Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, by Anna Quindlen; 4 of 5 stars

Anna Quindlen has a knack for making the mundane interesting, letting the reader know that every day stuff is both universal yet individualistic. Her book Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is no different. A former New York Times columnist, Quindlen has written essays here that explore different facets of women's lives.

In her essay Advice to My Younger Self, Quindlen writes, "It’s nothing short of astonishing, all that we learn between the time we are born and the time we die. Of course most of the learning takes place not in a classroom or a library, but in the laboratory of our own lives...[These lessons are] clear only in hindsight, frequently when some of its lessons may not even be useful anymore." That is how life is for all of us, yet it takes a true wordsmith to write this truth so succinctly.

While I've loved Quindlen's fiction since stumbling upon Black And Blue years ago, this was one of my first forays into her essays. As I read Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, I found myself occasionly thinking, "Yes! That's it exactly!" In her essay Faith, she mentions that when we're kids, days seem to fly by while the years crawl but that when we're older, it's the reverse: the days crawl by as the years fly. While I'd instinctively known this, I'd never given it much thought. For most of us over a certain age - well beyond our teens - all we have to do is look back over our lives to realize how true this is.

Well worth the read.

View all my reviews at Goodreads.com.