Something to share

I have spent the past two days devouring a new book, The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield. It has been quite a good one, one that sticks with you even after you close it. It's a wonderful, intriguing, mysterious book that definitely caters to the group considered "readers". If you are one who has been known to be up reading late, burning the midnight oil, and then pick the book up from your night-stand even before sleep has left your eyes, you will thoroughly identify with the main character of this novel. I just want to share a little tidbit with you that the author uses to introduce us to Margaret. I share it because it so fully describes the way I feel about my own reading experience. In fact, after I had read the paragraph, I reread it a couple of times to say to myself. Yes! This is exactly how I feel.

Margaret has tucked herself into bed and looking at her stack of friendly books on her night-table, she thinks:

"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.....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 fullfilled."

After this paragraph, Margaret discovers a new author, the mysterious lady who the book revolves around, who completely recovers the lost joys of reading for her. How exciting for her! Of course, this isn't what the book is about. This happens in the first chapter. The plot develops after this point, but I fully understood what Margaret was feeling. I still think back to the times in my Junior High and High School days when I first read Jane Eyre, Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Heights, The Shell Seekers, the Emily books, and others that zapped me from existence and completely swayed me. There has never been another time like it. Many books have come very very close. The Historian for example I loved after it came out a few years ago. The other books continue to be comfort books for me. I turn to them often and read and read them over and over. I enjoy it, but it is never going to be quite the same as that first time.

Perhaps it is reading now as an adult, with more complex emotions, being less easily swayed. Perhaps it is because our emotional senses have developed and experienced many things, unlike when we were young. Still, I wish to be grabbed, taken hostage, and seized in the way I remember. For those of you who are young and first discovering those worlds in the page, read as much as you can, because it will never quite feel the same.