I developed my love for reading from my mother.
Every couple of weeks my mom visited Doubleday (a stunning glass building at 724 Fifth Avenue (now Prada) in New York City) and bought ten hardcover books. She loved biographies, literary fiction, and non-fiction. Her passion for crime and thrillers was piled on her nightstand.
“The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt
While reading The Goldfinch, I coincidentally visited the Frick Museum and saw Carel Fabririus’ (1622-1654) masterpiece. Lines of people, many of whom had come to see Vermeer’s The Girl With a Pearl Earring crowded around Fabririus’ The Goldfinch.
Donna Tartt weaves her Pulitzer Prize winning novel around Fabririus’ painting:
“It was a small picture…and the simplest: a yellow finch, against a plain, pale ground, chained to a perch by its fig of an ankle. He was Rembrandt’s pupil, Vermeer’s teacher, “ my mother said. “And this one little painting is really the missing link between the two of them — that clear pure daylight, you can see where Vermeer got his quality of life from…”
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“The Signature of All Things” by Elizabeth Gilbert
This epic story provides a gateway to the Age of Enlightenment, when people looked to the natural world for life’s explanations. We follow the life of Alma from birth and transverse to her father’s plant-thief-youth and wild-sea-adventures. Alma becomes a scientist through her fascination with botany and along the way we learn about Darwin, moss, love, and self discovery.
“Human Time was a short and horizontal mechanism. It stretched out straight and narrow, from the fairly recent past to the barely imaginable future. The most striking characteristics of Human Time, however, was that it moved with such amazing quickness. It was a snap of the finger across the universe… She was a mere blink of existence, as was everyone else.”
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“Flamethrowers” by Rachel Kushner
Reno, the protagonist, is a unique and modern character which makes the book all the more interesting. The story is about a college art grad trying to make it in New York
“It was an irony but a fact that a person had to move to New York City first, to become an artist of the West.”
but there is also motorcycles, Italy and Fascism, and lots of movement through time.
“Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.”
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“Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson
Life After Life also explores time and circumstance and time and coincidence.
What if you could change one thing in your past, what would your life be like today? Life After Life begins with these two quotes:
“Everything Changes and nothing remains the same.”
~Plato, Cratylus
“What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
~Edward Beresford Todd
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Please share this list on social media with your friends and spread the gift of reading and the spirit of your mom (and mine).
Wishing you a great Mother’s Day and happy reading,
Cheryl