Reading: The Power to Heal

The library has just ordered the well-reviewed Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading by Nina Sankovitch. In this memoir the author, after the death of a sister, chooses to savor a book a day for a year. One critic writes that her book “reminds us of the most primal function of literature-to heal, to nurture and to connect us to our truest selves."

Sankovitch is not the first writer to discover the nurturing power of the written word. Here are a few more:

The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared by Alice Ozma

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time by Phyllis Rose

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, A History by Lewis Buzbee