A Review of my Summer Reads.

     

    This summer I took the time to improve my reading capabilities. I chose three memoirs and one philosophical book. I wanted the books to relate to my summer and enrich the events that were taking place within it. Summer, for me, is a time of rest and reflection, to stop moving so fast and have more time to explore other things that life can offer when I stop my every day routine. Memoirs were important for me to read since my degree involves a heavy amount of writing in an autobiographical style. Before reading these books I never quite realised how much I would enjoy memoirs and discovering them has really inspired me to pick up more. 

    The first book I read was "The Art of Loving" by Erich Fromm. This had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while and as the main event this summer was making the biggest vow to the love of my life I felt it was more than appropriate to read up on the subject that I was about to commit my life and heart to! I went into this book thinking it would guide me through creative insights and ideas around love but in fact a large part of the book was about where society had positioned love and how we have lost ourselves to consumerism so much that we now approach love as something we need to consume rather than something we need to practice. Here I was able to relate back to my degree: "Professional Practice in Arts and the Creative Industries."  Ballet was my practice, my passion and my main topic where I felt it evolving and required time, effort and patience just like practicing any other kind of art. I'd never considered love to also be a practice that required those same attributes. For those making a commitment like I did this summer, I'd highly recommend reading this book to grasp a deeper understanding of love and what it means to love not just your partner but life in general. Here is a link to some quotes to get a clearer idea of what the book entails. 

   The second book I picked up was on a book sharing shelf in an Italian supermarket. It was "A Marriage in Haiti" by Julia Alvarez. This grabbed my attention firstly because it was one of the only books in English and secondly it was about a marriage in a foreign land, which I was also about to embark on! This book entertained me for the first week of my honeymoon in the Seychelles and it had me in tears on several parts. I particularly liked all the "difficult" words underlined in pencil by the previous, probably Italian, reader. To hold in my hands a story which had been pre-loved and carefully studied made me enjoy it more as by those small pencil lines I could visibly see that previous owner taking care over the words they read, as I was now doing the same, I instantly felt part of a book reading collective. 

    Alvarez told the story of her journey across the border to Haiti; risking a lot and facing many challenges, she attended a wedding of one of the workers from her coffee plantation. It was a memoir of kindness and deep compassion. I got to read all about the injustices between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. It was the first time I was hearing about this and it made me horrified to realise the brutality brought onto neighbouring countries and how it is also happening in many other places around the world. Thanks to Alvarez I re-discovered the power of getting totally lost inside a book again. I couldn't put this one down. I realised I loved memoirs, you get to have a true insight into someone else's life, the paper providing a stream of clear thought, straight from their mind to mine. 

    Once discovering the racial divide between Haiti and The Domincian Republic, whilst I was in Africa, I thought it fitting to then read about the Apartheid: one of the biggest racial injustices in history. I didn't know much about it, I knew what it was, but I didn't know what it entailed. So I felt compelled to pick up Trevor Noah's book "Born a Crime". I knew Noah very well as a talk show host and whilst reading his book I could hear him speaking the book out to me inside my head, not only in his South African accent but also his way to put forward a sentence and deliver a joke. The book is told in short stories just as he puts across his comedy sketches. These were comedy sketches which had you laughing out loud but at the same time describing some of the most atrocious monstrosities of human capacity. You wouldn't believe the life he has lived and the times that this man and his family have endured. If someone has a story to tell, he does. It's of hope, adversity, coming of age and pure resilience. 

    The fourth book I landed on was something more on my domain: "Swan Dive" by Georgina Pazcoguin. It is a ballet memoir written by a Soloist in the New York City Ballet amid the scandalous time under the directorship of Peter Martins. This book is so refreshing amongst an age where we idealise ballerinas at the top of big companies. Pazcoguin has no filter describing her full course of failures, mishaps and embarrassing moments. I couldn't help thinking how therapeutic and brave this must have been for her to let out all of her "dives" in a comical manner and tell the world her story. I felt the book really pushed the limits of discretion and I wouldn't advise any young dancer or Dance Mum of willing dancing daughter to read it. At some moments it felt like you had stolen a teenage girls diary, opened it up randomly and come to regret your decision reading it and now knowing what you know. It made me slightly uncomfortable and I thought that that was probably because American culture had a bigger spectrum on sexual exposure. Even my husband commented on the cover, thinking it too sexual for a "ballet book". I came to the conclusion that sex inevitably sells and it might help sell the book. On the other hand I also think that exposing yourself as a dancer in America is simply the norm and we are perhaps more prude here in Europe. Either way it stripped the "perfect ballerina status quo" and exposed a more real, more relatable and more gritty ballerina. I wish for the level of perfection we endlessly look at everyday on social media platforms to also be balanced with the tenacity of exposing the truth that Pazcoguin painted so plainly from the art form.