Books are always on my wish list and thanks to various book pushers among my blogging and Facebook friends, I'm never at a loss as to what to ask for.
Martin in England told me about Lost Words and how glad I am that he did! It's a visual feast accompanied by magical writing. The lost words in question are words used to describe the natural world, words that seem to be disappearing from the language of children, words like acorn and adder, fern and king fisher. Words that have been replaced by the vocabulary of the internet, the smart phone, the television.
"You hold in your hands a spell book for conjuring back these lost words. To read it you will need to seek, find, and seek; it deals in things that are missing and things that are hidden, in absences and in appearances. It is told in gold -- the gold of the goldfinches that flit through its pages in charms -- and it holds not poems but spell s of many kinds that might just, by the old strong magic of being spoken aloud, unfold dreams and songs, and summon lost words back into the mouth and the mind's eye."
