I heard a story this morning about a man in New England whose house was infested by mice. He fumigated and the critters scattered out of the house and across the lawn, finally all hiding beneath a pile of raked leaves. Thinking quickly, the man set the pile of leaves of fire to be done with the mice once and for all. Unfortunately for him, however, a lone mouse, engulfed in flames, fled the pile and made a bee-line back to the basement where he succeeded in burning down the house (no longer just a popular Talking Heads song). The best laid plans of mice and men do often go awry…and end in a series of conflagrations (I always felt the old adage was missing something).

You would totally do it. Wouldn’t you?

As some of you may know, Eric & I had the opportunity to interview Mary Higgins & Carol Clark, co-authors of light-hearted mystery stories written in time for the Yule / Christmas / Hannukkah/ Boxing Day holiday every year. Author signings are strange and frightful beasts in their own right: I have heard a few Famous Thinkers Whose Names I Can’t Remember Now say that you should never meet the author of your favorite novel. You will not exchange meaningful insights; you will not achieve some nirvana of unspoken, profound communication or a meeting of like minds; most likely, you will choke a few times on all the statements you rehearsed saying and stare like a deer in headlights into the beleaguered eyes of your favorite author, who has just fended off a too-fanatic fan and is still recovering from the trauma.

The answer: they are very pleasant– though I kept wondering if they were secretly wondeing which of their characters I resembled the most.

You know how everyone likes the book critics who always hate what they read, because it’s so entertaining to read their insults? For this Review o’ the Week, we’ve picked a scathing review by Melody from Utah, who did not particularly like Sleeping with the Fishes in the Fred the Mermaid series by Mary Janice Davidson:

The main character is completely unlikable. I think the author has sassy and sarcastic mixed up with bitchy and volatile. From the first page Fredrika (Fred) is someone who’s frighteningly selfish and who reacts like a 5 year old. Honestly, until about the third page I wasn’t sure if I was reading Fred flashing back to when she was 5 years old.

The author admits not knowing the least bit about marine biology and the sea shore and as admirable as the admission is it does nothing to improve her book. Her ignorance not only shows, it glares and bites back. It also leads the storyline to be shallow (pardon the pun) and nearly useless. If you enjoy Danielle Steele’s work though, you will love this book.

The best part of the story is Fred’s best friend Joshua; his love story and personality is worth the read. So I did finish the book.

Ouch! Don’t let Ms. Davidson see this. Thanks, Melody, for your entertaining review!

Wow! Crazy week last week with the Silly Survey! We were all quite impressed here at BookSwim that Anne Rice pulled it out.

Concerned for the health of an author who didn’t make our list? Tell us how wrong we are in the comments section, below.

*note Re: Scrooge McDuck - Though not a published author, per se, we can’t imagine that swimming in money can actually be healthy.

Wow! Check out this fancy schmancy new player for this week’s podcast! It kicks the pants off of our old one.

What do you think of the auto-play on this week’s podcast? Love it? We’ll do it every week! Hate it? We’ll never do it again! Comment, oh awesome BookSwimmers!

And don’t forget to tune in next week for our interview with authors Carol and Mary Higgins Clark.

Yes, another week to nominate your favorite book set during the winter holidays. The nominations are piling up, so put in yours.

Update: The Mary Higgins Clark interview went well. It will be posted in one week. Keep nominating your favorite holiday books below.

Vida Winter, the eccentric dying woman at the heart of The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, is in a panic. After decades of fabricating the story of her life to entranced journalists, she has finally acquiesced to one young writer’s plaintive request: “Tell me the truth.” But Margaret, the biographer she’s contracted to tell her story, is walking toward the door. “I will tell you a story!” the old authoress calls after her, to make her come back. Two Once Upon a Times, two false starts—Margaret reaches for the doorknob.

And then: “Once upon a time, there were twins—“

Margaret freezes—the vital chord has been struck. She cannot leave now. And so, our story begins.

For all my experience with novels, I still don’t understand the bewitching qualities of The Thirteenth Tale. It may be the plot, sweeping us elegantly along with its lunatic millionaires, once-grand estates falling into decay, incestuous families, feral twin sisters and family deaths, mysteries, ghosts.

The passages I like best, though, are about reading. At one point, Winter presents our biographer protagonist with a hypothetical moral dilemma: you have a gun, and you are watching a man operate a conveyor belt that’s dumping every copy of every book you’ve ever loved into a blazing inferno. With every second, another copy of Jane Eyre (or For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Catcher in the Rye or…) is destroyed, and soon every copy of the work left in the world will be gone. You have a choice: do you kill him, or do you watch him obliterate these books and their memory?

The moral: books matter, tales matter; we make ourselves through the stories we tell. It is only at the end of the book, as Winter reconciles herself to her terrible origins, that she can at last stop being the ghost of her childhood. The magic lies in the telling of the tale, long ago omitted from her best-selling anthology Thirteen Stories of Change and Desperation, a book that only contained twelve: it is the story of her life, told to Margaret in harsh, ugly words, words like broken glass. But it is her story, and in its telling, she can find peace.