Ella Minnow Pea
Just started reading this last night - a silly bit of legerdemain with letters, but a bit of silliness is good now and then. I have the feeling it will be a quick read; it's an epistolary novel, and no one letter is that long. In fact, some are quite short! Will report when finished! So . . . finished this book yesterday, and it was a real treat!! It is, as the subtitle proclaims, "A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable." Any book that adds new words to my vocabulary, and also loves to play with language, is a good read in my world. And this fable is slightly reminiscent of Dr. Suess, in that sense of a love for playing with words. Fable is a good description indeed, or even allegory. On an imaginary island called Nollop, off the coast of South Carolina, a society of odd, interesting people revere Nevin Nollop, the man who came up with the famous pangram (a sentence that uses all the letters of the alphabet), "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." They have a statue erected in Nollop's honour, with the pangram written out below his statue in tiles. But then, the tiles begin to fall off, one by one, and the consequences of these losses are both hilarious and dire.
I won't say more, but I would recommend you look for this book, maybe in a used book store (that's how I got mine, through an on-line used bookstore), and give it a read. If you love language, you will not be sorry you did.
