When immersed in a good book it can become all-encompassing, moving, life affirming and affecting. But when it's over I find that its contents start to fade all too quickly. At least paper versions can be kept on a shelf, annotated and flicked through from time to time. I know electronic books have similar capacities but, let's admit it, it isn't the same, is it.
Anyway, in anticipation of a future which is more mobile I thought I'd start my list form here, from recently read books or note. Life is too short to be reminded of books that are not of note and anyway, I will usually not make it through them.
Patrick Fermor Leigh: An Adventure
(read: 2013)
Edmund de Waal
(read: November 2013)
"I have spent the last few years writing a very personal book. It is the biography of a collection and the biography of my family. It is the story of the ascent and decline of a Jewish dynasty, about loss and diaspora and about the survival of objects.
The collection is of 264 Japanese netsuke. It is the common thread for the story of its three Jewish owners and the three rooms in which it was kept over a period of a hundred and forty years.
The first of the three rooms is the study in Paris in the 1870s of the art-critic Charles Ephrussi, the model of Swann in Proust, hung with Impressionist paintings by Renoir and Degas. The second room is the dressing-room of my great-grandmother Emmy von Ephrussi in the vast Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse in Vienna. The third room is that of her son Ignace, my great-uncle Iggie, in Tokyo in the 1970s, an apartment looking out across central Tokyo.
I am the fifth generation of the family to inherit this collection, and it is my story too. I am a maker: I make pots. How things are made, how they are handled and what happens to them has been central to my life for over thirty years. So too has Japan, a place I went to when I was 17 to study pottery. How objects embody memory - or more particularly, whether objects can hold memories - is a real question for me. This book is my journey to the places in which this collection lived. It is my secret history of touch."
Daniel Klein - Travels with Epicurus
(read: February 2014)
Our society worships at the fountain of youth. Each year, we seek to avert the arrival of old age using everything at our disposal, from extreme exercise and botox to pilates and cosmetic dentistry. But in the process, are we missing out on a distinct and extraordinarily valuable stage of life?
I adored this book. It's theme is reflected in Klein's style which is light and easy-going, relaxed and incredibly wise. Apart from Epicurus' philosophy, Existentialism, Buddhism are Stoicism are all explored in a contemporary context. I'm no where near my seventh decade but this book chimes with my mid-life questions. I bought it for someone else but I always buy the books I give as gifts first because this adds to their riches and shared pleasure. However, this time, the pleasure was even more intense and well-timed than ever. Embrace every age, every moment, treasure every detail of life.
"Be moderate in order to taste the joys of life in abundance."
"Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance."
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