Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch

And helping me learn how to keep her alive. The lives in the books are breathing life into me, new life. As a memoirist and ruminating essayist, Sankovitch tries way too hard: 'I am underwater, swimming with the authors of all the books I've been reading and sucking up the oxygen of their words, and she is there too. Good idea, but many books go south after a few dozen pages, and describing those chronic defects is a problem we book reviewers face. If she started a book and after 10 pages didn't like it, she abandoned it and picked up another. She prefers not to pan books she scarcely ever so much as wrinkles her nose at any of the 50 or 60 she blurbs here. Books are experience, the words of authors proving the solace of love, the fulfillment of family, the torment of war, and the wisdom of memory.' About how we react and how we wish could react. About the things we wish to forget and those we want more and more of. were about the complexity and entirety of the human experience. She has a hearty appetite for literary fiction and mysteries, but I wince as she invariably reduces them to pat moral lessons: 'Those two books. Because talking about books allows me to talk about anything with anyone.' Simple moral lessons Solitary reading wasn't enough for Sankovitch, and it dawned on her that 'I do need to talk about books. If a phone call came in, I'd answer.ĭaughters of European parents who immigrated to the Midwest after World War II, Sankovitch and her sisters were avid readers from childhood, and while their tastes differed, their disagreements also enlivened them. I picked out a book for that day, ambled over to my purple chair, and began to read.

Then I walked over to my bookcase and looked over the books I'd bought or borrowed from the library. When Nina Sankovitch's oldest sister died from cancer at age 46, Sankovitch became angry and maudlin: 'I had failed to protect Anne-Marie from knowing her death was coming.' To wake herself up from her doldrums and to cease the three-year search for answers to her grief, she began a blog on her own 46th birthday in which she committed herself to reading and reviewing a book a day for a year: 'My year of reading would be my escape back into life.'Īs a dutiful mother of four and a wife, finding the daily hours necessary for her routine was quite a challenge: 'Every morning I posted my review of the book I'd read the day before. By Nina Sankovitch (Harper 240 pages $23.99)

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch