Interesting premise but it didn't pull through. It is an engaging idea and even though I am not a fan of dystopian I liked the idea but everything else started to weigh down the excitement. It could be difficult to follow and the footnotes were distracting at best. The second half of the book brought down the engaging parts that moved me to keep reading during the first half. The characters began to feel off and I found it difficult to keep picking it up and reading it.

DNF @8%

Book source ~ NetGalley

I went into this book with the vague hope it would be a bit like Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. It’s not. At all. It starts out interesting enough and then the author begins throwing around $100 words that, in all my years of reading, I had no idea what they meant. I couldn’t even guess what they were. Do you know how irritating it is to have to constantly stop to look up words? Very. Also, sentences tended to run on and on and on and on and on…in an effort to appear smart? I have no clue. Apparently this book is way beyond my brain capacity, so I saved myself major frustration, headaches, and crossed eyes and dropped it at 8%. Maybe others will get more out of it than me. I hope so. Because it seems like a great concept.

My rating (**) -- An odd book which hardly deserves the tag Thriller. I love language and etymology and don't mind using the dictionary and translate functions on my Paperwhite. Even the footnotes were interesting. But at 8% in, I read the Amazon reviews, wondering how I had picked this book, since I was on the verge of quitting. Unfortunately, those who plowed on to the end were very divided in their opinions. Even the four stars were muted in their enthusiasm. I skipped Chapter D (more journal musing by Bart). Chapter E (Empanada) is Ana again with some action. I managed to finish this by skipping the boring and incomprehensible Bart chapters. Interesting, improbable ideas, wonderful challenging writing, but ultimately boring with too much exposition. Ana is a wholly unlikeable character, a lexicographer who thinks that keeping a journal is a waste bordering on conceit, to write something only you would ever see.

Word \ ˈwərd \ n 1 : a human relic, now obsolete

Have you ever wanted to read about a dystopian future where words themselves bring down the world? (Word nerds unite.) *Although I do wish to express caution to discerning readers...

'The Word Exchange' is a chilling sci-fi story, where the dictionary is being wiped away. Words are not free knowledge anymore. One must pay to learn what a word means, and even once you find out its definition, your brain won't remember it later on – because it's stored on your Meme (a communication device similar to the smartphone). Without your Meme, you know nothing. Then a language virus hits, and as the outbreak intensifies, worldwide pandemonium ensues.

Cons? Y-E-S.
*Here's why I personally can't recommend this book to my friends. It alludes to mature adult content. And it contains very foul language. (I usually stick to clean reads.) These elements took away from my pure enjoyment of the story.

What I liked? I have to admit, the premise of the story is really good. The printed word is dead. (That's attention-grabbing!) It truly would have been the right kind of story to make my literary-inclined heart to pitter-patter. There's just some stuff in the story I didn't like in there, and so I have to dramatically decrease my rating on this book.

I liked the footnotes. This may sound a little weird to you, but let me just say that the bonus notes filled in the story so much more. This is especially fun to use on an e-reader device, so you can flip back and forth between the footnotes and where you left off in the story, effortlessly. And those unique word definitions in the chapter titles... ah! There is just loads of literary references in there too. Imaginative... and dreamy.

It's like the ultimate book for book readers, in a way. This author is something of a genius, the way she's woven so many bookish elements together to create a fabulous, cohesive, believable setting – a world where books themselves are dying. Her vocabulary is astounding. It felt like there were new words in every single chapter that I had never heard of, and yet, there they were in my dictionary – just words I'd never met yet – but they came by the boatload. I'm sure that I found a hundred new vocabulary words that I had to check my e-reader dictionary for (and some words weren't even found, imagine that).

It's about the geekiest kind of reading there is. I just wish I could have been able to rate it higher and recommend it.

“The end of words would mean the end of memory and thought. In other words, our past and future.”
- Chapter D, The Word Exchange

I was so excited to read this but was left feeling disappointed. Too much word inflation without real meaning and seemed forced at times.

In Graedon's dystopian fantasy, print is dead. Technology has advanced to release devices that provide constant communication. In addition, they are self-learning, and intuitive to the owner's desires. What if there was a pandemic word flu causing widespread loss of words? While the premise of this novel is enticing for any word nerd, the execution felt languid at times. A short story would better tell Anana's search for her father. While driven by arcane words, the shaky world building and problematic pacing made it difficult to read. Even with these faults this is an intriguing techno-thriller in this age of deep learning and artificial intelligence.

I have been trying to play catch up on all of the outdated NetGalley books I've received and decided it was high time I get around to The Word Exchange. I feel bad that I'm even reviewing this because I did not actually read the whole thing. I got about twenty pages in and it is excruciating. Long rambling sentences with so many wordy words thrown in as though a book about the loss of language and what not needs to contain the entire dictionary in just the first two chapters. It's like reading a dissertation on language. Not my cup of tea.

In the near future of America, everyone has their own personal "Memes" make memory unnecessary and you don't even need a vocabulary. It can even anticipates wants and needs. Anana works with her anti-Meme dad who is a famous lexicographer working on a dictionary of English. Doug disappears and Anana can't help but wonder if the rumors are true. Anana and her comrade Bart travel underground mazes and has encounters with a mysterious society which is against Memes. This subversive society worries that when words are lost will the be memories. Language appears as a virus in the 22nd century. Why?

This novel has made me wonder what would happen if we become dependent on gadgets to talk for us. Would we lose our words? Are we letting our gadget use make it difficult or impossible to talk and listen? A worthwhile book to read and discover what our technology might do.

VERDICT: A geeky novel focusing on the dangers of over extensive use of technological devices to communicate. Very smart but too long.

A few years ago, I requested The Word Exchange on Netgalley, because the story line sounded totally my cup of tea, and then, more urgent books piled up, and only recently did I finally take time to read it.
The structure of the book is neat, with its 3 parts: Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis.
Plus each chapter is alphabetized (like in Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, by Henry Hitchings, referred to in this novel itself) and opens with a made up definition of a word starting by that letter, in connection with the plot.
The story is simple:
Alice’s father, Doug, is the chief editor of the North American Dictionary of the English language. He disappears mysteriously, while preparing the third edition. Alice has no idea where he is, and she basically spends the whole book (a bit over three months) trying to find out what happened to him and where he could possibly be, if he is still alive even.
To do so, she tries to get help, but she has no idea whom she can really trust or not, including her former and current boyfriends.
The mystery is presented like a treasure hunt, with a secret code our heroine has to crack.

Things get more and more complicated. Alice is actually a code name inspired by Lewis Carroll. Her real name is Ana.
And shortly after Doug’s disappearance, virus S0111 appears. A nasty and unusual thing that first mimics flu-like symptoms, but that actually attacks the language. It is spread by a meme, an electronic assistant (sometimes inserted in bodies as a microchip).
It attenuates the memory, progressively prevents you from talking, then ends up killing you.
The virus does not seem unrelated to the development of the Word Exchange and Synchronic, a company allowing you to redefine words as you wish, but also making you pay to use words.
Alice will have to face dangerous people. It gets even worse as the virus becomes epidemic, affecting neuronal pathways, killing thousands of people, and threatening the infrastructure all over the world. Language is in danger of becoming extinct and society is on the verge of collapse.
Some scenes are quite spooky, worthy of Fahrenheit 451.
Ana will even discover a secret society. But on which side are they?
The book is super geeky and starts from a very smart idea I think.
There are also cool descriptions of libraries.
But it is long, way too long and overly detailed. There are too many long digressions disrupting the pace of the novel, though interesting sometimes (on Hegel for instance).
Plus, as some of the main characters get affected by the virus, their journal contains progressively more and more typos and mistakes, and create many new words. The idea is neat, but in some passages, it is taken so far that really I had no idea what they were really saying. But maybe the point was that they were no longer even trying to communicate.
With less pages and more editing, this book could be really superb.
I enjoyed the ultimate message on the dangers threatening our society if we become slaves, overly dependent on technological devices to communicate.
There are some neat ideas, such as reading presented like a therapy and a preventive against the virus.

I found that reading gave me a certain relief – one form of escapism that seemed safe, and maybe more than safe. I felt saner – less fragmented- after reading for an hour.
location 3234

The passage on measures to take after the recovery, as a preventive against another similar crisis, could be used as the basis of any good education system. And we are certainly in need of those.

The secretary of education recently unveiled an initiative for curriculums to place more emphasis on history and language. Within the decade, proficiency in at least three languages will be required of all American schoolchildren by graduation. And along with its other recommendations, the CDC has issued a promulgation that every U.S. citizen “unplug” for at least two hours each day.
location 6374

I got way more than I bargained for with this one.

The book is told in alternating perspectives: half in the voice of Anana Johnson--more commonly called "Alice" throughout the book--who is the daughter of one of the more prominent people working at the North American Dictionary of the English Language (or NADEL for short). The other half is one of Anana's colleagues at NADEL, Bart Tate. The world has become almost completely digital, the era of "print media" all but completely eliminated. Doug, Ana's father, is staunchly against the tech-takeover, and is in the process of publishing what will be the final edition of the NADEL print dictionary--when he suddenly goes missing, leaving only the name ALICE as a clue: his code for a situation where something bad has fallen on him. And as this "Alice" takes her trip down the rabbit hole, a "word flu" begins to infect the population and suddenly, something as solid as the definition of words is more influx than should be possible...

The creation of the world itself is fascinating. Memes--which have replaced cell phones and are infinitely more useful/terrifying--remind me a great deal of the tech hinted at in the movie Her, which was equally fascinating and terrifying. The Meme can determine how you're feeling, reorder groceries for you, answer emails and phone calls, play music, schedule appointments... In many ways, it's kind of the Internet of Things, or Amazon's Alexa, all made into your phone--and pretty much everything else. And on the Meme we have the Word Exchange, a quick way to check the meaning of a more obscure word you hear in everyday life for a pittance of a cost to the company. But the more people begin to rely on the Exchange and their Memes for information, the less they let themselves think on their own...which leads into the edges of the word flu.

I love the name Meme. I just have to put that first. It's brilliant. Because in many ways, we're heading down this route already. There are some frightening correlations to popular culture, which makes it a very clever commentary on reliance on technology and the "death" of the printed book. (I've already stated my arguments on that, so I shan't repeat myself.) The actual conveyance of the "word flu" is fascinating, and I found myself comparing it to Nadsat, as if we were watching the world fall into what would become the setting of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. (And, I'll note, they used the term "droog" once, which made me insufferably happy.) It never becomes impossible to read, though eventually the aphasia does claim the coherency of some of the characters, and it's fun to try and piece together the bits we're missing.

I also got a few callbacks to my read-through of Tony Noland's VERBOSITY'S VENGEANCE (and had my own feeling of needing the Word Exchange) with some of the vocabulary. Despite the fact that I often find myself with a larger vocabulary than many of my peers, this one stretched me to the limits of my knowledge on occasion. I've seen a few reviews comment that the thesaurus-grabbing element of this kind of writing comes off as pretentious and hokey, but given that all our narrators work--literally--for a dictionary, I don't see any issue with it. Bart routinely quotes people I've never heard of. These people know all the words. ALL the words. And I bet they use most of them.

It ended about the way I expected it to, but as I hope for in any book, I was invested enough in the characters and just uncertain enough about the outcome to keep me turning pages until the end. (And besides, I HAD to find out how Bart's storyline concluded. I had to. And it ended exactly as I really wanted. I have every hope for him, in every regard.)

I do find Ana's apparent complete lack of knowledge of who Charles Dodgson is a little astounding, given the prevalence of Alice in Wonderland references, but given how late in the book this takes place, I'm willing to give her a bit of the benefit of the doubt with all she's been through. But still.

In the end, a very smart and highly enjoyable book, and a very clever dig at all of us in turn. I love books that make me think. And this does just that.

Rating: **** (Recommended)