The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

A very good read.  Not quite as good as I had hoped.  The end bothered me, and I tossed & turned over it this morning (which is why I'm up and writing this at 6:30).  I'll put my rambling thoughts at the bottom.  It is an absolutely worthwhile read, one that unfolds beautifully, bit by bit, so reading my last paragraph would definitely spoil that enjoyment. 

Instead, some passages that I loved:

• There is something about words.  In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.  Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, adn when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts.  Inside you they work their magic.
• 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.
• When I came to myself Dr. Clifton was there.  He put an arm around me.  "I know," he said.  "I know."  He iddn't know, of course, Not really.  And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it.  For I knew what he meant.  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.

*SPOILER*

I loved theplot & the subplots (Hester, Vida's doctor, John the Dig, etc..), but was very frustrated by the fact that the writer never clearly delineates which sister survived.  Even with disfigurement from the fire, the two girls were so fundamentally different that I'm positive Vida Winters knew who she had pulled out eventually.  My first inclination is that Emmeline died, because Vida buried her old life from that moment forward.  I imagine that only the grief of losing that dear one could cause such extremity.  On the other hand, I don't think Adeline could have functioned so normally for so many years.  Did they constantly guard her against violence?  It just doesn't jive for me that it was her.  Any thoughts?

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

This book was difficult to rate on GoodReads.  Ultimately I gave it 4 out of 5 stars, but I wholeheartedly agree with another reader who wrote: "Some days it was a five star read and others a two, with me wanting to throw it at a wall."  The characters were so human, so painful in their weaknesses.  It was heartbreaking to witness the obscure (yes!) demise of humans with so much initial promise.  I'm half-cursing Hardy.  But he does make his statement (shockingly for the time period) about marriage, social norms, feminism.  Sue drove me crazy throughout, but I did feel for poor Jude.  Only those willing to bounce between ache & anger will enjoy this book. 

Still...I thought it was a great read, but would be hesitant to recommend it to those who can't handle unhappy endings (or beginnings...or middles!).  Overall, I am awed at Hardy's ability to so thoroughly analyze human desires and experiences.  His pace takes some adjustment, but the writing is phenomenal.  I want to read Mayor of Casterbridge and Return of the Native, but I may need a bit of a break from the inevitable bleak. 

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

This book left me worried about my emotions.  Because it really should have impacted them on some level.  But I never shed a tear.  Which is really surprising considering the fact that I bawled through half of the HBO John Adams special I watched this morning.  Why?  The characters were real.  And I guess that was the problem for me with this book.  I found it to be an exceptionally entertaining story, but the characters never made the leap to flesh and blood.  For me.  I was not attached.  A worthwhile read because it's quick & easy, but it wasn't deeply moving for me. 

I just saw a link that a movie of this is in the works to be released in 2009 -  Alec Baldwin, Cameron Diaz, Abigail Breslin.  I'm not so much a Cameron Diaz fan, but perhaps this will be a case where a production brings more life than the prose manages. 

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

I've recently been reading so much modern literature that jumping into Thomas Hardy was more of an adjustment than anticipated.  His sentence structure alone seemed so much more complicated.  And the vocabulary.  The descriptions.  It took a few chapters to accustom myself , but then I was in love.  Where I started the book by skimming through descriptive interludes, by the end I was savoring the nuances of language and tone. 

I truly enjoyed this book.  It wasn't a life-changing read by any means, but I loved it.  Especially because I kept thinking Hardy too morbid (Tess is my only previous exposure to his writing) for the ending I really wanted.  But he delivered.  Beautifully.  And kept me turning pages even through the "unsure" of the storyline.

Last year I bought a huge hardbound volume of five Hardy novels.  I'm thinking of reading straight through.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

I really, really, really, really wanted to like this book.  And I did at first.  Laughter, tears, the whole shabang.  But then it got old.  The self-pity, the far-reaching drama, the self-realization, the language.  My book started falling apart as I read.  Three-quarters of the way through, an entire section dropped out.  So I threw the whole thing away.  There was no hate, mind you.  And I can even say I'm really glad I spent some time with the book as a whole.  I just didn't feel the need to finish.  And in the end, I suppose that says the most.