So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In early 2002, Sara Nelson - editor, reporter, reviewer, mother, daughter, wife, and compulsive reader - set out to chronicle a year's worth of reading, to explore how the world of books and words intermingled with children, marriage, friends, and the rest of the "real" world. She had a system all set up: fifty-two weeks, fifty-two books...and it all fell apart the first week. That's when she discovered that the books chose her as much as she chose them, and the rewards and frustrations they brought were nothing she could plan for: "In reading, as in life, even if you know what you're doing, you really kind of don't."

From Solzhenitsyn to Laura Zigman, Catherine M. to Captain Underpants, this is the captivating result. It is a personal journey filled with wit, charm, insight, infectious enthusiasm - and observations on everything from Public Books (the ones we pretend we're reading), lending trauma, and the idiosyncrasies of sex scenes ("The mingling of bodies and emotions and fluids is one thing. But reading about it: now, that's personal"), to revenge books, hype, the stresses of recommendation (what does it mean when someone you like hates the book you love?), the odd reasons we pick up a book in the first place, and how to put it down if we don't like it ("The literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult").

FROM THE CRITICS

USA Today

At its best, the book deals less with specific books than the nature of reading and why some books seem like friends. She writes, "Explaining the moment of connection between a reader and a book to someone who's never experienced it is like trying to describe sex to a virgin." — Bob Minzesheimer

The New Yorker

So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading, by Sara Nelson, takes as its title the exasperated cry of literary professionals everywhere, a cry that is echoed by the nearly simultaneous publication of the almost identically titled So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Paul Dry Books). Nelson describes herself as an insomniac who is “ravenous for books,” and she structures her own book as a record of a single year’s reading, during which time she devours everything from J. M. Coetzee to Somerset Maugham to Mary Higgins Clark to a dictionary of hipster slang. From this starting point, Nelson examines phenomena that will make many readers smile with recognition: the false importance of an overhyped book, the recommendation from a friend that makes you think less of your friend, and, most dreaded of all, the book you feel guilty for not having read.

Where Nelson’s approach is personal, Zaid traces the preoccupation with reading back through Dr. Johnson, Seneca, and even the Bible (“Of making many books there is no end”). He emerges as a playful celebrant of literary proliferation, noting that there is a new book published every thirty seconds, and optimistically points out that publishers who moan about low sales “see as a failure what is actually a blessing: The book business, unlike newspapers, films, or television, is viable on a small scale.” Zaid, who claims to own more than ten thousand books, says he has sometimes thought that “a chastity glove for authors who can’t contain themselves” would be a good idea. Nonetheless, he cheerfully opines that “the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.” (Leo Carey)

Publishers Weekly

"I have a New Year's plan," Nelson writes in the prologue to this charming diary of an unapologetic "readaholic." Her goal: to read a book a week for a year and try "to get down on paper what I've been doing for years in my mind: matching up the reading experience with the personal one and watching where they intersect-or don't." Armed with a list of books, the author, a Glamour senior contributing editor, the New York Observer's publishing columnist and a veteran book reviewer, begins her 52-week odyssey. She doesn't necessarily stick to her list, which includes classics ("the homework I didn't do in college"), books everyone's talking about (like David McCullough's John Adams) and titles as diverse as Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth, and Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. But she succeeds in sharing her infectious enthusiasm for literature in general, the act of reading and individual books and authors. Along the way, Nelson unearths treasures. She becomes enamored of David Mura's Turning Japanese, a memoir that helps her understand her Japanese-American husband better, and looks to Henry Dunow's The Way Home, about coaching baseball, while trying to help her second-grade son improve his athletic skills. Most readers will probably come away from this love letter to books eager to pursue some of Nelson's favorites-Nora Ephron's Heartburn, perhaps, or Emma Donoghue's Slammerkin-which is what makes Nelson's reflections inspiring and worthwhile. Agent, Mark Reiter. (Oct. 13) Forecast: Nelson's media connections will undoubtedly yield lots of coverage in women's magazines and regional New York publications. National magazine ads, a radio satellite tour, national publicity and online promos with reading groups will help, too. Although the book could, ostensibly, appeal to both men and women, the precious jacket art-of a cartoon woman reading amid a pile of books-might deter male readers. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal