Dimensions
140 x 210 x 23mm
"A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us." -Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollack, January 27, 1904
After losing her sister to cancer, Nina Sankovitch found herself running faster and faster away from sorrow, guilt, and fear. On her 46 birthday - the same age her sister was when she died - Nina stopped running, dropped down into a chair and began to read. TOLSTOY AND THE PURPLE CHAIR tells the story of how she read one book a day for one year and, in her year of magical reading, found healing, joy, and wisdom.
With grace and great insight, Nina recounts her year of reading, weaving poignant memories into her discussion of the books she read. She also describes the obstacles to this ambitious project - four kids, a husband, three cats, and piles of laundry would have to wait. But more than that, this book tells of the joy and pleasure she found in books, of how reading helped her pull through the grief of losing a loved one; how it carried her across the world to places she'd been and to places that were new to her; how it introduced her to friends, real and imagined; how it brought her back to her family, hopeful, happy, and ready to move forward again.
Sankovitch writes about grief with the same poise and power as Joan Didion. But ultimately, TOLSTOY AND THE PURPLE CHAIR is a love letter to these authors (see below); it is a testament to the wisdom found in books and proof of the all-encompassing power and delight of reading. Accessible, wise, and moving, Nina's story will inspire anyone to sit down and start reading a book.
The 365 Book Project Reading List:
I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Bombay Time by Thrity Umrigar
Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan
How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall
Boston Noir edited by Dennis Lehane
A Fisherman of the Inland Sea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Stitches by David Small
The Fall by Albert Camus
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
On the Line by Serena Williams and Daniel Paisner
A Terrible Splendor by Marshall Jon Fisher
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
Cheese by Willem Elsschot
The African Queen by C.S. Forester
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
Snakehead by Anthony Horowitz
