Book Review: So Many Books, So Little Time by Sara Nelson

"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.

Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book because I could completely relate with her on so many levels. The entire time I was reading the book I sat with a pencil and underlined sentences and passages that I felt I couldn't have said any better myself not only about myself but also about many of the wonderful people I have met on bookcrossing as well. The author, Sara Nelson, is a writer as well as a book reviewer and she sets a goal for herself to read one book a week for a year and then write her feelings about it. She gets off track within the first week, the first connection I made with her and the humor that she uses to discuss not only her "real life" and her book life is another reason connecting with her experiences is so easy..

Quotes:

"Having a bifurcated reading brain - one part that likes 'junk' and one that reveres 'literature' - is the same kind of satisfying. You don't have to be any one thing and you don't have to think any one way." It's great. I am not the only person that can read a romance novel one day and a classic novel the next.

"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."

"For me, the feeling comes in a rush: I'm reading along and suddenly a word or phrase or scene enlarges before my eyes and soon everything around me is just so much fuzzy background." Again, couldn't have said it better myself. I have always used books as a sort of escape when I didn't want deal with things in the real world.

"Now, thanks to maturity, or psychotherapy, or the simple fact that as I get older I have a lot less time and even less patience, I have given up my membership in the book equivalent of the Clean Plate Club. If I don't like it, I stop reading."

"We're a funny, cliquish group, we book people, and sometimes we resist liking - or even resist opening - the very thing everybody tells us we're supposed to like."

"Even more important, with a book that has been discussed, reviewed, and parsed by everybody from Adam on down, you lose more than just your ability to shut off the noise and come to your own conclusions. You also forfeit the joy of discovery."

"An old book can do that for you. It can help you re-create your life's calendar. . . . An old book can remind you of where and who you were then. It can define a moment in your life . . . "

"Poor me. I have too many choices." I think that this is sometimes a problem for many of us bookcrossers. We stare at our piles of books and get so lost in the magnitude of the "task" we have set ourselves that we sometimes lose sight of the enjoyment we get from reading.

"Here's something I've learned: Having limitless choices is as difficult as having none at all. Maybe more difficult. They say . . . that too many possibilities beget anxiety, and anxiety begets anger and more bad choices. Suddenly, I see what they mean. When I'm in this off mood, the sight of those bedside piles makes me shake. There's simply no way the books there won't soon morph into dozens of new houses in my little Swiss town."

"My books are my secret lovers, the friends I run to to get away from the daily drudgeries of life, to try out something new, and yes, to get away for a few hours, from him."

"A good historical is good because it both takes you away from your own circumscribed world and puts you in the center of it: it shows you that despite the funny clothes, and the unusual language, and the long gone venues, people are all pretty much the same. The issues that occupy us - issues like jealousy, vanity, and lust, for example - don't change, even if the societies in which we play them out do."

"It reminded me yet again that what's in a book is only part of what matters, in the right circumstances and with the right history, just about any book can take you where you need to go, even if you could never have found that place on a map."

Plans: Made into a bookring.

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