🍰✨

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly  is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. It rivals Breakfast at Tiffany’s for Best Book Of My Summer Thus Far. 

Like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Diving Bell is a short story- more accurately it is a short memoir. It chronicles the thoughts, memories, and desires of Jean-Dominique Bauby. He was once the editor of French Elle, and after a massive stroke is left almost entirely paralyzed, except for a fully-functioning mind and the ability to blink with his left eye. Blinking is his only means of communicating with the world, and is how he wrote this memoir.

I love his wit and his creativity, and the dreaminess of his writing, though his own world probably seemed more nightmarish. Bauby gives an insightful, observant account of what it is like to be a prisoner trapped inside of one’s own mind.

The rest of my summer reading list can be found here.