An excerpt from The Thirteenth Tale

It's practically the middle of the night.  Certainly too late to be up on a school night.  Especially on a school night that precedes a 13 hour work day.  Open House is tomorrow night.  But here I am, reading this book that I cannot put down.  I am a binge reader.  And this is a book for book lovers.  I keep getting lost in the language of this novel.  I love books like that and I read very few that do that to me. It makes me wish I spent my days in a library, or better yet, had my own library at home where I could curl up with this (or any other) good book and slip away while being surrounded by some of my most favorite things.  My books.  Here is a passage that I especially love...

"Of course one always hopes for something special when one reads an author one hasn't read before, and Miss Winter's books gave me the same thrill I had when I discovered the Landier diaries, for instance.  But it was more than that.  I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage in 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 a 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.  And during this time, these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke to read again -- the lost joys of reading returned to me.  Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me."

See what I mean?