Spring
by Ali Smith
Suddenly I realized I had not read Spring, which has been sitting on a shelf for two years. How could this happen? My excuse is that I do not regard Ali Smith’s book as narratives but as adventures, so I save them for when I really need them (like now). When I read her books I have no idea what I’m getting into. The author trusts that I don’t need a road map I jump in, and as I hurtle down (or up, I can’t tell) I am assailed by sights, sounds, wordplay, puns, feelings, colors, jokes, memories of things that never happened to me, so that by the time I get to the bottom (or top), I know I have been through an experience. One I cannot simply summarize it in words. If people want to know what it is they will have to read it for themselves, and they will thank me for telling them nothing.
The Liar s Dictionary, by Eley Williams Image: Doubleday
Have you ever caught a Mountweazel? Before reading Eley Williams s beguiling first novel, I d never heard of them. But Williams is an expert. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on them, and then she put her hard-earned knowledge to further good use in
The Liar s Dictionary, which is to word lovers what potato chips are to my husband minus the guilt.
What are these sly creatures? Mountweazels are fake entries deliberately inserted into dictionaries, encyclopedias, or other trustworthy reference works as traps to catch plagiarists and copyright infringements. As their name suggests, they are evasive and weaselly, distantly related to intentionally ambiguous or misleading weasel words. According to Wikipedia (which may well be filled with its fair share of Mountweazels), the term was coined by