Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

Weeeellll. Just when I get all impressed with myself for reading around 60 books a year, along comes Nina Sankovitch who spent her "year of magical reading" reading 365 books. Oh, and reviewing them. Oh, and then she wrote a book about the experience. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (out in June) is not just one of those gimicky I-did-this-crazy-thing-and-lived books. Sankovitch is grieving and yes, we all do kind of strange things to get through pain and set ourselves back on the path to living. While at first I thought Sankovitch was a little unhinged, setting this rigorous task of reading a book a day (really? Not even a weekend off? How can you compare it to a job, if you work weekends,too? And you have a family. Oh, and you have to sit in a purple chair that vaguely stinks of cat pee?), I came to recognize that sometimes we need draconian discipline to succeed at something (see Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother--or at least, the hype about it).

The beginning of the book is difficult to read if you've ever lost someone close to you, as Nina grieves for the death of her sister, but the book is neither a sad pondering of loss nor a dull catalog of books of the "today I read this and it was great" sort. Instead, Sankovitch reads widely and weaves in the narrative her family life (both past and present). She writes "remembrance is the bones around which a body of resilience is built." She seeks in her books not only reminders of what she shared with her sister, but a guide to life, a reassurance that others have also experienced joy and love, and suffering. She reads both to forget and to remember which is a much better way to approach survival than any vice she might have picked up in the confusion after a death in the family.

I love that Sankovitch approaches her reading ecclectically, though with some hesitation. Her son, for example, hands her Watership Down and she despairs at the daunting length. She worries about gifts from friends for fear she wouldn't like the offerings and would be forced to admit so in her reviews. She solves the former problem by forcing herself to go ahead and read the 500 pages of Watership Down, and the latter by looking at the intention behind the gifts instead of at the books themselves. She takes advice from mysteries, reveling in the neatness of a solution to a puzzle (if only life were like that); she no longer avoids books with painful topics, thinking there is much to be learned; she reads kids' books; she abandons books she doesn't like and with no regret--there's so much else out there.

She gets through her year, and no she isn't "ready to relax" as a friend suggests, and surprisingly, all pleasure in reading has not been destroyed by complete and utter immersion in books. Instead, it seems, Sankovitch is able to live again, re-enter the world in a better position than when she ran frantically and aimlessly in an attempt to escape her grief. By the end of the book, Sankovitch has found some wisdom that she attempts to impart to us, about life and loss, and living, but she also--more immediately relevant, perhaps--gives us a list of books. I think we can all trust we'll find something to meet our own reading needs.

For more of Nina Sankovitch, check out her website: http://www.readallday.org/blog/.