tolstoy and the purple chair my year of magical reading

Books are magic because they can do so much: they can mirror our own experiences and show us we are not alone.

New York book reviewer, Nina Sankovitch, has new memoir, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

It taught me you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own … If that isn’t an act of magic, I don’t know what is.” As she explains it, it was “ one book that supplied me with another world at a time when it was desperately needed. Terrible things happen on the island but one of the young girls of the village survives and one aspect of her survival is Great Expectations. How he teaches them is by reading aloud from Dickens’ Great Expectations. An outsider married to a village insider offers to teach the local children. The island is caught in the middle of a territorial war and the teacher in a small village has left, fleeing the conflict. Mister Pip is set on a fictional island in the Pacific. One of the books I read during my year of reading a book a day was Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. And “Magical” because books are magic, powerful magic. “Tolstoy” because I read his last novel during my year of reading “Purple Chair” because I did a lot of my reading in a ratty, smelly, but very comfortable purple chair. My memoir about this year of reading – and a lifetime of reading - is entitled Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading. Nina Sankovitch's Tolstoy and the Purple Chairįrom October 2008 through October 2009, I read a book a day.

Tolstoy and the purple chair my year of magical reading