
Lexicon by Max Barry
Compare two commonly-used adages: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” versus “The pen is mightier than the sword.” In your own life, which saying have you found to be truer? It's all well and good to claim that an intangible thought, either spoken or written, is less powerful than a physical object, but one can easily come up with several examples to the contrary: Discarded treaties between the United States government and various Native American tribal peoples; Chairman Mao's infamous little red book; documentation in South Africa upholding the so-called legality of apartheid; Stalin's issuance of the Great Purge and subsequent refusal to acknowledge its existence; Adolph Hitler's deranged, inflammatory Mein Kampf. Words are powerful, dangerous things. One might even say that they're magical. In Lexicon, by Max Barry, they are all... Read More