that outlined all the symptoms of being a bibliomaniac. Getting rid of furniture in order to fit more books into one's home (except, of course, for the comfy reading chair). Lying to one's family about having been at the bookstore - claiming in fact to have been, for example, at a bar rather than Barnes & Noble. In fact, sneaking the books into the house not in the tell-tale green bags, but in a Victoria's Secret bag.

Well, I'm the poster girl for insane book buying. Just ask my credit card companies. They just LOVE me. And the sudden downturn in the publishing industry? Probably because I've maxxed out the old plastic.

That, and the house is bursting at the seams with books. How many, you ask? Oh, well, roughly, maybe .... 20,000? So, what, is that a lot?

There are LIBRARIES with fewer books.

But come on. I don't splurge on clothes (no wisecracks from the fashion conscious - I've got a better vocabulary than you do and I'm not afraid to use it) - I don't have one of those costly hobbies like a man in my life (or a teenager...don't get me started). I don't travel, or dine out, and Imelda would simply sob over the pitiful state of my shoe collection (sneakers? check. Winter boots? check. 1 pair of worn out flats because my arches have falled from carrying around bags of books, CHECK.)

Instead I buy books. I collect books. I would die rather than pick through the trash for a piece of furniture, but spy a pile of moldering books, I'M SO THERE!

Any subject. Any author. Any condition. I'm not picky. I love them all.

Other people get hit on by drug dealers? I get hit on by the guy hawking books....

Can't you see it? He sidles over, that twitchy face, those beady eyes darting back and forth in search of a copper - He gives me that little grin, leans closer, pulls open the jack and says in that rusty hissing voice...

"Hey, lady, wanna buy a book?"

Anyway, join me as I indulge my vice. As I talk about the books I've bought, want to buy, the ones I've started reading, finished reading, forgot I was reading and the ones I have never forgotten (and a few I have).