The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. I have copied that into the front of my notebook.

I went in knowing nothing at all, which is the only sensible way to go in, so I will be careful here.

A man lives in an enormous house of endless halls full of statues, with tides that come up through the lower floors and birds in the upper ones. He keeps a journal. He is kind and curious and patient and completely at home. And slowly, in the gentlest way imaginable, you start to notice that the things he tells you do not quite fit together, and the floor of the book tilts under you about a degree at a time.

I loved him. I do not think I have loved a narrator so much since I was a small boy. His courtesy towards the dead, the thirteen people whose bones he tends and brings food and water lilies to, the way he thanks the House for everything it gives him. That is Faith, of a kind you very rarely see written down without a sneer somewhere in it.

Susanna Clarke was ill for a long time before she wrote this and I think you can feel it in the book, in the way it understands a small world and how a person might be happy inside one.

Nine, only because the stretch out in our world is thinner than the halls are. But those halls. I would go back tomorrow.