When I first heard about Nina Sankovitch's memoir "Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading," a chronicle of Sankovitch's efforts to read a book every day for a year, my curiosity was immediately piqued.
A lifelong bookworm, I am often drawn to books about books. I have recently devoured memoirs such as Nick Hornby's "The Polysyllabic Spree" and Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran," relishing in how they glorify the power of reading and allow me to identify with the similarly bibliophilic authors.
But I had my doubts about "Tolstoy and the Purple Chair" which was released in June after reading the book's front-flap description, which explains how Sankovitch's "life changed profoundly" in her year of reading, calling it "the ultimate therapy."
"Tolstoy and the Purple Chair" turned out not to be a cliched treatise on the profound power of great literature. Instead, it is an original and touching but not sickeningly sentimental account of one woman's lifelong affinity for books and her attempt to channel that affinity to deal with her grief after her sister dies.
Sankovitch sets up the situation by describing her penchant for reading, which began during her childhood. She describes early trips to the local bookmobile and how books she read as a child still make her cry.
After her sister died, Sankovitch struggled with the idea of living more fully, deciding to read intensively to find missing meaning. She read a book each day from Oct. 28, 2008 to Oct. 28, 2009, writing a review of each book on her website, Readallday.org.
Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of "Tolstoy and the Purple Chair" is Sankovitch's discussion of the logistics of her project. She describes how she, a mother and wife, had to carefully plan out her time in order to complete her project. She calculated that she could read approximately 70 pages an hour and thus needed about four hours to read a book of normal length, about 250-300 pages.
Sankovitch's memoir is humble and relates to real life. She details her attempts to finish her books by the time her kids got home from school at the end of the day and her efforts to balance her reading with cooking, laundry and other household chores.
"I would be able to write my reviews, enjoy my books, and be there for my family as greeter, driver, food shopper and server, cleaner, cook, friend, counselor, disciplinarian, lover," she wrote.
In each chapter, Sankovitch describes several books she read over the course of her project. The wide variety of books she chose from Jeannette Walls's "The Glass Castle," to Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game," to Ernest Hemingway's "The Nick Adams Stories" makes reading her memoir a rich and vibrant experience. Sankovitch's candid descriptions and evaluations of the books make readers feel as if they are in an intimate and relaxed book group setting, openly talking about books with a friend.
Sankovitch ends her memoir not with a sappy description about how her year of reading completely healed her pain over the loss of her sister, but rather with an explanation of gently sentimental insights she gained during the year.
In her final pages, Sankovitch writes, "There is no remedy for the sorrow of losing someone we love Our only answer is to live."
In "Tolstoy and the Purple Chair", Sankovitch creates a heartwarming account of her efforts to find fulfillment. As she shares her experiences, she also emphasizes to readers that they too can find solace through literature. "Tolstoy and the Purple Chair" is an understated but moving story about the effects of a "year of magical reading."
