Tuesday Intro: The Thirteenth Tale

"It was November. Although it was not yet late, the sky was dark when I turned into Laundress Passage. Father had finished for the day, switched off the shop lights and closed the shutters; but so I would not come home to darkness he had left on the light over the stairs to the flat. Through the glass in the door it cast a foolscap rectangle of paleness onto the wet pavement, and it was while I was standing in that rectangle, about to turn my key in the door, that I first saw the letter. Another white rectangle, it was on the fifth step from the bottom, where I couldn't miss it. 

I closed the door and put the shop key in its usual place behind Bailey's Advanced Principles of Geometry. Poor Bailey. No one has wanted his fat gray book for thirty years. Sometimes I wonder what he makes of his role as guardian for the bookshop keys. I don't suppose it's the destiny he had in mind for the masterwork that he spent two decades writing."

The Thirteenth Tale
by Diane Setterfield

It seems like most people have read The Thirteenth Tale.  It is my book club's May selection, so I'm finally getting around to it now. Approaching halfway mark, I'm involved in the story and curious about the outcome, but not loving it... yet.

Have you read this one? What do you think of the opening?

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the opening paragraph (sometime two) of a book she decided to read based on the opening. Feel free to grab the banner and play along.

Two More Reasons to Love May

Happy May! We have color, at last, in central New York - flowering trees are blooming, while daffodils, hyacinths, and forsythia add splashes of color to our yards. In a couple of weeks, there will be lilacs. And if that's not enough to make me smile, two of my favorite events are returning this month.

First, Trish is hosting a May edition of Pin It and Do It. You all know I love Pinterest and can never resist this challenge, but this month I'm going to add a new twist. Previously, #PinItDoIt has been all about food and, while there are still plenty of recipes I'd like to try, I'm challenging myself to branch out this time. Maybe a knitting, gardening, or decorating project, or something from my NYC board, or movies, or books... we'll see. Of course, I'll still be cooking and baking, too. All the particulars can be found in Trish's post.

#Estellagram is on again! This bookish photo-a-day challenge is so much fun. March was awesome (I didn't miss a single day), but April was a bust. Maybe those weekly roundup posts in March kept me motivated after all. We'll see what happens in May.

Will you be joining us for either of these challenges?

Top Ten Tuesday: Tempting Tags

First, my apologies for the excessive alliteration. I just can't seem to help myself.

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week we're talking about words that instantly make us want to read a book. We all have those few words, settings, or subjects which make a novel irresistible, and you can be sure publishers utilize them to their fullest in cover blurbs.

Here are are my ten tempting tags:

• multigenerational saga
• Maine
• beach/summer house
• alternating points-of-view
• English village (extra points for the Cotswolds)
• epistolary
• foodie memoir, recipe inclusion a bonus
• Italy
• reminiscent of Downton Abbey
• boarding school/academia

What blurb words do you fall for every time?
For more Top Ten Tuesday posts, visit The Broke and the Bookish.

Photos from my 2008 trip through the Cotswolds.

Monday Musing

I really meant to write a Sunday Salon post, but somehow the weekend slipped away before I managed to find the time. It was the first warm, sunny weekend since sometime last fall, and I couldn't bear to spend it with my laptop. Spring cleaning the garage took precedence on Saturday - pretty exciting, right? An entire winter's worth of salt, sand, and dust needed to be dealt with. After several hours, the place was so clean, I briefly considered hosting a picnic in the garage! We'll see how long it stays that way. Then there were clothes to be washed, floors to be mopped, and various other indoor chores. Finally, around 5 o'clock, I was able to slip out to the sunny patio with The Thirteenth Tale and a glass of wine. Bliss!

Sunday was even warmer but, unfortunately, I didn't get to spend much time outdoors. We attended Syracuse Opera's performance of The Marriage of Figaro  and afterwards went out for a long, leisurely dinner with friends.

Recent Reading
I've been enjoying a streak of really good books lately that began with The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. (my review). I also absolutely loved the audio version of Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler and will try to get my thoughts together for a post later this week. On Friday,  I finished The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout and, while it's not quite Olive Kitteridge, it reminded me why Strout is one of my favorite authors. I'm still thinking about this novel, but in the meantime you can check my Saturday Sentence for a taste of her writing.

Book Club
My book club met last week to discuss The Paris Wife  by Paula McLain. We selected the title because one member was attending her Maryland friend's book club while visiting, and it was their selection. There were six of us at our the meeting, but only three had finished (a fourth was nearly done).  I listened to the book over a year ago, so my memory was a little hazy. We had a unanimous "liked-but-didn't-love" reaction. The Maryland group, however, had a slightly different opinion - they all loved The Paris Wife.

Our next selection is The Thirteenth Tale  by Diane Setterfield, an all-time favorite of the Maryland group.

Current Reading
My current audiobook is Cooked  by Michael Pollan. I'm very glad to be listening to this one - mostly because I enjoy the author's narration, but I also have a feeling this is one of those books (like The Omnivore's Dilemma) I'd find slow-going in print.

In print, I'm only on page 20 of The Thirteenth Tale  by Diane Setterfield, but my initial reaction is positive. The audio production has excellent reviews, so I'm considering a read/listen combo. This book has been around for a while, and I suspect many bloggers have already read it.

What are you reading this week?

Saturday's Sentence

I ran across an interesting post last weekend at Lynne's Book Notes. She says, "Author David Abrams has started a marvelous idea on his blog, The Quivering Pen. Each Sunday, he posts, without explanation, the best sentence he has read during the week."

Isn't that a great idea? As luck would have it, there is  a single sentence that really stood out in my reading this week. And since it happens to be about food, I'm linking up to Weekend Cooking, too.

"While the Burgesses seemed to have no knowledge of, or interest in, food (there were meals of scrambled hamburger covered with an unmelted sheet of orange cheese, or a tuna casserole made with canned soup, or a chicken roasted without any spices, not even salt), Pam discovered that they loved baked goods, and so she made banana bread and sugar cookies, and sometimes Susan stood in the small kitchen and helped her, and whatever was baked was eaten hungrily, and this touched Pam as well - as though these kids had been starved all their lives for sweetness."

The Burgess Boys
by Elizabeth Strout
page 107

Weekend Cooking, hosted at Beth Fish Reads, is open to anyone who has a food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up over the weekend.

The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. by Nichole Bernier

The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D.
by Nichole Bernier
Broadway Paperbacks, 2013
originally published 2012
305 pages
source: review copy from publisher

Summary (from Goodreads):

Before there were blogs, there were journals. And in them we’d write as we really were, not as we wanted to appear. But there comes a day when journals outlive us. And with them, our secrets.

Summer vacation on Great Rock Island was supposed to be a restorative time for Kate, who’d lost her close friend Elizabeth in a sudden accident. But when she inherits a trunk of Elizabeth's journals, they reveal a woman far different than the cheerful wife and mother Kate thought she knew.
 
The complicated portrait of Elizabeth makes Kate question not just their friendship, but her own deepest beliefs about loyalty and honesty at a period of uncertainty in her own marriage — as well as her own choices as a wife, mother, and professional, and the legacy she herself would want to leave behind.

When an unfamiliar man’s name appears in the pages, Kate realizes the extent of what she didn’t know about her friend, including where she was really going on the day she died.

My thoughts: 

I accepted a review copy of The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. based on two factors - the setting and the fact that journal entries figure prominently in the story. Books set on the New England coast always call to me, but a summer house on an island made this one irresistible. I'm also a big fan of epistolary novels and hoped the journal entries would impart a similar feeling.

Opening the novel to find a quote by Wallace Stegner, one of my favorite authors, I suspected I'd made the right decision.

"Somehow I should have been able to say how strong and resilient you were, what a patient and abiding and bonding force, the softness that proved in the long run stronger than what it seemed to yield to... You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound."
 -- Wallace Stegner, "Letter, Much Too Late"

The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. forces its readers to ask the question: Do we ever truly know our friends? For that matter, how well can we really know anyone?

This book kept me up far too late several nights in a row. I was glued to the stories of two friends unfolding side by side. Kate's life is revealed as the novel progresses, while we learn about Elizabeth posthumously through her journals.

 Although I am now older than either of these women, it was very easy to relate to both of them. I have been there - an "at home mom" leaving a career behind and making new friends through a local play group. It took years to learn their backstories.  The kids have reached their twenties, the families have mostly scattered, and now I wonder how well we actually knew each other.

Reading Elizabeth's journals allows Kate to finally know her deceased friend and to understand how she came to be the seemingly perfect wife and mother, and also prompts her to reflect upon the many "what ifs" in her own life. The reader, of course, follows her down this path.

"Choices, repercussions... It was a strange way to think of dating - a limiting of your options and lifestyle because you'd chosen one type of partner over another - though it was technically true. It was true of most decisions. The effects of your choices might not be clear at the moment they were made. But if you turned back to see where you'd come, there they'd be, the ghost of the path not taken leading to the places you would never go." p. 131

The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. is sure to be a hit with book clubs, too. The paperback edition's "Extra Libris" section includes not only a reader's guide, but a conversation with the author and a list of recommended reading. My all-time favorite novel - Crossing to Safety  by Wallace Stegner - occupies the #1 position among "books that remind us you never really know the hearts and minds of others".  I can envision discussions of The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. ranging far and wide ... especially if wine is involved!

Highly recommended.

My rating:

Wordless Wednesday: April 24

In Monday's mail...