Long time ago, I started to keep journals about the books I read. The starting lines (the ones that always get me into further reading), quotes, characters, images... Later on, I started working for a magazine and a bookshop, so reading was an important part of my life. Nowadays, I still keep the journals, I still read. But sometimes, Life happens, at a speed that no device, no matter how modern, can record. That’s what has been happening in my week, and that’s why, I’m late for the Turn the Page... Tuesday. Sorry, I’m normally not like this, but there were so many things in these few days (several mountain lions, classes that ended, classes that started, a lesson on violets, a promise kept... among others) that I wasn’t able to post on Tuesday. Will you forgive me? There it goes, my belated contribution to our reading experiment.
The Guernsey Library and Potato Peel Society
by, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. The Dial Press, New York, 2008. 274 pages.
“Dear Sidney,
Susan Scott is a wonder. We sold over forty copies of the book, which was very pleasant, but much more thrilling from my standpoint was the food. Susan managed to procure ration coupons for icing sugar and real egg for the meringue.”
This is how the book starts, and so does, the first letter. The Guernsey... is an epistolar book, composed only by letters, the common theme of all of them is a love for the written word. Some of the characters publish books, some write them, some are passionate readers. And we enter into their lives in the first person, in that intimate voice that is only tendered in a letter, in the lost art of writing a letter. We discover about love, about how to survive the war years and the years after the war with the maximum amount of joy available. We learn about lovers lost and lovers found, about a pig that shouldn’t be there and about the invention of the organic cake. All of it, with a delicious sense of humor. After having read one or two letters, you feel totally immersed in the times and lives of the characters, and all the surprises are yet to come. I loved this book, since the moment someone left it (intentionally, I hope) in my house, and I saw the stamps and the sea. It was calling me, the way only the books can call.
