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Loading... Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading (original 2011; edition 2011)| 769 | 58 | 28,990 | 
(3.47) | 74 | Biography & Autobiography.
Nonfiction.
HTML: "NinaSankovitch has crafted a dazzling memoir that remindsus of the most primal function of literature-to heal, to nurture and to connectus to our truest selves." â??Thrity Umrigar, author of The Space Between Us Catalyzedby the loss of her sister, a mother of four spends one year savoring a greatbook every day, from Thomas Pynchon to Nora Ephron and beyond. In the tradition ofGretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project and Joan Dideon'sA Year of Magical Thinking, Nina Sankovitch'ssoul-baring and literary-minded memoir is a chronicle of loss,hope, and redemption. Nina ultimately turns to reading as therapy andthrough her journey illuminates the power of books to help us reclaim ourlives.… (more) |
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Information from the Dutch Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language. | |
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| Epigraph |
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us. -- Frank Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904  A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. -- Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit | |
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In memory of Anne-Marie Sankovitch and for our family | |
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In September 2008 my husband, Jack, and I went away for a weekend, leaving our four kids in the care of my parents. | |
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It is that search for order that drives my hunger for reading mysteries. Sure, I find sparks of wisdom in a good mystery, but what I am really looking for are solutions. I'm searching for an order in the universe. In a world where, sometimes, very little makes sense, a mystery can take the twists and turns of life and run them through a plot that eventually does make sense. A solution to a question is found. The sense of satisfaction is huge. | |
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"We live in wonder, blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension," wrote the poet Carolyn Kizer, and I know that to be true. My hiatus is over, my soul and my body are healed, but I will never leave the purple chair for long. So many books waiting to be read, so much happiness to be found, so much wonder to be revealed. (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.) | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions Biography & Autobiography.
Nonfiction.
HTML: "NinaSankovitch has crafted a dazzling memoir that remindsus of the most primal function of literature-to heal, to nurture and to connectus to our truest selves." â??Thrity Umrigar, author of The Space Between Us Catalyzedby the loss of her sister, a mother of four spends one year savoring a greatbook every day, from Thomas Pynchon to Nora Ephron and beyond. In the tradition ofGretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project and Joan Dideon'sA Year of Magical Thinking, Nina Sankovitch'ssoul-baring and literary-minded memoir is a chronicle of loss,hope, and redemption. Nina ultimately turns to reading as therapy andthrough her journey illuminates the power of books to help us reclaim ourlives. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
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This celebration of the richness of reading will reward anyone who loves to read. Editor Review (reviewed on April 1, 2011) This celebration of the richness of reading will reward anyone who loves to read. This is a far better book than one might expect from the categories into which it seems to fall. It initially seems like a book in which the author commits to reading the encyclopedia, the Bible or some other exhaustive work, only in this case the challenge is to read, and review, a book per day for a full year. Yet the impetus fits this into a separate category of mourning memoirs, for it was the death of the author's sister that inspired her regimen. Ultimately, the results transcend categories, comparisons and matters of marketing, because what Sankovitch has accomplished in her first book is not only to celebrate the transformational, even healing, powers of reading, but to give the reader a feeling of reading those books as well, through the eyes of an astute reader. Her choices are eclectic, international, unpredictable (even by her), the main mandate being that each is manageable enough to be read in a day. Avoiding the tedium of a diary, the author deals with the books thematically in chapters that focus on love, death, family, even the joys of reading, as she skillfully interweaves a memoir of growing up in a bookish immigrant family and developing a complicated, loving relationship with her oldest sister. After cancer claimed her sister at the age of 46, Sankovitch plunged into relentless activity—"I was scared of living a life not worth the living." But hyperactivity failed to ease her mourning, so on her own 46th birthday, she dedicated herself to reading, not as a simple escape, but "as an escape back to life." Intelligent, insightful and eloquent, Sankovitch takes the leader on the literary journey, demonstrating how after "trying to anaesthetize myself from what I'd lost…I'd finally stopped running away." As a bonus, even the well-read reader will be inspired to explore some of the books from this magical year. Agent: Esther Newberg/ICM Kirkus Review http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-rev... | |
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Sankovitch commits to reading one book a day for a year in an effort to finally, fully, grieve the death of her sister three years before.
I enjoyed hearing the synopses of so many books, and there were many good quotes scattered throughout.
The author is clearly a fast reader and there's nothing wrong with her goal, but she treats books and reading as her god and guide in life. Sankovitch and I hold very different moral/spiritual beliefs, and so I just couldn't agree with many of her conclusions. She doesn't have true hope in an afterlife, and her musings on death and grief reflected this lack of hope. She states, "The only balm to sorrow is memory."
Sankovitch also believes that humans are inherently good, yet doesn't bother attempting to explain why, if we're so good, we act so selfish and even wickedly at times. She just says we should go read some other book to try and figure it out. (My personal recommendation would be the Bible!)
Though I enjoyed the book-talk, this is technically a memoir, and this side of the book felt disjointed, as if Sankovitch wanted to cram her whole life into this one book but wasn't sure how to do that.
There are some brief mentions of sex that I found in poor taste.
It was okay, overall, but I wouldn't recommend it.
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