´No, I needed to read a book a day. I needed to sit down and sit still and read. I had spent the last three years running and racing, filing my life and the lives of everyone in my family with activity and plans and movement, constant movements. But no matter how much I crammed with living, and no matter how fast I ran, I couldn´t get away from the grief and from the pain´.
With all the good and not-bad things that happened to me this year, I experienced in 2023 the hardest amount of grief as an adult in my entire life. Indeed, I lost people very dear to me years before, but this time, the frequency of loss was appalling. From January onwards until the mid-June, unexpected or probably death reached me. Some years ago, it was in a way easier to survive the pain, with limited communication and without social media connections. Nowadays though, you can always once in a while stumble over an Instagram post of someone no longer here, or a voice message from another happier times. I actually had to delete those departed persons from my agenda, part of my progressive coping mechanism: The memories left are in my heart. Also, do not miss any opportunity of calling those loved ones, sometimes tomorrow never comes.
As usual in such life threatening situations, books were my companion. Except the books for my brilliant book tours, I´ve read relatively less from my TBR, and it seems that my Proust Project - re-reading Proust after almost two decades - has to wait for 2024 - hopefully. I still have a big library pile of books I am committed to finish in the first half of the year, plus some old galleys neededing my urgent review. But at a certain extent, the books I´ve read - a lot of short stories, poetry too - guided my mind through the pain of separation. Another part of my time was spent delving into language learning, and at a certain extent I am proud of my progress in acquiring some very difficult languages in the last 12 months.
Three years after the death of her sister following a short chronical illness, author and academic Nina Sankovitch started a very bold project: reading one book a day, for a full year, and writing about them. It should be only one book per author. The plan sounds very difficult, even for a fast reader as me. A book for under 200 pages needs around 3-4 hours of intensive reading, therefore it is not practically impossible to do it, in addition to house chores and various family responsibilities.
Through the books, on her purple chair - featured on the cover of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair. My Year of Magical Reading - a reference to another memoir written to deal with sudden departure of a a dear one, by Joan Didion -, a favorite of her cat too hence a special smell which comes with feline bodily odours, she connected with her sister - some of the books were shared by her or mentioned by her, an acknowledged art expert - but also with her immigrant family past and family histories, with her past and most important life stages, from childhood to adulthood.
There are good titles shared, an inspiration for forthcoming TBR, but I also loved the very direct and slow paced voice of this bookish memoir. It shows comfort and inspiration and will help anyone to (re)discover the power of stories. No matter if you are mourning or not (yet), this book will help you understand that no matter what, there will always be a good book waiting for you, ready to help. The utterly unbearable thing will be the disappearance of books themselves.
Rating: 5 stars
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