Book Review: Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch

The subtitle of this book is: My Year of Magical Reading. A book about a woman who spent a year reading a book a day, that appeals to all readers, not?

It certainly appealed to me, and Harper sent me a review copy (ARC).

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: What it is about

This book is the memoir of Nina Sankovitch relating how she spent a year reading a book a day. As a stay-at-home mother, she had or made the time to read one book every single day for a year, and write a review of it on her website.

Three years before, her sister Anne-Marie had died at 46 years’ of age of an illness. Nina was very close to her and for the following years ran around like a headless chicken trying to cram into her own life as much as she could. After those three years she was exhausted and decided a year of reading, with as few obligations as possible, would be useful to her.

So she starts reading and finds wisdom and comfort in books and during the year she learns a lot about herself and learns to cope with the loss of her sister.

The book is divided into chapters, all with a particular theme in which the author describes what insights she gained from certain books about the particular theme (e. g., love, family, war, forgiveness, etc.). While she doesn’t describe all 365 books she read (there is a list at the back, though), she uses the books to explain events in her life and to gain an understanding about how she should continue living her own life, with her sister gone.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: What I thought

It wasn’t as good as I had hoped: A year of reading! That had to be interesting. But when you think about it, how could it be interesting to for a reader to read a book about just that?

So, the book is filled with biographical information about the author, her family, and her parents’ life in Europe (they are both immigrants to the US who arrived some time after the second World War).

I have a few issues with the book. Not large ones, but even so:

I could not understand the author’s justification for spending a whole year reading. I know I don’t do all that much myself (I’m not working, I write a blog post every day, I read an average of a book every two days) but I still see reading as something I do when I’m finished with my chores and other activities. How this could be one’s main task for a year? I missed that point, obviously.

Then the idea that you could find wisdom in books. I can see that this may be true sometimes, but Sankovitch read random books from all types of authors. I don’t know that that was the best way to achieve it.

Also, I found Sankovitch language a little too poetic for my liking. I’m quite a down to earth person, and if I manage to read between the lines in a book, I’m delighted, because that doesn’t happen very often. Sankovitch finds all kinds of meanings in books that I would never find (but I know other people might) and so I didn’t feel connected with her in that way.

And finally, while the memories about her and her family’s past were interesting, they were not hugely interesting or special, to me, at least. They were just the memories of some person I’d never heard of.

However, I did enjoy the book and I think some people might actually find my objections good reasons to read the book.

I got this book: free from Harper publishers (ARC)

I read this in: English, the original language

Number of pages: 240 (with the list of books that Sankovitch read)

First published: 2011 (June)

Genre: memoir, books about books

Finally: Do you have that, when you see a list of books, you check how many of those you have read, and you wonder if this is a list that you should try and read all, yourself? I had that! I saw Sankovitch’ list and counted only 25 (of the 365) books that I had read, although many of the other authors I had read, just not the particular books in the list. I think we do like similar books, in general.