A new friend

{via We Heart It}

I just started reading Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield and I am head over heels in love with it. There are so many little gems in here that I just want to grab whoever is luckless enough to be sitting next to me and read them the new brilliant passage I have just finished. Which happens every few pages. I've settled just for marking the book up so I can keep coming back and back and geeking out over the way she has mastered the language.

I love it. I haven't been this excited about a book in awhile.

Here's one of my favorite passages so far:

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 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 that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

I love this feeling of devotion and yearning she captures here. It seems that we all have things like this that we have done for our whole lives. And yet the modern practice of them does not match the first impact that the first formative the practice had on us. We keep doing it because it doesn't seem possible to stop.

I know there have been times where I have felt this way about reading. I read because I have always read. Because in some ways reading is as vital to me as breathing. But a lot of times the books I pick up just don't move me like I remember the stories of my childhood moving me. But, like breathing, I can't imagine not reading even--if the story doesn't become incorporated into my personal mythology. You just never know when you'll pick up a book that changes you again.

Not reading is just not possible.

As I'm thinking about this concept and reading, I'm also thinking about how this can be true with relationships. Aren't there certain relationships we keep around just because they have been such a vital part of who we are. When we think of certain people, we think about them in terms of past actions and past influence. When we see them in present time it's just not the same as it used to be, we don't seem to quite speak the same language anymore. And yet, we keep them because their continued presence gives us echos of the person they inspired us to be. It's easy to hold out hope that if the two of you resonated so strongly once before, it can happen again. And sometimes it does. I can think of three instances of that just off the top of my head.

Just thinking.


Anyway, if you like Gothic-like novels at all (Jane Eyre, Woman in White, Fingersmiths, etc) even the tiniest bit, I think you'll love this book.