Favorite Books of 2013: Beth R.

I love the cover, the way the bird peeks through as if the paper has been ripped and someone wrote on it with the type of marker they use to write on your deli sandwich.

I love the reproduction of the small painting of the bird when you open the book. I especially love the way Donna Tartt wrote her name in brown ink in mine.

I love the feel of the pages, like a more updated version of onionskin.

I remember where I was when I finished the book. But let me go back.

I have been a fan of Donna Tartt’s for many years. I have long twinned her in my mind with Jeffrey Eugenides, as each of their books take the better part of a decade to produce. Compared with the numerous authors who churn them out yearly, I feel as if I would rather pay a larger fee for one great big book occasionally than a smaller fee for a dinky book more often. I guess they have their place, but my heart resides in those epic sweeping tomes that take me across the years, through families and lifetimes and continents. I knew that I wanted to read this one from the moment I learned it was going to be published. But a galley (advanced reading copy) never showed at my bookstore. Then we sent in a special request to one of the sales reps and lo and behold, one magically appeared. I realized it had been previously read, as someone had clearly spilled a cup of coffee over the cover, but that added to its charm. Once I started Theo’s tale, I don’t think I even came up for air. Sure I woke and dressed and went to work and talked about books and recommended them to people, but my heart and mind were transfixed by Theo and his plight. Wheat would happen to him? What would happen to the painting? Would he ever convince Pippa that they were meant to be together?

I was fascinated with the way the seemingly disparate elements were juxtaposed. A few stood out to me:

*The way the dustjacket claimed it was an old-fashioned story as well as a tell-all-your-friends triumph

*Theo’s loss and his friend Andy’s family’s excess

*The world of glittery Las Vegas and the restorative environment of Hobie and his furniture repair shop

Each time I read more of the story my hand kept reaching for my pencil. I would stop on certain passages, ones I felt were written just for me and I would star them. That’s my system: a star next to the paragraph and I circle the page number. By the time I got to the end I was starring things left and right and sobbing and weeping and wishing I could live in that moment. That split-second one where I felt connected to the words and the author and the inspiration that brought them to her and everyone else who ever felt the same way. Those are the moments that I live for as a reader; and as a bookseller/librarian I try to translate how I felt into recommendations for others.

As soon as I was finished I sat down and wrote an email to the sales rep. It was meant to be a thank you but ended up being one of those pour-your-heart-out emails because you feel like you need someone to know the level of love you have for the book. I paused before I sent it. I read it over and felt it was probably too silly to send. But I sent it anyway. Then I had the dread and regret wondering who would read it and how would they respond. Perhaps they would just ignore the note and maybe that would be for the best.

I didn’t hear back for two days and then it was in the form of an email letting everyone know that the sales rep who had so kindly helped me had died on Sunday, the very day I sent him my note. I felt sad, then strange; it was serendipitous in a melancholy sort of way. In the time since it happened it has become bound up for me in the experience of reading this book, my favorite book for 2013. The book that stood out and shone of dozens and dozens of others.

Should you read it, well I hope so. Will you have the same reaction–I don’t know. I hope you have passages that sing to you, paragraphs that stand out and shine. And if not this book, then another. Reading is a beautiful pastime, be it on an electronic device or old fashioned pages. For me, it’s all about the book. But it’s about connections too.

As Hobie puts forth in one of my favorite passages: “Great paintings–people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But—“ crossing back to the table to sit again “–if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think ‘oh I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst you. Hey kid. Yes you.” …An individual heart-shock. Your dream, Welty’s dream, Vermeer’s dream. You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the art museum sees something else entire, and that’s not even to mention the people separated from us by time–four hundred years before us four hundred after we’re gone. It’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of angles in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours I was painted for you.”

Perhaps this is the book you were meant to read next. Perhaps something here has swayed you, intrigued you, made you want to find a copy of your very own and hug it tight to your chest. As Forster would say’ ‘Only connect.’ If not this book, then perhaps another that you can call your very own. For me it’s The Goldfinch and for now all the other fiction I read pales in comparison. Just as other paintings pale beside Fabritius’s little work of art of a bird who longed to be free.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Thank you, Beth. You can visit Beth at her blog, Let Us Go Then, You and I.