Book Club

A lovely new friend in the neighborhood invited me to join a small book club that meets once a month. Yes, yes. I'm busy. But as I've mentioned before I'm down one-friend this year due to the gravitational pull of the German people, so I'm committed to being open to new friends and am trying to figure out really hard when I can see the friends I already have. So, off to the book club I go and I have figured out how to enjoy a book when you really have no choice but to read it two pages at a time.

Anyway, this month's book is "The Thirteenth Tale" by Diane Setterfield. I finished it last week and I'd score it at 6.5 on a scale of 1-10. Its a gothic style story which means that much happens that is key to the story/mystery that is not discussed and that you have to figure out. Some folks love that--me, not so much. But the writing itself is lovely and there is a passage that touched me that I feel so compelled to share I cannot resist it:

" People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. "