Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading

By Nina Sankovitch

“A dazzling memoir that reminds us of the most primal function of literature—to heal, to nurture and to connect us to our truest selves.” —Thrity Umrigar, author of The Space Between Us

Catalyzed by the loss of her sister, a mother of four spends one year savoring a great book every day, from Thomas Pynchon to Nora Ephron and beyond. Nina Sankovitch’s soul-baring and literary-minded memoir is a chronicle of loss, hope, and redemption. Nina ultimately turns to reading as therapy and through her journey illuminates the power of books to help us reclaim our lives.

“Intelligent, insightful and eloquent, Sankovitch takes the reader on the literary journey. . . . As a bonus, even the well-read reader will be inspired to explore some of the books from this magical year.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“The beauty of her project lies in seeing how books intertwine with daily life, how very much they affect our moods, interactions, and, especially important for Sankovitch, how we recover and process our memories.” —Los Angeles Times

“Through the stories of her own family, Nina Sankovitch shows how books have the power to refresh, renew, and even heal us.” —Julie Klam, New York Times bestselling author of You Had Me at Woof

“[An] entertaining bibliophile’s dream. . . . Sankovitch champions the act of reading not as an indulgence but as a necessity, and will make the perfect gift from one bookworm to another.” —Publishers Weekly

“There is much to learn from this moving book.” —Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of One Amazing Thing

“Anyone who has ever sought refuge in literature will identify.” —O magazine

“A beautifully paced look at how mindfulness can affect the psyche.” —Shelf Awareness, starred review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9780062092168

Nina Sankovitch

Nina Sankovitch launched ReadAllDay.org in 2008, and at the end of her year of reading, she was profiled in the New York Times. She continues to review books on ReadAllDay.org and for the Huffington Post. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and four sons.

Book preview

Prologue

On the Cliff

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

THOMAS À KEMPIS

IN SEPTEMBER 2008 MY HUSBAND, JACK, AND I WENT AWAY for a weekend, leaving our four kids in the care of my parents. We went by car from suburban Connecticut out to the Atlantic beaches of Long Island. We had a Windsurfer lashed to our roof and a bike shoved in the back on top of our few bags filled with clothes and books, enough for three days away. Our vacation weekend was my present to Jack in honor of his fiftieth birthday. I had signed him up for an advanced windsurfing workshop, booked us into a hotel off Montauk Highway, and finagled a dinner reservation at a local hot spot that was notoriously difficult to get into.

On our first day there, while Jack was out riding the wind, I took off on my bicycle. I headed east to Montauk, carrying a book in my bike basket, Dracula by Bram Stoker, along with a water bottle and a packet of chocolate. I rode the winding hills of old Montauk Highway, a road that stays close to the ocean shoreline, buffered only by scrubland, fir trees, and cliffs. After a half hour or so, I stopped my bike by an opening cutting through the brush. There, down a little path, I found a perfect spot. A wooden bench stood rooted to the edge of the cliff, faded to a light and shiny gray by sand, wind, and rain, as if buffed and polished. Sheltered from the sun by an overhanging scrub tree and facing out over the Atlantic Ocean, the bench was both solitary and encompassing. I could sit there and be alone, and then look up and see the world unfolding before me in a cascade of blue-and-white waves and glittering sunlight over water. I leaned my bike against a rock, took the book, chocolate, and water out of the basket, and sat down on the bench to read.

I spent my day on that bench, getting up occasionally to stretch and at one point, riding off in search of a bathroom and lunch. But I returned to read again, caught up in the gothic journey of Dracula from Transylvania to England, and back again to Transylvania. I traveled over mountains and past crazed villagers, dodging vampires and accompanied by the good guys, Jonathan Harker, Van Helsing, and Mina. We were fighting to save the world from vampire takeover.

The suddenly shifting cold breezes of early evening brought me back to where I was, sitting on a bench on a Montauk cliff. I had to return to the hotel and get ready for our dinner out. On the bike ride home I stopped at a farmer’s market and picked up some apples, a chunk of blue cheese, and a loaf of bread. I stopped at a liquor store for red wine and then swerved my way to the hotel, my bike basket overflowing.

Jack wasn’t back yet. Great, I thought to myself. I won’t get ready for dinner; I’ll just keep reading. To stave off hunger, I cut some cheese for myself, loaded it onto a crust of the bread, and poured out a generous slug of wine.With my hand curled around the glass, I continued to read. Van Helsing was hot on the trail of Count Dracula, closing in on the bloodsucking aristocrat.

I was asleep on my book, drained wineglass on the floor and half the entire blue cheese consumed, when Jack got back from his windsurfing. I didn’t even feel him as he slipped in on the couch beside me. When I woke up at ten thirty, he was there behind me, snoring away, smelling salty and sweaty. Our dinner reservation was long past. I wriggled into an upright position, poured myself another glass of wine, and finished off Dracula.

The next day I realized I had done it. I had read a book in one day. And a very hefty book at that, more than four hundred pages in all. Of course there had been other days in my life when I’d devoured a book in one sitting or in paced feastings over the course of one day. But this book on this day had been a test for me. And I knew now that I was ready. I was ready to read a book a day for one year.

When Jack took off after breakfast for another day of windsurfing, I rode my bike over to the restaurant we’d skipped out on the night before. I arrived sweaty and dusty, eager to explain to the maître d’ how, last night, we had just slept through our reservation. She was a tall, statuesque beauty, and she laughed as I told her my story.

I’ve never heard that one before, she said as she penciled us in with a star for eight o’clock.

At dinner that night, I raised my glass of Italian white, just poured out by our efficient waiter, and looked Jack in the eye. I had his attention.

To my year of reading, I announced.

You’re really going to do it? he asked.

I nodded.

A book a day? How about a book a week? he asked.

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, filling my life and the lives of everyone in my family with activity and plans and movement, constant movement. But no matter how much I crammed into living, and no matter how fast I ran, I couldn’t get away from the grief and the pain.

It was time to stop running. It was time to stop doing anything and everything. It was time to start reading.

To your year of reading, then, Jack seconded, and clinked his glass with mine. May it be everything you want it to be, and more.

Chapter 1

Crossing the Bridge

It is from knowing that he is dead that he wants to protect his son. As long as I live, he thinks, let me be the one who knows! By whatever act of will it takes, let me be the thinking animal plunging through the air.

J. M. COETZEE,

The Master of Petersburg

MY SISTER WAS FORTY-SIX YEARS OLD WHEN SHE DIED. During the few months between her diagnosis and her death, I traveled back and forth from home in Connecticut to New York City to see her. I usually came in by train. On the train I could read. I read for the same reasons I’ve always done it, for pleasure and escape. But now I was also reading to forget—for just a half hour or so—the reality of what my sister was going through. She had been diagnosed with bile duct cancer. The cancer advanced relentlessly and quickly. It left pain, helplessness, and fear in its wake.

I always carried with me on the train a book or two for Anne-Marie. After finding out about her cancer, I’d done a furious Internet search—everyone hit by the diagnosis does it—and I’d read that reading funny books can help fight the illness. Escapist books would also help with fighting off the evil cells, but the articles advised me to lay off any heavy reading material. So I brought in Woody Allen and Steve Martin for Anne-Marie, and I also brought in lots of murder mysteries. Murder mysteries involve death, and none of us wanted to think about death, but Anne-Marie had always used mysteries to unwind and relax. As an art historian, she’d spent her days poring over dense texts and examining architectural details, plans, and photos. Mysteries were her candy, her vodka tonic, her bubble bath. She loved mysteries rich in detail, deep with atmosphere, and dark in motive. There was no way I was going to deny her now.

One day in mid-April I brought in a mystery for her that I had not yet read. Carl Hiaasen’s books are twisted and raucous. I was sure he’d be a good antidote to pain and fear. On the train I laid aside my own book and opened up Basket Case. It was very funny and full of atmosphere, crazy South Florida atmosphere. But I quickly realized that the book hit too close to home. The main character, Jack Tagger, is certain he will die in his forty-sixth year. My sister had to make it to forty-seven—she had to—and I could not let any doubt creep in. I read the book furtively and quickly and never gave it to Anne-Marie to read.

If I had known for certain that my sister would not make it to forty-seven, would I have moved to New York City to be closer to her, leaving my husband and four boys in Connecticut to fend for themselves? No, I doubt it. Anne-Marie wanted to see me in doses. I was the youngest of three sisters, and Anne-Marie was the oldest, with Natasha in between. All our lives, Anne-Marie told us when she wanted us around and when she wanted us gone, and we listened.

We were raised in Evanston, Illinois, by immigrant parents. They had come to the United States for new opportunities, leaving all family and support behind. We made our own tight-knit unit of five. We had plenty of friends, but my sisters and I felt like aliens most of the time. Our family was different from other families. Our house had more books, more art, and more dust than anyone else’s. We had no relatives living close by, no grandparents for the holidays, no aunts for babysitting, no cousins to play with. Our parents had strong—and in the case of my father, scary—foreign accents. Our mother worked, first as a grad student and then as a full-time professor, from the time I entered kindergarten. My sisters and I were the only kids from our neighborhood who ate lunch in school, and we were the only kids in the whole entire Midwest who had sliced green peppers and hard red pears packed alongside the more ordinary white-bread sandwiches and Twinkies.

Books were a part of my family’s life, present in every room and read every night by both parents, to themselves and to us. My mother read to us girls in the living room. I loved lying back on the rug and looking up at the cracked ceiling, listening to the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table. Sir Gawain was my favorite, although he definitely caused my hang-ups over boys later; they were much too easily seduced compared to Gawain. The beautiful Lady Bertilak approaches Gawain day after day, but he never gives in to her kisses. The boys I would grow up to kiss gave in without any effort at all, and yet it was my reputation on the line, not theirs. After King Arthur came the animals of The Wind in the Willows. Life in the English countryside post-Camelot seemed so dull. The so-called grand adventure of Mole and Rat was really just a series of mishaps, and the final battle made me yawn. I could not get excited about invading weasels and a slimy toad.

Sunday afternoons were also spent reading, indoors in the winter months, and outside in our small backyard in the summer. It was not until I was in high school and had an American boyfriend that we spent a Sunday afternoon watching a football game. It was the Super Bowl. A surprisingly chivalrous-for-the-day Dan Cromer explained the whole game to my parents and me. But that was the last time he spoke to me, later ignoring me in the hallways at school and never calling back when I left messages at his home. If I didn’t understand football, what good could I be?

The first book I can remember claiming as my own was one I stole from the Lincolnwood Elementary School library. It was My Mother Is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World by Becky Reyher. I still have that book today. It’s on a bookshelf in my bedroom, alongside other favorites from childhood, and it still has its library due-date card: December 6, 1971. I loved that book and just could not return it when the date came. I don’t remember if I paid the lost fee.

In the book, Varya, a young Ukrainian girl, becomes separated from her mother while they’re working in the fields. People from a neighboring village who are out harvesting wheat try to help Varya find her mother, but the only description the child can give is that her mother is the most beautiful woman in the world. The villagers send messengers to all the local farms, asking them to send the most beautiful women back to the clearing where Varya waits, sobbing. One by one, beautiful women are paraded before the little girl, but she shakes her head at each one, sobbing harder and harder. And then a woman comes running up: Her face was big and broad, and her body even larger. Her eyes were little pale slits between a great lump of a nose. The mouth was almost toothless. She is Varya’s mother, and the mother and child are reunited: The smile Varya had longed for was once again shining upon her. That story still brings me to tears. It conveyed to me as a nine-year-old, as it does today, the innocent and resplendent love between parent and child.

My mother really was and still is the most beautiful woman in the world, and Anne-Marie was too: the two most beautiful women in the world, in one family. On the day my sister died, she had been feeling well enough to sit up in bed and put on eyeliner, mascara, and lipstick. She never needed that stuff to look good, but it added glamour, even when she was so ill. She let me brush her hair that day, lovely dark blond hair. She had been worried it would fall out in treatment, but we never got that far. We would have traded a lifetime of hair from all of our heads just to have the chance to fight her illness. But the bile duct cancer moved too fast. Treatment turned out to be only a torture, and never a cure.

I wasn’t planning on going in to see Anne-Marie the day she died. I’d been to visit her every day since she’d been readmitted to the hospital in early May. On a beautiful spring morning she’d woken to a belly swollen up to horrific proportions. Her system was shutting down, and bile and liquid were backing up. She hung on at home, hoping her insides would start working again, but by evening she knew she had to go back to the hospital. I was out with Jack, celebrating our thirteenth wedding anniversary, when I got the call. We were walking by the river that winds along behind the main street of our town. I closed my phone and walked away from Jack, going out on the pier that juts into the marshes at the river’s edge. It was low tide, and the smell of salt and muck and decay mixed with the soft, warm spring breeze. I closed my eyes and cried.

The next day I took the train into the city, then walked the thirty blocks up to New York–Presbyterian. And the next day I took the train again, and the next day again.

On the day my father turned eighty years old, Anne-Marie was feeling up to a chocolate truffle and a sip of champagne. I continued to go in every day, and Anne-Marie continued to get better, in increments and with some backtracking. In the last few days she had been eating more, and talking and laughing easily. She had taken to wearing two pairs of reading glasses, one propped on top of the other on her head, just in case. She seemed ready for anything.

I considered taking a day at home to catch up on loads of unwashed laundry and unpaid bills, but Jack urged me to go in and see her.

Just drive in with me for the morning. You’ll be back in time for the boys. The boys were my older children, Peter, Michael, and George. The youngest of my four, Martin, was still in pre-K and with me for the day. It would cheer my mother up to see him. She could take him to the playground by the hospital, and I could go in for a quick visit with Anne-Marie.

The pants I wore into the city that day were loose on me. In the past month, I’d stopped eating meals regularly and had put an end to wine at night. Just one glass led to crying. Even if the kids were in bed, I didn’t want them to wake up and hear me sobbing. The kindness and patience they’d shown me had already exceeded what any kid should have had to muster. Peter had gone in with me one Sunday to see Anne-Marie. When we left her hospital room, he put his arm around me and said, I love you, Mom. Eleven years old, and he was comforting me.

Just a few days ago, I’d cried to Michael that Martin was lucky because he was too young to understand that Anne-Marie was dying. Michael answered, No, Mommy, he’s not lucky. He’s not lucky at all because he’s never going to know Anne-Marie like we do. Michael remembered his own sleepovers, Scrabble games, and hours of Lego with her. Anne-Marie was always the bad Lego guy, out to ruin the world created by the good Lego guys. Bad Lego guy was always defeated in the end.

I stopped in a store to buy a belt for my falling pants. I wanted something really attention getting. That was my job with Anne-Marie when she was in the hospital: to get her attention, to get her to laugh or to whip out a sharp, smart comment. Proof that she was still with us. I told her funny and startling stories about my kids. I wore new and strange combinations of clothes, each day crazier than the day before. Anne-Marie smiled and laughed when she saw me. She forgot for a minute that she was dying. I would do anything to give her that minute.

So I picked out a shockingly ugly pink-and-white-and-Day-Glo-orange-striped belt, cinched up my old jeans, and went to do the exchange with my mother. She’d take Martin, and I’d take the elevator to the eighth floor.

We had a great visit. Anne-Marie was animated and involved as soon as I came in the room. She gave my belt a well-deserved insult. Leaning over, she took the book I’d brought in for her, Runaway, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro. She pulled down a pair of glasses from atop her head to read from a story she’d opened to. Later I read the stories and fixated on the line, She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort. We all hoped that way. Anne-Marie never had the time to read all the books I’d brought her. She read just one page of the Munro and then closed it up and added it to her pile.

I brushed back her hair from her face; she was lovely. My parents had never compared us as kids. To them we were all smart and beautiful. But we knew the truth: Anne-Marie was the beauty, Natasha was the good girl, and I was the pudgy, funny one.

Three girls, all of us different, but all of us loved books. From the time we could toddle, we toddled toward books. When I was just three years old, the three of us would walk together to the library bookmobile. It stopped at a corner just a few blocks away from our house. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury describes books smelling like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land. For me, books do have a spicy smell, but it is a local spice, soothing and familiar. It is the smell of the bookmobile, a mixture of musty pages and warm bodies. We crowded in along the shelves, looking for what we wanted along the lower brackets; the ones above were for the grown-up books. Anchored shelves in the middle of the van were for new releases, with a slot to the side for returning due books. At home we were expected to keep track of our library books and to get them back on time. Anne-Marie and I were usually late, Natasha never.

Piles of books were stacked along the windowsill of Anne-Marie’s hospital room, gifts from friends and from family. I was borrowing as many as I brought in. Anne-Marie had just introduced me to the writer Deborah Crombie and her sleuths, Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. She reread the series while I worked my way through, virgin and loving it. I was in the middle of All Shall Be Well. The title held out hope, and when I had seen the book there on the hospital sill, I’d asked to borrow it. Anne-Marie had said yes, but said she wanted it back. We were all still planning for more time.

My father was there that morning, along with Marvin, Anne-Marie’s husband. Marvin slept in Anne-Marie’s room every night, and so he was tired every day. Sleep wasn’t easy wrapped around a woman in a hospital bed who was hooked up to all kinds of bags and tubes. I sought to make him laugh, and my father too. It was important that I play the fool and jester. When we laughed, we forgot that we were in a room with a woman who had little hope left. The optimism of forgetting stayed with us, allowing us to

Reviews for Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

[m.belljackson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Book-A-Day concept, while initially odd, was tempting reading the firs time through many years ago;now, it is just too sad with so many intervening deaths.

[irinar-227991 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A lovely, easy to read short memoir of the therapeutic effects of a year spent reading a book a day. Avid readers and book lovers will completely understand the sentiment and healing balm provided by complete immersion in the world of each book.Not a book I will keep in my home library but a nice, well-written light read!

[pattylee-621744 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting, thoughtful memoir; more memoir than book review, as expected. Some great quotes sprinkled throughout. My only slight hesitation was with the whole concept of reading a book a day for an entire year. Goodness knows I have read and read to the exclusion of all else and it is a great temporary escape from whatever is getting you down, but the thought of doing it for a whole year is a bit scary. For depression, we know that physical exercise, tackling a small task a day, seeing a counselor are all proven methods of dragging oneself out of the mire. The thought of 365 days of reading in a chair (purple or not) when there are children to be hugged and animals to be petted, dinner to be made (OK maybe not...)would be enough to drive me batty.

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Loss of a loved one is devastating, and when it shatters the illusion of control for a person who needed to believe she is in control of her life, something must be done. Doing more of everything didn't work, so a year of reading a book a day becomes the plan. It's seems to have helped. Nina Sankovitch is good at telling her story and getting her points across, but it felt like being repeatedly given different flavors of the same sherbet over and over. While not disdaining good sherbet, I prefer custard, crème brûlée, actually.

[auntie0nanuuq · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I'm sure most people will disagree with my rating, but I was not enthralled and I'm not into grieving for people (family, friends, or otherwise) who have suffered a prolonged painful death.After the author's sister died at the age of forty-six of bile duct cancer, the author turned her life in to a race to do as much living as possible...Upon the author turning forty-six, she spent the entire year reading & reviewing one book a day...I found the book not to be about her "Magical Year of Reading" but of the homage to her sister & her sister's death.At the beginning of the book we learn about her parents' lives before they emigrated to the u.s. Early on the book for some confusing reason repeats itself, I had to check the pagination to make sure I had indeed passed from page 27 to page 28, rather than re-reading a previous paragraph.So this book is about how reading helped the author through her grief; although I certainly could happily have gone without reading this book and the burden.The book felt as if it was a form of therapy for the author and I was the therapist....

[bookbarmy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Every so often, a reader can't help but form an instant connection with an author. Especially when they share a passion for the same things. That's just what has happened with me and the author Nina Sankovitch. These two books delve into two of my favorite things -- a love of reading and a fascination with old letters.Imagine the chats we could have over a cup of tea...Ms. Sankovitch lost her beloved sister, Ann-Marie, to cancer at age 46. Reading was a lifelong passion for them both. During Ann-Maire's final months in the hospital, Ms. Sankovitch read aloud to her -- spending as much time together as possible during her last days.After her sister's death and overcome with grief, Nina decides that the same passion that bonded her with her sister and carried her through her life will be her therapy. She will read a book a day for a year. A book a day, I wondered? Even I, a voracious reader, can't compete with a book a day. These were her rules:• She would read only one book per author,• She would not re-read any books she had already read,• She would limit her choices to books that were no more than one inch thick, ensuring that they would, for the most part, be in the range of 250-300 pages each,• And she would only read the kind of books she and her sister, Anne-Marie would have enjoyed together.For those of us who want to read about what someone else is reading, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair takes us on her journey, as she reads from her favorite purple chair. She shares her epiphanies and discoveries -- all from the pages of her carefully chosen books. She intersperses her bookish insights with memories of her sister and of growing up in a bookish immigrant family who instilled in her the belief that books are not a luxury, but a necessity.Never fear, this is not a grim tale of a painful year, nor is it an instruction manual for grieving. Ms. Sankovitch gives us a book straight from her heart, full of hope and wisdom. It's about stopping the merry-go-round of a busy life to read, think and learn.This book will appeal to any bibliophile, but especially for those of us who turn to books for answers, comfort and wisdom.

[mamashepp · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

And another half a star. I really did enjoy it but it wasn't what I was expecting which may be why it's not a four.

[jreynolds1959 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Nina Sankovitch has been reading her whole life. Her parents and two sisters were also very avid readers.Nina loses her sister, Anne-Marie to cancer, and takes life devastatingly hard, going all out to make sure that she encompasses everything that life offer like running, going at all speeds.She comes to the conclusion that she is going to take a year and read a book a day, to try and bring her sorrow to some kind of conclusion.Nina shares with us some of the philosophies that she acquires during her reading a book a day and they seemed to have worked for her in her grief from losing her sister.While I understood having to deal with grief in your own way, I don't think that I could have dealt with it in the same manner. I read, have always read, but my turn to books is as an escape from the normal and the opportunity to escape into someone else's story and put my own away for a short period of time.Kudos to Nina for using the tool that made her deal with her grief in her way and for sharing that with us.

[bnbookgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

LOVED, LOVED, LOVED this book. I can see myself reading a book a day for a year. The author lost her sister to cancer and this is such a healing journey for her. I loved reading how each book she read took her a step closer to coming to terms with her grief. I too found a trip to the Bookmobile more exciting than a carnival so I felt we were kindred spirits from the moment I picked this book up. This book also tells many stories of the author's family; her children, her father's time in WWII, her sisters, and of course her fascinations with reading. The author encourages us to read and take time to seek the bigger and better things. To slow down in this world of such fast paced motion. The author has a website called ReadAllDay.org which she launched after reading her book a day. It was fascinating to read how Nina managed her family, her life, cooking meals, driving here and there and also fitting in a book a day. It seems she did this without neglecting those responsibilities. From the description of her library, to her purple reading chair, the writing is wonderful. If you are a bibliophile, read this book. If you just want to slow down and enjoy all life has to give, read this book.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

After her sister Anne-Marie died of cancer, Nina Sankovitch spent three years being as busy as she could, volunteering, being a mom to her four boys, and comforting her family. But the day comes when she knows she must face her grief: to do that, she chooses to back off from her busy life and read a book a day for a year.A book a day for a year? Isn't that a little... selfish? Well, yes - and no. Nina admits that she was in a bit of a unique place in being able to do so; she is a fast reader and was not working at the time. She essentially treated that book a day as her job, and wrote about each book read on her blog, readallday.org. In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, she discusses many of the titles that touch her and teach her about living life, and how she deals with her grief over Anne-Marie by delving into a passion they both shared: books and reading. I found myself nodding along with her and thinking about my own reading and the way a book can change a life. Because much like Will Schwalbe says in The End of Your Life Book Club (I'm totally paraphrasing), reading isn't an escape from life it really is living. Highly recommended for any book lover.

[mlake_22 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"Even when I read a book where the story had nothing to do with an experience of my own, I found resonance from recovered memories, and an escape from the present."

A book a day for one year - that's the goal Nina set for herself. I picked this book up for the book suggestions but I read it for the insights. When her sister dies she thinks that all the things people say about it getting easier and how they know how she feels are lies. As she works her way through 365 books she realizes that books connect us to others and to ourselves.

"Not only were books carrying me away on escapades of new experiences but the people and places and atmospheres created by authors were also bringing me back to those times in my life where I looked forward to tomorrow."

February 2012

[samsattler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When Nina Sankovitch lost her elder sister Anne-Marie to stomach cancer, she also lost the person with whom she most regularly shared new books and authors. Sankovitch, her two sisters, and her brother were lucky to have grown up in a home in which books were so appreciated, but now one of them would be missing from the conversation. It was only after three years of living life at a frantic pace in which she tried to live both for herself and for Anne-Marie that Sankovitch finally decided to try something different in order to deal with her grief. She would read a book per day for the next 365 days – and she would spend two or three hours writing a formal review of each and every one of those books. Believe it or not, she did it - Tolstoy and the Purple Chair tells us how she managed it and what she gained in the process.From the beginning, Sankovitch set a few firm rules for herself:•She would read only one book per author,•She would not re-read any books she had already read,•She would limit her choices to books that were no more than one inch thick, ensuring that they would, for the most part, be in the range of 250-300 pages each,•And she would only read the kind of books she and Anne-Marie would have likely enjoyed together if her sister were still alive.In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, Nina Sankovitch devotes time to Anne-Marie’s story, to what it was like growing up in her family, to how she dealt with her sister’s death both before and after beginning her reading year, and to many of the 365 books she read that year. Reading enthusiasts will be intrigued by the book choices that Sankovitch made during the year, as well as by how often, and how regularly, she was able to find something in those books that spoke to her personally about the grieving process. Readers seeking new ideas about dealing with the grief associated with the loss of a family member are likely to be equally enthusiastic about the Tolstoy and the Purple Chair because Sankovitch is frank and open about her own experiences following Anne-Marie’s death – starting with the question that so often haunted her: “Why do I deserve to live?”Coming in to her year of reading, Sankovitch knew exactly how lucky she was that her family was willing to support her effort to find comfort through such a time-consuming project. As she says in the book’s second chapter:“For years, books had offered me a window into how other people deal with life, its sorrows and joys and monotonies and frustrations. I would look there again for empathy, guidance, fellowship, and experience. Books would give me all that, and more…I was trusting books to answer the relentless question of why I deserved to live. And how I should live. My year of reading would be my escape back into life.”She found what she was searching for.

[carmenere_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For LTer's this book is just a confirmation of something we already know, books are places we can go to escape the real world, if only for a few hours a day. Author Nina Sankovitch, along with reading a book a day also created a blog documenting and reviewing her thoughts on each book. In so doing, she became connected to people all over the world who shared her love of books. Sound familiar? She relates that through her blog "Threads of friendship entwine over the shared enjoyment of a book. If later a book is shared that is not so mutually enjoyed, the friendship survives." Well, as it turns out, that by reading a book a day, usually around 1 inch in thickness, she is able to remember what she's shared with her sister and how she continues to live through memories carried in the minds of those who loved her. Nice book. Little self serving but a nice way to get through a difficult time.

[what_katie_read · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Loved this book about a woman's journey dealing with the death of her sister through reading a book every day for an entire year.

[heduanna · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was expecting a tale of all the books she read in that year together with some commentary about her life, something along the lines of [The Whole Five Feet]. Maybe her blog was like that (I still haven't checked), but this book certainly isn't. It's a tale of family love & loss, & everything that led up to reading a book every day for a year, & how books are woven into all of it.It was much more beautiful than I expected.

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

After Nina’s sister passes away at age 46, she decides to read a book every single day for a year. It was an effort to process her emotions and find something to focus on during that difficult time. The book is really a meditation is grief and memories of her sister. I wasn’t quite expecting a book on grieving and though it was a raw and intimate look at what she went through, I felt like it wasn’t quite what it proclaimed itself to be. I was expecting a little more about the actual books she was reading.I did love her thoughts on the importance of reading, the way it is both an escape and a way to ground ourselves. For anyone that sees reading as a permanent part of your life and something you love, it’s easy to see it becoming your focus when other aspects feel as though they are spinning out of control. I wish she’d talk a bit more about the actual challenges of reading a book each day and how that affected her enjoyment of each one. Did she find herself craving certain books or wishing for a day off? Did she wish she could sit and read a huge novel over the course of a week, but feel like she couldn’t because she had to move on to the next one? Regardless, it’s an inspiring endeavor and one that it would be incredible to attempt one day! “We all need a space to just let things be, a place to remember who we are and what is important to us, an interval of time that allows the happiness and joy of living back into our consciousness.”  

[greeniezona · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Nina Sankovitch lost her sister to cancer and immediately started running. (Metaphorically.) As if she could just keep herself and her family moving fast enough to somehow escape the pain and loss. As it sinks in that this isn't a terrifically effective coping mechanism -- an idea takes hold of her. Books have been so important to her for her entire life,, and important in her relationship with her sister. She will read and review one book every day for one year. 365 books for 365 days.

That sounds like heaven. Until I just now suddenly realized that I'm pretty sure she only read fiction. A full year of reading only fiction? Now I'm sickly horrified.

Okay, my own personal proclivities aside, I did really enjoy this book. Meditations on how books shape us, shape our relationships, shape our understanding of the world. How even "trashy" genre fiction can lead to profound insights. How processing the lives of others through fiction can ease our grief, remind us of purpose, and give perspective.

At times the depth of the author's grief made me wonder if I hadn't made a poor choice for a vacation read. But it was redemptive, in the end. In fact, I've already passed this copy on, to a friend and fellow reader I was vacationing with. (A chapter on lending and borrowing books with friends was perhaps my favorite chapter in the book. Thanks for the recommendation, Emma!)

[proustitute_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A great book for readers: everyone will find Sankovitch's thoughts on how books relate to one's life ring close to home. What was especially interesting here was her juxtaposition of her reading life with her mental life, as reading allowed her time to quiet down and process the death of her sister.

All readers who love literature will relate to Sankovitch's love for books; everyone will also come away from this wanting to read many books Sankovitch details and which may have passed one's radar or been long-forgotten in a pile somewhere. The one thing that permeated the entire book, and which I found especially classist (as if this book were directed only toward those privileged enough to be in circumstances like Sankovitch's), was that this is not a book for all people who love to read.

This is solely the story of one woman who can afford to live on her husband's income for an entire year to read a book each day, and to also relinquish her two children to her husband's care to not "disturb" her book-a-day project. For that alone—and this is an attitude and sentiment that runs throughout the book, this sense of privilege and socioeconomic stability—the book may feel alien and too much like an unlivable fantasy to many avid readers who are not as lucky and financially secure as Sankovitch.

[elliepotten · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Sitting in my chair, cats nearby, I was reading a great book. That was my job this year, and it was a good one. The salary was nonexistent, but the satisfaction was daily and deep." I'm very late to the game with this one - particularly given the fact that my copy is an ARC! - but every book has its moment, and I think that perhaps if I'd read it too soon I'd have been disappointed. Fortunately, other reviews warned me to shift my expectations about the book's focus, so I actually really enjoyed it, if not for the reasons I thought I would. Basically, the premise is that Nina Sankovitch read a book a day for a year in a kind of mission to recover from the death of her beloved sister Anne-Marie. Previous to this 'year of magical reading', she had spent several years running round like a maniac trying to live a double life, not only to make up for her sister's tragically shortened existence, but also as an attempt to buoy up her grieving family. At length she realised that this approach wasn't helping anybody, and instead opted to sit down and read - a favourite pastime that she shared with her late sister - and use the lessons in her books to gradually grieve, heal, and find happiness in her memories instead of pain. My big issue with the book was the fact that all the publicity I'd seen beforehand - the same publicity that led me to acquire this ARC in the first place - was very much focussed on the 'reading a book a day for 365 days' element, complete with photos of Sankovitch reading in the park, on the porch, on the titular purple chair... In short, it was being marketed as a kind of stunt memoir (love) about reading and books (LOVE!). In actual fact, it could have been a book a week, or a book a month, and the memoir wouldn't have suffered much for it. There is an awful lot about the content of some of the books Sankovitch chose, and what she learned from them, and how she applied these things specifically to the experience of losing her sister. There is NOT an awful lot about the actual experience of reading a book, where and how she managed to read a book every single day, and what she enjoyed about the luxury of just reading. That said, I really did enjoy it, even if I don't remember many specifics now, a few weeks on. I underlined lots of quotes about reading, and took away a few book recommendations (though not many - Sankovitch and I don't really have very similar reading tastes and I'd never heard of most of her choices) - but the overriding impression I have is of a book about family, grief, and learning to live again after the loss of a loved one. If I had a friend, say, who loved to read and had lost someone, I'd definitely buy them a copy because despite not having experienced it myself yet (touch wood), I think in that situation I'd have found the book reassuring and heartwarming and quite comforting in a lot of ways. As an avid reader, there's a certain poetry to finding solace in a book about finding solace in books! Conclusions? Well, it wasn't the book I thought it would be, and I did think it was a bit misleading that it was being marketed heavily on the book-memoir side, but I still really enjoyed it. It was a great reminder of how much books can influence us, our moods and the way we think; it was a lovely tribute to a sister with whom Sankovitch had shared her love of books right up until her death, and there WERE a few nice readerly moments that made me feel like I was in the company of a fellow book addict. Cautiously recommended.

[lycomayflower · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After a few years of living "frantically" in the wake of her sister's sudden death from cancer, Sankovitch decided to slow down and read one book a day for a year. This becomes her solace and her healing process for the loss of someone very dear to her, and the memoir that resulted is sustaining, if uneven. Sankovitch writes convincingly about the real power of books and reading to touch people and change their lives in hundreds of little (and sometimes a few big) ways. She effortlessly weaves stories about her family and her past into her memoir of reading, and the passages about how her books and her family slowly bring her to a better acceptance of her loss are marvelous. However, the move from talking about life to discussing the ins-and-outs of a particular books is sometimes jarring, and some personal information is repeated from chapter to chapter without any sense that the narrative realizes that this is not new information. Not a wholly satisfying book, as these little infelicities are enough to detract a bit from the experience, but still an entertaining, fulfilling, and uplifting read.

[salgalruns · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Nina Sankovitch loses her sister to cancer, and as part of her grieving, decides to read a book a day for a year. She sets up rules for this adventure (1" thick spine so as not to get too long, no repeat reads, and no reads by the same author), and also blogs her reviews of each book. Somehow, she will do this, as well as run a household with a husband and 4 boys. The concept behind it was wonderful - I would love to be able to curl up each day and read a book. I'm sure it was also quite therapeutic to not only step away from reality, but to give her a time to think and reflect about time with her sister. The problem that I had with this book was actually in the way it was written. Sankovitch breaks the book into chapters that are all there to teach a lesson. She then references books and lines throughout each chapter to support her lesson. It actually read more like a college essay than a memoir to me as a result. Vocabulary is good - you can tell she is an intelligent person, but the storyline seems choppy with the chapter breakdowns. One of the lessons that she writes about has to do with book recommendations and sharing of books. I have to agree with her wholeheartedly on this point - It truly IS difficult to suggest a book to someone, and hope that they experience it in the same way you did. I loved her commentary about her sisters sharing books ~ what a great family memory to have!

[sanddune_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Following the death of her elder sister Anne-Marie from cancer at the age of forty-six, Nina Sankovitch found comfort by reading a book a day for a year. That much I knew before I started to read, and I was expecting a book predominantly focused on the books read and the reading experience, with an element of family memoir included. Instead, what I got was exactly the reverse, a family memoir interspersed with brief discursions into books. And a family memoir particularly focused on the sister and Nina's relationship with her. And therein lies the problem for me: Nina Sankovitch clearly adored her sister but she presents her as such an unremitting paragon of virtue that it is difficult to see her as a real person. Paragraphs such as this convey the feel: 'But Anne-Marie became my gold standard of achievement, the one whose approval I sought even more than my parents'. Up she went on a pedestal, and for me, she never really came  down again.'I was reminded of Anne-Marie in the characters I was meeting in all of my books. She was the kind of heroine authors like to put in their books, with her quiet strength and resilience, her utter lack of petty or trivial concerns, and the superlative combination of her beauty and her intelligence.' Clearly, to lose a sister or any close relative or friend at the age of forty-six is very sad, but Sankovitch comes over as so self-indulgent in her grief that she completely lost my sympathy. I know this sounds cruel and heartless, but after fifty pages I just wanted to tell her to stop thinking about herself all the time and pull herself together. But her focus on the dead Anne-Marie even three years after her death is so complete that there seems to be very little thought left for anyone else: either for her husband whose own sister had died in the same year, or for her four children.So not a good read for me, and particularly so coming so soon after reading [And When Did You Last See Your Father],  which, by giving a portrait of the dying man as a real human being with all his faults and foibles, succeeded in portraying a much more moving and rawer account of death and grief.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Short little book about the moving and emotional power of the act of reading. Very comforting read, and with plenty of good suggestions for reads.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am sure that serious readers everywhere are by now well aware of Nina Sankovitch's story of how her beloved oldest sister died way too young of cancer at the age of forty-six, and that this book, TOLSTOY AND THE PURPLE CHAIR: MY YEAR OF MAGICAL READING, is all about how she finally used her love of books and reading to find her way back to a kind of understanding and getting on with her own life following this tragedy. While I know I could never match her extraordinary accomplishment of reading and reviewing a book a day, and wouldn't even try, I knew I was gonna like this book from the time I read this line on page six - "Our family was different from other families. Our house had more books, more art, and more dust than anyone else's."Yes! When there are good books waiting, damn the dust! I knew then that Nina (and her family) and I were kindred souls in our unapologetic love - and lust - for good books and good writing. Sankovitch makes the point over and over in this beautifully written memoir that good books help us to know more and more about what it is to be human.There are a lot of things I could probably write about how I related to what Nina had to say here. But I'll just say this. Remember the kid in your high school English class who never did his homework and when the teacher asked him, right after you had given your answer, what he thought about the significance of, say, the witches in Hamlet? He was the kid who always just kinda shuffled and mumbled and pointed at you and said, "I was gonna say what he said."It's not that I didn't do my homework. Like Nina, I am an absolutely unrepentant and unreformed lover of books. I loved the detailed lists at the end of her book. From them and from those mentioned in the text, I've made my own list. And I've probably read, or at least know of close to half of those books. But the thing is I pretty much agreed with most of what Nina Sankovitch tells us about the redeeming importance of books in our lives, so I'm just gonna say, "Yeah, what she said." I loved this book. It is filled with wisdom. If you love books, so will you. I recommend it highly. Thank you, Nina.

[bellettres · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sankovitch understands the connection between life and literature. She does a beautiful job of making it clear why we read and what we gain from reading. Her comments on love, dying, childhood, memory, and enthusiasm are triggered by the books she read, but it is her response to those books that makes this a worthwhile read.

[florinda_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

From books to blog and back again, Nina Sankovitch chronicles her “year of magical reading” in TOLSTOY AND THE PURPLE CHAIR. In describing it that way, Sankovitch intentionally references Joan Didion’s THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING; this is a time of healing from loss, as she turns to books--reading one each day, every day for one year, and writing about it on her blog Read All Day--to help her make sense of life following the death of her beloved sister from an aggressive form of cancer.If you didn’t know what was motivating Nina to undertake this project, it would be easy to envy this stay-at-home mother of four sons for having the luxury of spending the bulk of her days reading and blogging for an entire year. And once you DO know her motivation for it...well, it’s still hard not to be just a LITTLE envious, but that’s greatly tempered by compassion. This isn’t a vacation--Nina is not taking a year off from her family or domestic responsibilities to bury herself in books. It’s not a vague, idealistic quest for “self-improvement” either--this is FOCUSED, or as she describes it, “intense.” This is reading as therapy--and it seems to have been pretty effective therapy, at that.TOLSTOY... is an engaging and inspiring read. While it’s a chronicle of an endeavor fueled by sad circumstances, it’s also a record of accomplishment. Nina actually manages to read 365 books in one year, at the rate of one per day, and write about them all, but that’s really all in service of a larger goal; books are her tools. At the end of that year, working with the tools she’s chosen, she’s gained insight and understanding about how to keep living and loving and moving forward. She discusses selected, personally significant books in some detail, but this isn’t so much a “book about books” as it is a book about one particular thoughtful, articulate reader’s personal journey through one transformative year, which has a narrative arc of its own.While not exactly a book about books, TOLSTOY AND THE PURPLE CHAIR IS a book about reading, and it’s clearly a book FOR READERS. The idea of using books to help process a significant life event--not strictly looking for information, but seeking emotional truth in stories both real and fictional--makes perfect sense to a reader. It’s something many of us probably have done, or would do under equally personally-challenging conditions, even if we couldn’t devote a full year exclusively to it. However, as readers, we can appreciate that Nina Sankovitch did, and chose to share her story; it’s evidence of the life-changing power of books...literally.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Although the reason for this book is far from joyous, the death of her sister at the age of 46, this book is a celebration of reading, memories and understanding. After her sister's death, the author is running around taking care of her four children, her husband and her house, trying to figure out what to do with her grief and how to go on without the presence of her sister. They had always hared their lobe of books, her sister loved mysteries, in fact books and reading were always a big part of her family's lives. She rakes on a quest to read a book a day for a year, hoping to learn from books how to find joy again. Reading the books she comes to remember what books provide in the way of comfort and friendship, connection and understanding. Loved this book and reading her opinions of the books she read. She touched on her parent's lives in Belgium and Poland, the horror her dad encountered losing his three siblings in one night. She includes a reading list at the back of the book, some of these I have read, some I want to read and some I probably never will but I loved seeing what she was reading.

[mandochild · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The title of this book was enough to pull me towards it and I loved reading. For the first few months I read it at odd and I frequent moments at bus stops, so I don't have a coherent view of it. But it's the kind of book that forgives a piecemeal approach.I didn't really identify with the author or her choice of books, but I did identify strongly with her desire to live in and be enriched by the books she encountered. Her view of the world subtly shifted to accommodate the life she absorbed from each book and that is very much how it is. I also recognized the desire to draw and share wisdom and learned that we can only share ourselves. There is no universal wisdom although it may feel like it. But words have a way of creating our thinking and taking us to places that the author may nev have imagined. Once the words leave us they cease to belong to us and become the property of whoever chooses to pick them up. And they will change according to the reader. It was fun to remind myself of the ways in which we are connected and disconnected through a shared point of reference.

[sweetiegherkin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The author of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair decides to embark on a year of reading one book per day as a way to cope with and come to terms with her sister's early death from cancer. This book is the fruit of her labors and it contains discussions of the books she read, the lessons she learned, her family history, etc. In my opinion, the book shines the most when talking about her family history, especially stories of her immigrant parents and their experiences in Europe during WWII as well as stories about her and her sisters growing up in the Midwest. When it comes to lessons learned, these were usually good but it began to feel redundant after a while ... there was a whole lot of ‘I’m alive, my sister's dead, I have to deal with it, and books will help me do that’ basically reiterated in different ways. Ironically, talking about books flat out (before tying them back to some personal story) was where I felt the author failed the most. She gave just enough details in her overviews of specific books as to be spoilers for books you haven't read but want to, but too little deep discussion to engage you when she outlined a book you already read. Her descriptions of books worked best when it was a book you hadn't already read and had no interest in reading because at least now you knew the basic plot if it came up in conversation. Overall, the book and the author's style are pleasant enough, but the book isn't gripping enough to make you feel like you can't put it down, and this feeling seems to increase the further along you get in the book. This was a very different experience for me as with most books the pace picks up near the end and you can't put the book down. I think it's because when you're heard for the umpteenth time the same revelation, you're kind of ready to move on to a new book.

[gcplreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reading as therapy--I'm sure we all can relate. The chance not only to escape our worries, but be lifted by beautiful art and by the reflections of ourselves and our connectedness to the page. While grieving the death of her sister, Nina Sankovitch, a part-time book blogger, decides that she needs to take a year off work and just read. A book a day is her goal. And through the power of literature, she hopes to slow down and reconnect with herself, with her memories, and with her lost happiness. I wish she'd written a little less about these feelings and written a bit more about the specific titles she chose (I did like her taste), but I did find Tolstoy and the Purple Chair to be a lovely book overall. For how could I, someone who craves that uninterrupted hour of reading, not smile and totally relate to her drive?