A Fabulous Find and Fugitive Pieces

What I Read: Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels

Rating: 5/5!

Okay, this post is partly to share the excitement of a fun book room find and partly to rave about a book I read years back but just recently recommended to Sonya (Hi, Sonya!). First, you must hear about this fabulous find we, well, found. Rasha and I were going through book donations as per usual, oohing and aahing as is to be expected when two bibliophiles are paid to sort through books all day, when we came across a rather strange offering. A book called Steamboat Gothic by Frances Parkinson Keyes, which Rasha picked up, oohed and aahed over, and tried to open… but the book wouldn’t open! (Duh duh duh…) She tries again, but only the first few pages move at all, and then I clue in, because I watch a lot of old movies where the characters have to… but I’m giving it away too soon. Anyways, so I clue in. She passes me the box, I shake it around a bit, and out comes a card, reading: “We hope you enjoy this book. We found the contents inspiring and relaxing during times of stress. Put this book on a shelf at the school. You will find it very handy. Have a good summer, thanks for your help and advice.” And it turns out that the inspiring and relaxing contents of this book are… a bottle of aged Canadian Forty Creek premium whisky! In a sealed bottle! And so, Watson, that is how old films about bootlegging and hollow Bibles helped to solve the case of the book with the really stuck pages.

After more sleuthing we found out that the book was made by this really cool Canadian company called The Book Box, which sells books to the public at www.secretstoragebooks.com. Normally I greatly disapprove of book vandalism, but this company seems to take fairly new antiques (which is kind of a contradiction of terms, I know) and books that have multiple copies of that edition in print. They also do a lot of newer books that have a wide circulation: I guess books like The History of Golf blend in better on some people’s shelves. The copy of Steamboat Gothic we found was from 1954 but looks like it’s older… I’ll have to see if I can get a picture of it on here. Anyways, the company advertises itself as “Recycling for Book Lovers”, which I think is adorable and makes me look more kindly on the destruction of the book for the sake of storing booze. If you have a book lover in the family, this would probably make them an amazing gift! No, that is not a hint.

To my second order of business: Fugitive Pieces. I’m still reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, which, by the way, is AMAZING and has already inspired two strangers to approach me to talk about how much they loved the book AND made me miss my bus stop once AND caused me to almost walk into a parked van on my way home. It’s a dangerous book. But so worth it… pick it up, you won’t regret it. But I digress. Fugitive Pieces was recommended and lent to me by my beautiful sister Sarah a couple of years ago, and she couldn’t have picked a more perfect book for me. It is so lyric and poetic in its writing style (Anne Michaels published poetry before this book, her first novel, which I must get my hands on), but the images are still so vivid and relatable that you can’t forget what you see through her writing. It tells the story of a poet who lives through the Holocaust as a boy, and tells of his journey from there through Greece to Canada to Greece again. It is a love story, a story about survival and endurance, a story about poetry and art, a story about the past and the changeability of the past, a story about family and history. I cannot recommend this book highly enough: you will lose yourself in her beautiful writing and the beautiful story.

And once you’re finished, read her newest book, The Winter Vault. She made us wait for years between Fugitive Pieces and this latest masterpiece, but it was well worth it! Anne Michaels, teach me your ways! And take all the time you need on your third book, we’ll wait.

As a note, I’ve been recommended to read Shogun by James Clavell and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (which I’ve found at the book room, yay!), so I’ll be diverting from the reading list I posted to read these two (thank you Dan and Katrina!). And yes, Jon, to finish Jim Butcher’s fantastic Alera series. (I promise you you’ll get those back, although I like them, so you might need to sneak them off my bookshelves.) And also The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, which I started too (will I ever learn?). I have waaay too many books going right now, but that makes me quite happy: during the year we English majors have surprisingly little time to read books that we want to read outside of our school texts. For now I’m going to finish A Fine Balance, because it is just so good. Here’s hoping I don’t walk into traffic or into a stampede of rampaging elephants because I’m so deep into my read!

All the best, and happy reading!

Erin