Last Oct. 28, on her 46th birthday, Nina Sankovitch read a novel, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” by Muriel Barbery. The next day she posted a review online deeming it “beautiful, moving and occasionally very funny.”
The next day she read “The Emigrants,” by W. G. Sebald, and the day after that, “A Sun for the Dying,” by Jean-Claude Izzo. On Thanksgiving she read Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Isaac Newton; on Christmas, “The Love Song of Monkey,” by Michael S. A. Graziano; on July 4, “Dreamers,” by Knut Hamsun. When seen Friday, she was working on “How to Paint a Dead Man,” by Sarah Hall. She finished two more over the weekend during a trip to Rochester with her family (husband; 27-year-old stepdaughter; four boys ages 16, 14, 11 and 8) for her in-laws’ 60th wedding anniversary. In a time-deprived world, where book reading is increasingly squeezed off the page, it is hard to know what’s most striking about Ms. Sankovitch’s quest, now on Day 350, to read a book every day for a year and review them on her blog, www.readallday.org.
WOW! I am green with envy.
This sounds like a quest worthy of our esteemed blog host, the information-aholic Reverend Canon Kendall Harmon.
I don’t know…I love to read, but part of that process is spending time contemplating what I have read. For me, thinking about what I am reading or have read is very important. I often think about things that I have read in the past for years. I often re-read things and think about them some more. I find that as I grow older, my understanding of what I have read changes with my changed perspective. I see flaws in things I once admired, and admire things that I once passed over without notice.
To borrow a line from Evelyn Waugh, out of context, “It was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault – it was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the very root of the matter.”
I am an avid reader and have kept for many years a list of my reading and rereading, but … this sounds too much like punching a time clock to me. I can’t really take a book on board that fast. I start out reading with a certain resistance to the author, I mentally argue with him and often I haven’t fully assessed a book until sometime after I’ve put it down. Some writers I like to read slowly and brood over. But the reviews I quickly sampled on this woman’s website are well written and my hat is off to her! Have to shop her reading list to see what’s there that I might like. 🙂
My eldest son read a book a day for a least half of his 7th grade year…instead of paying attention in class (not much there anyway) or doing homework (read “busy work”) and still managed to make reasonably good grades. Had the school not hassled him on this, he might have been able to avoid the drug heads in his school and had a less traumatic life. He is a very stable, responsible husband, father & grandfather now…and rather well read. Frances Scott
“I’ve always thought great literature is all one needs to read to understand human psychology, emotions, even history,†she said.
And I’m kind of with her on this.
There are sixty six books that I would like to recommend that are conveniently bound together in a single volume… [lol]
Hmm, it does sound like a production-line process, one in which you must keep going toward the goal without stopping to savor anything. When I read, a particularly profound sentence or metaphor can keep me musing for quite a while and I love to let beautiful language slowly flow over me and permeate. That wouldn’t be possible in a project like this one.
Sounds like the “Julie and Julia” concept. (Did anyone else just really love that movie? :>) )