This is my mother’s new favorite book, and she recommended it to me. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading is a nonfiction book that describes Nina Sankovitch’s project for reading away her grief—after the death of her sister, she reads and reviews one book per day for an entire year. Each chapter focuses on a larger theme: memory, desire, kindness. Nina weaves stories of her life and her sister’s life along with the messages on that specific theme from the books she read. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair is beautifully written and often touching. I especially enjoyed the chapter on sharing books—I am a book loaner and love sharing books with the ones I love.
I liked the parts where she ties her own life and her own family’s history to the major topics. There were sections of the book that were slower, where she describes several books in a row and what she learned from them with no pause for her own stories. My personal preference is for more narrative, less essay.
One thing that surprised me was that she writes mainly about the message of the book, rarely about their style. I would have loved to hear about her top three favorite books, the ones that moved her the most.
If you love books and are comfortable with a book without a linear progression, I definitely recommend this for you.
Four stars.
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