The Little Paris Bookshop

"The Little Paris Bookshop" by Nina George was a delicious book.  Every sentence was like taking a small bite of a buttery croissant. The outside flaky, shards of crust spiking the tongue, a dare to continue eating, a dare to continue reading, to continue searching and reaching for the soft center of understanding.  The main character, Perdu, was a broken man at the beginning of the story, the flaky shards and fallen crumbs of a stale pastry, but not irreparable.

Perdu himself is the story, the croissant.  That soft center of understanding was there for others, but not himself.  He “reflected that it was a common misconception that booksellers looked after books.  They look after people.”  He considered himself (as did others) a “literary apothecary” and prescribed books as medication to heal the heart, revive the soul.

Then one day he realized that his soul needed reviving and he parted on what can only be called an epic journey filled with adventures and misadventures (is there a difference?) where he sought his soul as well as the true author of his favorite soul saving book. 

This book deals with loss on a number of different levels, including the loss of love, the loss of self, death of loved ones, and death of inspiration.  It offers hope and comfort via literature and friendships formed over literature and over common ground.  “It was the season for truffles and literature.”  What could be more hopeful than that?

This is a bread and butter book because the bread is the butter, the butter is the bread.  The rich croissant of the story is the very butteryness of the language and vice versa.   You can taste each word and find meaning in each stage of discovery that Perdu experiences. 

“…tasted of honey and pale fruit, of a tender sigh before sliding into sleep. A vibrant, contradictory wine, a wine brimming with love.”

Who wouldn’t want to taste that?  Read the book to find out what this really means and to experience butteryness for yourself.

When Breath Becomes Air

“When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi does not need my review. It is a bread and butter book whether I say it is or not.  I don’t normally read biographies or autobiographies, because I have a difficult time connecting with a plot – the bread, the foundation of the story is somehow too squishy and moist to be substantial enough to hold any butter, any intricate language.  Kalanithi has made me reconsider that statement and made me wonder why I never considered life itself a plot.

Kalanithi’s story made me feel small, insignificant but only in a way that forced me to see that no matter how hard we try, no matter how intelligent we are, no matter our intentions for humanity,  death is a reality out of our control.  Cancer can and has beaten the best of us.  However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to fight it and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t live our lives to the fullest, do the things that make us want to live.   If a man dying with cancer can still operate as a neurosurgeon,

those of us without a debilitating chronic disease have no excuse to not live the life we want to live. 

Kalanithi said, “The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out.  It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget.”  I think it is important for us all to consider this, whether ill or healthy, discover what matters, and then focus on it, do something about it, whether it is trying to make a change or encourage growth – if we don’t find what matters – it may die, we may die.

Kalanithi spent his life searching for meaning – the meaning of life, the meaning of death, and the meaning of the human mind – and how they all intersect.  I don’t know if he ever came to any concrete conclusions, but he led me to the conclusion that each of us matters, that we each have meaning of our own, and our personal meaning can give meaning to others. 

Kalanithi’s life is the plot of this book.  It is captivating to read about his experiences as a neurosurgeon and equally heart warming and heart breaking to read about his struggle with cancer.  The language was butter, but it was the kind of butter that may have been in the refrigerator too long – salty, but slightly off with the flavor of other items left in the refrigerator too long – bitter and wanting, but fully knowing what it was.  He wrote, “Because I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I am dying, until I actually die, I am still living” and later “The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?”

What, indeed.  What are any of us supposed to do?  I don’t have the courage to face the answer to that question.  I don’t know how he did and I certainly don’t know how he lived knowing that “The curse of cancer created a strange and strained existence, challenging me to be neither blind to, nor bound by, death’s approach.” And yet somehow the fear of death didn’t overtake him.  Instead, his desire to live prompted him to carry on, to share his thoughts with us in this book, and to simply be. 

And that is why the story made me feel small.  It made me question this very thing – are any of us living life fully?  Maybe we can’t until we realize that life could disappear from us at any moment, without warning, without care, simply without.  I recommend reading this book as a prompt to help us realize how precious life really is and start or perhaps continue our individual searches for meaning and what truly matters to us.

The Girl on the Train

"The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins is a mystery: the characters are all mysterious in their own ways, the events/plot are depicted in a mysterious format, and the reader just might become mysterious too in trying to predict the inevitable twist that is a requirement of all mysteries.  Because of the mysterious format the author chose, the book is anything but formulaic.  The entire story is told in first person, switching points of view from the female main characters involved in the story. 

Because I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who have not read this book yet, I am not going to discuss the plot and I am not going to discuss the characters.  I will simply say that the foundation, the plot of the story was shaky, crumbly, like a piece of bread that you know is too soft to butter, but you try to spread it on there anyway – a story that you can’t put down, a story that gets under your skin, a story that forces you to understand it.

The plot gradually unfolds through its reading and so the language is not especially flowing.  The story is mainly delivered in dialog, observation, and short descriptions – chunky cold butter on a slice of too soft bread.  This may sound harsh, but it works for a mystery book.   As with most mysteries, the answers, the plot, the language all makes sense in the end – put that cold bread and butter in a hot skillet and the butter will melt into a delicious toast.

My favorite quote from the book is actually inspired by a poem written by e.e. cummings, “Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis." I think is an excellent phrase that defines each of the characters.  Life can’t be confined to simply one paragraph and death between parenthesis is simply a date.  No, life is the dash between the date of birth and the date of the death; it is the unstated, it is the experience, it is what only the person who lived knows.  If that sounds interesting, then you should read "The Girl on the Train" to find out what each of the characters knows.