Meeting Wrap-Up, December 4, 2010

Before the discussion commenced, we were reminded that January's meeting will involve choosing future books, so if you have an idea, please submit it now to Peggy who is collecting suggestions. At any rate, come prepared to the next meeting.

Book Discussion: Ella Minnow Pea

This is an epistolary novel by Mark Dunn about a fictitious island off the coast of South Carolina, Nollop, named after Nevin Nollop, the author of the pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Nollop and his sentence have been elevated to cult-like status on the island, and as alphabetic tiles from the pangram gradually fall from Nevin Nollop's weathered memorial, the island's governing council declares the tiles' falling to be the will of Nevin Nollop and commands the letter on each tile that falls to be expunged from the alphabet. The novel takes place in letters between Ella Minnow Pea, a young woman who is a resident of Nollop, and her relatives, friends, and eventual co-conspirators as they try to come to terms with trying to communicate with fewer and fewer letters and also to come to terms with the totalitarian measures the council uses to enforce the will of Nollop as they interpret it.

Some of the topics of discussion centered around:

• The strange coincidence of this being the 3rd epistolary novel that we have read in the past year. Several of the readers remarked that it took them a while to get involved in this book because of its epistolary format.
  
• The difficulty of reading the communications between the characters as various letters of the alphabet disappear.
• The story as a metaphor for censorship and totalitarianism.
• The problems of functioning on a day-to-day level when something essential you have taken for granted has been taken away.
• How did Nollop Island's council get their power? At what point should the citizens of Nollop have stood up to their governing council? What should/could they have done?

When the final poll was taken of those who had read the book, about half of those present unequivocally liked the book, and about half kind of liked it but weren't blown away by it. Nobody actively disliked it, although one present had not read it, not being a fan of epistolary novels.