Saturday, May 22, 2010

52 Books in 52 Weeks: Book 19


Still managing to be a week behind on my reading... This week I read The Recipe Club by Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel. It is a novel written in the form of correspondence between two women.

The book begins when these women are adults and then revisits the past to show the circumstances to that led to decades of silence between the two women and finally the end has a bit of a twist.

This is by no means a top book pick for me, but the way it was written was intriguing. By only having a glimpse of the story through the letters, it left a lot to the imagination. It also hits home how easy it is to get upset through the written word - I believe you see this a lot on the internet... people get angry and polarized. Since the argument {or discussion} is written, there many cues that are missing which allows anger to boil over quickly and forgiveness to be slow in coming.

Some quotes from the book:
Oh, Lilly. This is not how I hoped to find you again. But maybe it's the only way. Death always makes me want to make sense of things. I want to understand my mother's life. I want to understand my own.
I'm scattered and unfocused, broken. Losing my mother feels like an amputation...
Then my father did something so unlike him – completely honest and read. He said, "Sometimes people we love can't love us in ways that we wish to be loved. Not because we aren't worthy of that love, but for other reasons beyond our control."
Death is so weird. For a while afterwards everybody acts like it will change them and make them appreciate everything – friends, family, each new day. But then, little by little, life just resumes being normal again. You forget the dead person, or you don't exactly forget them, you just put them into deep mental storage, like you're putting away furs for the summer.
It's hard to imagine our parents before they had us, isn't it? Hard to believe they were ever our age – or, if for that matter, that one day we'll be as old as them. Do you think we'll always feel young inside, even when we don't look that way?

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