Books for August

And here we are at the very crest of the season, poised for our free-fall to autumn.  August is perfect for slow living with lots of reading.  Sometimes it’s even too hot to venture outside and therefore, I take advantage of couch potato-ing with books to set me up for the fall and keep me dreaming of summer days still to come.  Here are some such reads:

I’ll never forget an afternoon at the bookshop back in 2002.  I had just paid for a magazine when I woman whizzed by me with an engaged and satisfied smile on her lips.  Unable to hide her joy, she said, “Look what I just bought my daughter!”  She unslipped from her paper bag, a lovely tome called A Time to Blossom.  As I had made acquaintances with Tovah Martin’s endearing book about mothers, daughters and gardens, I suddenly found myself sharing the excitement of a lovely book with a stranger.  “I have a daughter who will love this and it will be a wonderful birthday present for her!,” she said.  I couldn’t have been more pleased for her.

A Time to Blossom covers all four seasons with garden style, crafts and remembrances of times past to share with the young girls in one’s life.  When I first encountered the book, my daughter was not of an age to begin gardening with me but she always loved flowers and make-believe so we poured over it together although the book remained with me when she left home.  It’s one I tour through each August for the section of dahlias, the shameless and colorful blooms of August that remind us that summer is still with us.  At least for now…

Proust’s Duchess by Caroline Weber, is a bit scholarly but I am working my way through it with pleasure.  More on Proust in an upcoming post, but the book had me at “she turned a simple morning walk …into a poem of elegance, the finest adornment, the rarest flower under the sun”.  I can’t put it down.  Not for one moment.

This triple biography of the women who most inspired Proust is written against an historical background but I am most interested in the intriguing female collective that led to Proust’s notion of involuntary memory – those brightly lit “aha” moments that jettison us back to our pasts unexpectedly.

A new book that is mesmerizing me is The Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables:  The Enchanting Island that Inspired L.M. Montgomery.  Filled with captivating photographs and illustrations of the real places immortalized in Montgomery’s novels, especially Anne of Green Gables, the book has me mentally preparing my retirement sojourn to Prince Edward Island to visit my grandfather’s homestead along with Green Gables.  My book will guide me as I discover with new eyes, the Lake of Shining Waters and Lover’s Lane.  And who doesn’t think of Anne with an “e” when the season’s pages turn to heartbreaking sunsets and changing colors that signal our time in the sun is coming to an end?

Finally, I didn’t want to like Ageless Beauty the French Way by Clémence von Mueffling.  I have plenty of French beauty books and feel I am saturated in my knowledge of what makes the Frenchwomen so self-assured and beautiful.  But the book was sent to me and so I delved in.

A few things – first, the advice of von Mueffling’s grandmother Regine Debrise, an 86 year old, addicted-to-red-lipstick former model who was often photographed by Irving Penn in the 1940’s and 50’s.  I also appreciated that the book labelled and included my age box (maturité) in its advice so I didn’t feel that I was reading a beauty advice book just for millenials.  My favorite thing about the book is von Mueffling’s advice to shift my attitude about skincare from a unwelcome late-night task to an act of self-love.  By spending the time to look after our skin using age-specific formulations and with the guidance of three generations (von Mueffling’s beauty editor mother chimes in), we can turn our nightly routine into a pampering and welcome interlude before bed.  I’m game…and what better way to say farewell to summer than to improve our skin and put our best face forward for the next season?

More soon…