The Girl Who Read on the Metro

This book transported me into a life I would often dream I could live. Being in a bookshop, owning a bookshop and seeing people’s face’s light up when they touched a book they didn’t even know they needed. Making no readers remember what reading can do for their inner child, that it can help free their brain from our consumerist and content consumption society, how reading slows you down.

But this book also made me realise also, what a little Romanticised life that really is.

I feel we life in a social that romanticises everything. This notion of being alone, bossing out hours or work to be self-employed, to live our dream. But is a dream job all we chase for or imagine when we think of dreaming?

When I dream, I don’t know what I picture. It changes often.

I used to dream of a life like Elizbeth has in this book. Ditching the mundane day – to – day job for one where your with your passion all day. Where you can get sucked into the world of books.

But when we romanticise these lives, which are often quite selfish lives I feel, we forget that we are a race born around community. Although books and the power of books are a key focus of this book, I feel the main message is about how they bring people together. People who otherwise may not be seen as friends in society, maybe because age, hobbies, what books they read.

This book gives me hope that ‘unlikely friendships’ and that community can be revived in this society which is so stuck to their eyes on the ground. Whether that is screens, or turning a blind eye to things we rather not see because social media has shown we can do that.

When did making friends in the real world become so hard? When did spending time alone become so romanticised? I ran off to Nottingham for 2 years and was so alone and it became my comfort zone.

How do we get this healthy balance of being alone, but then revive the power of community and shared ideas, passions, interests, and perspectives coming together.

All I know is I used to want to do Elizabeth’s adventure at the end of this book (I wont spoil), but now I don’t think I do. Or if I did, I would want to do it with the support of my friends, and knowing they’d be in on the journey along the way – and that’s something I would not have said a year ago.

Some of my favourite quotes:

• ‘Each book is a portrait, and it has at least two faces… the face of the person who gives it, and the face of the person who receives it.’

• ‘A gust of wind caught the umbrella, bending it like a farewell wave’

• ‘It must be part of the inescapable human condition – each person ultimately deafd, impervious, to other people’s emotions, in capable of deciphering gestures, looks or silences, all condemned to give painful explanations with words that are never the right ones’

• ‘We are never aware of what we convey when we describe our symptoms or alignments’.

• Page 123: ‘Why do they [spiders] climb up drain pipes? Why do they leave a place of safety for another which is much more dangerous?
  Leonidas folded and unfolded his pale, carefully manicured hands several times. Each of his nails was polished and perfectly filed.
  ‘ The question does not only apply to spiders’ he eventually replied.

• Page 130, ‘The apartment whose imperfections had been concealed by the glamour of a love story’ – something I always fall victim to.

• Page 163 ‘Each one of them gave me something, and at the same time, they’ve taken everything away. There’s nothing left – do you see? I’m like a shell. I feel the draught blowing through me. I’m cold.’

• Page 183 ‘ Why am I supposed to have an opinion on everything? My choice would inevitably be different from yous. And right now, its you’rs that matter.

At the back of the book, there’s some reading group questions and one of them really struck me.

What can books reveal about us, either as the giver or receiver?

As a Giver: If it’s one we have read, it shows we want them to feel as deeply as we did. To then unite over conversation and connection.

As a Giver: If it’s one we haven’t read, we demonstrate our love to someone, it becomes a symbol of what they remind us of, of love.

As a reader: It can show anything. Areas your passionate in, areas you want to learn more in, they can be a cry for help, they can be a hunt for comfort, they can be a hunt to feel something, they can be an escape (healthy and unhealth), they can be to tool to bring people together, to educate yourself. They can be whatever you want it in your life.

Soliman’s word for employees ‘passeurs’ which for Juliette connotes the Second World War: ‘The passeurs smuggled jews out of the German Occupied Zone to safety’. Why do you think he chose that word? What might Soliman and his employees have in common with wartime passuers?

In providing people books, you give them an escape, an emotional escape to leave the terrain and landscape that surrounds you. Books can be safety, even if only for a brief moment. They can guide you to a new world, and everyone has the right to access that.

What is the different between an illusion and a dream?

An illusion as an unhealthy connotation to it.

A dream I see as picturesque, the goal.

I an illusion the result of an unhealth dream?

What comes first, an illusion or a dream?

Are they the same thing but depending on what mind set your in – depicts the clouds that are around your image.

An illusion is haunted by grey clouds.

But a dream is clear sky’s, birds’ singings and butterflies

So therefore, can a dream being an illusion, and can an illusion clear up to become a dream?

Is an illusion a dream with some self-sabotage pollution in?

Illusion and dreams are one.

‘On page 247, all seems lost. It’s the best moment’ What does this mean?

When all seems lost, that’s when your hopes can come alive. Its like a flame nearly gone out, but there’s a spark waiting for an opportunity to get caught. I think of calcifer in Howls Moving Castle when he’s almost put out, but then is revived.

The feels that comes with getting your energy back, your vision, your voice and feels like the roaring of a fresh fire. It’s a feeling people can live for, it’s a feeling that can bring us comfort because it reminds us we feel and are alive. Hence why it’s the best moment.