The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

I can’t think of when I have been as pleasantly surprised by a book.  On the heels of State of Wonder which I loved, loved, loved, I stumbled on The Thirteenth Tale and was certain it would just be another book to read.  Boy was I wrong.  It had all the trappings of a generic Gothic novel with none of the hype that comes with the classics…spinstress bookseller living in her father’s house is called away to assist a mysterious recluse with a cryptic request.  See what I mean?  I almost skipped it,  deciding without even reading it that it was not worth my time!  And in addition to the story, the WRITING about READING oh my dear friend, the way this author writes of reading was astonishing, as if she looked into my very soul and wrote of what she saw!

The following is an annoyingly long passage from the book but I have to include it in its entirety because its so strikes a nerve:  

Of course, one always hopes for something special when one reads an author one hasn’t read before…but it was more than that.  I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy.  And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child.  I still believe in stories.  I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book.  Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that.  When I was a child, books were everything.  And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books.  It is not  a yearning one ever expects to be fulfilled.  And during this time, these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke to read again-the lost joys of reading returned to me.

I mean, I would never say reading was "everything" (I'm not that far gone yet) but at times, I came close...

On grief: 

We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.  "I know," he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

And the author had this to say about writing in an interview included in my copy of the book which I found fascinating and inspiring (note that I read most books cover to cover...forward, dedication, appreciations/thanks, etc....if I had a photographic memory (I do not) I'd be able to tell you every kind of font books have ever been written in...only once have I ever seen someone I know listed in the "thank you" part of a book and that was a client, a lawyer, whose individual tax returns I once worked on when I was at Arthur Andersen back in the day who was being thanked by the writer of that novel):

In particular the erosion of my private reading time made me unhappy-if I cannot escape for an hour or two every day by reading for pleasure, the small problems seem to grow large, and I begin to feel enormously burdened...I had always wanted to be a writer, but was impeded by the belief that to be a writer one had to be extraordinary, and I knew I wasn't...I had realized that while books are extraordinary, writers themselves are no more or less special than everyone else.

So get out there and write, my less than extraordinary friends!  What's stoppin' ya?

(oh, but take the time to read this book on the way, you will not be disappointed)

Rating:  #2 Fabulous