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

From the Publisher

Sometimes subtle, sometimes striking, the interplay between our lives and our books is the subject of this unique memoir by well-known publishing correspondent and self-described "readaholic" Sara Nelson. From Solzhenitsyn to Laura Zigman, Catherine M. to Captain Underpants, the result is a personal chronicle of insight, wit, and enough infectious enthusiasm to make a passionate reader out of anybody.

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.”

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

This book will inspire and humor those who can't go anywhere without something to read. A reviewer and reporter who focuses on the book industry, Nelson came up with the idea of reading one book per week for a year and recording her reactions. The plan was a good one, but it did not pan out as expected. The result is a marvelous record of how books choose us more than we choose them and how they then proceed to have a wonderful impact on our lives. Nelson's reading covered a broad variety of subjects and authors, from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird ("funny and wise") when she's suffering from reader's block, to E.B. White's Charlotte's Web when she's trying to get her third-grade son interested in reading, to Catherine Millet's The Sexual Life of Catherine M. when she's wondering whether one should read a favorite sex scene aloud to another person ("that's personal"). Throughout, Nelson's observations remind us of how books can transport us to different worlds and end up changing our own. At the back of the book, she includes lists of what she intended to read, what she ended up reading, and what her must-read stack looks like now. It is a fitting conclusion to a work that will make readers run to the shelf to discover which book beckons next. Recommended for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/03.]-Ron Ratliff, Kansas State Univ. Lib., Manhattan Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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Table of Contents

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January 6
Great Expectations

But enough about me. Let's talk about my project.

I'm here trying to choose my first book of the year. I've spent a good couple of days thinking about what that book should be, which means I've been scanning these shelves as well as sifting through the piles near my bed, the ones mentally marked Must Read, Might Read, and Maybe Someday. (I'm intermittently ruthless about the assignment of these categories, banishing Richard Russo's Empire Falls from Must Read to Maybe Someday after six failed attempts to get interested in it. On the other hand, I moved Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit from Might Read to Must Read after no fewer than six friends extolled its virtues.) I've already decided to take one biggish book instead of the usual three or four I often pack as insurance against being caught-can you imagine?-with nothing to read. I've already finished The Corrections-and besides, I have this idea that the New Year should begin with a New Book, preferably one that's light and maybe even funny. The year 2001 was tough going for all of us, and I have this superstitious idea that if I start this year with something happy, it'll be a happy year.

Eventually, I find, high up on the shelves, where the newest books often go, a copy of Funnymen, a novel by Ted Heller, who wrote the delightful Slab Rat, which I loved, despite the terrible review it got in The New York Times Book Review. Heller-son of Joseph Catch-22 Heller-has a gift for black comedy (coincidence or genetics? You decide), and this new novel sounds intriguing: it's an imagined oral history of a comedy team made up of a Jewish comedian and an Italian-American crooner in the post-vaudeville era. It's a Martin-Lewis kind of thing, I gather from the jacket copy, and while I've never been a great fan of that particular couple, I find the phenomenon kind of interesting. And it weighs in at around 400 pages, so all my criteria are met. Funnymen it is, then, I think as I tuck it into my duffel bag.

I should probably stop right here and explain that this wasn't the most ordinary of Vermont lodges we would be visiting. Our host, my friend Sabrina, is the widow of a stepson of the famous Russian writer and thinker Alexander Solzhenitsyn. As mother of the author's first grandchild, Sabrina is still welcome at the compound in Cavendish, Vermont, where the Solzhenitsyns lived in exile for nearly twenty years. (They're now back in Russia, and the Cavendish digs are used by Sabrina and the two S. sons who live in the States.) The idea of visiting a famous Nobel Prize- winning author's home appeals to me, and besides, Sabrina has promised us skiing lessons and hot toddies and lots and lots of lazy hours to read by the fire.

When we get there, the family's choice of exile venue begins to make sense: it's beautiful land up here, but isolated, and very, very cold. The two houses the author had built for him-one for the family to live in and one for the writer to write in-are connected by a basement passageway. There's something very Russian about the whole setup, and it even suggests a kind of architectural Stockholm syndrome: the expatriate author purposely building a home reminiscent of the Siberian prison in which he spent a couple of decades.

In other words, it's the polar (pun intended) opposite of the warm, loquacious nightclub world Heller portrays in Funnymen.

Still, I'm looking forward to the visit and to reading Funnymen, and after a day on the slopes-or rather, a day in which Leo and I hovered as Charley took his first skiing lesson on the slopes-a hearty dinner, and a couple of drinks, I sit down on the simple sofa in front of the fire and open it. But suddenly, it's not so Funny. In the book, Heller is describing the honky-tonk vaudevillian atmosphere of a Catskills nightclub; I look up for a moment and see hard ground and bare, frozen trees. One character refers to the "A-bomb" nature of the act because it "kills" so well, and I wander into the Russian Orthodox chapel the author built for himself in the basement. I'm sorting through characters named Heine and Ziggy and Snuffy and my eyes wander to the wall-to-wall bookshelves-more of them here but not nearly so nice as the ones Leo built-and wonder aloud at a big fat book whose title is spelled out in angry red Asian characters. What's that? I ask Sabrina. Oh, she says, with the air of someone who's had it explained to her before, that's Solzhenitsyn's August 1914: Red Wheel, but in Malaysian. I suddenly understand what's wrong with this picture: I'm reading about the Borscht Belt in the middle of the Gulag. No wonder I can't retain my focus.

Part of the appeal of books, of course, is that they're the cheapest and easiest way to transport you from the world you know into one you don't. That's why people who'd never leave the house read travel tomes and why, on a swelteringly hot summer day, you can have fun with, say, Smilla's Sense of Snow. A friend of mine tells me that he likes to listen to tapes of Trollope novels while negotiating New York City traffic because he likes the clash of his inner and outer worlds: "The lovely British voice on the tape is saying, 'And the vicar went into the parish,' just as I'm yelling in my best New Yorkese, 'Hey, Buddy, up yours!' to the cabdriver on my right." Reading's ability to beam you up to a different world is a good part of the reason people like me do it in the first place-because dollar for dollar, hour per hour, it's the most expedient way to get from our proscribed little "here" to an imagined, intriguing "there." Part time machine, part Concorde, part ejector seat, books are our salvation.

But here I am in rural, outer Vermont, having traveled this time by train, not page. And suddenly, Funnymen-a book that back in New York might well have transported me happily to the Catskills-seems superfluous. I was already in a new world. Besides, reading a novel about comedians here seemed somehow inappropriate, sort of like giggling over Bridget Jones's Diary at a divorce proceeding. There was no way I was going to get through it.

So I started prowling Solzhenitsyn's shelves. "Why not try something by the great man himself?" my exasperated husband suggests. But by now my college-major Spanish is so rusty I can barely understand what my building superintendent says, let alone the thoughts of the great writer. And I don't read Russian-or Croat or Chinese or Malaysian for that matter-so my options are limited. In fact, in both of these houses, except for a dog-eared copy of Gulliver's Travels I find in one of the sons' bedrooms upstairs, there's almost nothing that's both (a) in English and (b) not about or by Solzhenitsyn himself. For a brief moment, I consider One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I remember vaguely from a college world history course, but then I remember the only reason I read it then: some Russian novel was required, and Ivan Denisovich was the shortest one on the list. Eventually, I uncover a copy of a book in English called Solzhenitsyn: Soul in Exile, which I gather is one of the few biographies sanctioned by the Solzhenitsyn family, as there is a boxful of them standing by the door. It's a book I never, ever would have read under any other circumstances, but I'm in Russia now, I tell myself. I need to do as the Russians do. What's more: I'm grateful to have a window on the world I've just entered.

Remember how I said I expected to learn some lessons about reading? Well, I just never thought they'd be so prosaic-or would come so soon. But by the time Leo and Charley and I were settled back onto the train to New York, I'd figured out a few things. To wit: (1) Choosing a book is not all that different from choosing a house. There are really only three rules: location, location, and location. And (2) In reading, as in life, even if you know what you're doing, you really kind of don't. To paraphrase the old saw: If you want to make the book god laugh, show him your reading list.

"How do you choose your books?" my friends had asked. Less than a week into my project, I can now tell them the beginning of the truth. I don't always choose the books, I'll say. Sometimes the books choose me.

—from So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading by Sara Nelson, copyright © 2003 Sara Nelson, published by The Putnam Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher.