Book Club

I was invited to join a book club, and tonight we met here at my house. It was great fun. None of us could agree on a book to read for this meeting so we all just chose a book and read it and then talked about it, and tried to convince the other participants that our book was the best and it should be chosen as the next book. I read The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. This is my synopsis: I have checked it out of our local library 3 times. I have finished it once. I never got past page 5 the first two times. The style of writing is very different than I am used to reading. You know, my readings consist of blogs and The Cat in The Hat, as of late. But I love love love to read a good book. Having said that, I'm not a very deep-thinking person. I don't have the patience or endurance to read such classics as Jane Austen, or Hemmingway, or Charles Dickens. I only read the ones required by my high school English classes. (This book club thing should be interesting, eh?) I did read the Twighlight Series, though, and I liked them. Not loved them. Just liked them. I thought they were entertaining, but I was so irritated with Bella and what a wimpy, helpless person she started out as. Totally a wuss. I could completely relate to her clumsiness, but not her helplessness. She grew on me and now we are friends, so don't go sending me hate mail. And don't even get me started on Edward. He seems nice and all, but, if I had my choice, I'd chose Jacob Black. Just saying his name gives me the shivers. Oooohhh. Jacob. I secretly call him Michael, because I know a certain werewolf who closely resembles Jacob's character. KIDDING. Only kidding. Michael isn't that hairy.

Oh, and I don't like Oprah's book club books. They never have happy endings and they leave me feeling depressed and irritated that I spent my precious time reading a book without closure! (I guess closure is relative, though, right?)

Back to my synopsis of The Thirteenth Tale. LOVED IT! Can I just say that my shallow mind has gained an inch or two of depth? It was very captivating. Once I got used to the author's style, it made no difference in the reading. It did make a humongous difference in my mind's eye and how I saw things as she described them to me. I'll give you an example. Here are some exerpts from the book.

Here a character is sharing with the reader how she feels about books in general: For someone now dead once thought these words significat enough to write them down.
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.

This, my friends, is why I blog. I do it to keep you all aware of my being. I AM HERE. I AM SHARING MY MAGIC WITH YOU.

In a way, I can relate to the woman telling the story of a woman telling her story. She loves books. She spends her life around them, and knows each one of them by touch. I, too, know my books by touch. That one in the corner with the smear of lipstick on it, and 12 1/2 pages missing and once belonged to the library but now belongs to us, that one is special. And the one with the bumpy pages because it "accidentally" got dropped in the toilet, holds a place in my heart as well. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. It's like that with me. It's as if she took the words right out of my brain and committed them to paper, turned it into a book, had it published and made millions of dollars off my thoughts.

Another part of the book I thought entertaining focuses on telling the truth. In which I absolutely agree with her opinion. Check it. I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions. Just so long as they don't start on about storytelling and honesty, the way some of them do. Naturally that annoys me. But provided they leave me alone, I won't hurt them.

Good to know. This is why I make it a point to never tell the truth.

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself.
...what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.

Just don't lie to me about eating my sweets because then I want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Skor bar.