by Sara Nelson
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
January 6 - Great Expectations
January 20 - A Word About Leo
February 1 - Double Booked
February 8 - Endless Love
February 13 - 92 in the Shade
February 20 - More About Mom
February 27 - The Clean Plate Book Club
March 8 - Hype
March 15 - Eating Crow
March 22 - Sharing Books Gives Me Heartburn
March 29 - Nothing Happened
April 6 - Book by Book
April 15 - Even Greater Expectations
April 22 - And the Oscar Goes to ...
April 30 - Dear Mr. Robert Plunket:
May 5 - P.S. I Lied
May 12 - Baseball, Part I
May 20 - Baseball, Part II
June 1 - Summer Reading
June 22 - A Million Little Pieces
July 6 - The Time Machine
July 20 - Reading Confidential
August 20 Anna, Emma, and Me -
September 1 - Acknowledge This!
September 11 - Oh, God
September 18 - Kid Stuff
September 25 - Sex and the City
October 2 - Sex and the City-Across the
October 10 - Afterlife with Father
October 24 - No Business Like Our Business
November 3 - Saturdays with Charley
November 15 - Œuvre and Oeuvre Again
November 25 - Openings
December 10 - Friends and Family
December 30 What Did I Do? -
Epilogue
Appendix A - What I Planned to Read, as of
Appendix B - What I Actually Did Read, as of
Appendix C - The Must-Read Pile, as of 1/1/03
“Written for book junkies like me. It is a feast and a road map to great literature and its polar opposite. Sara Nelson reads well, thinks sharply, and delivers the goods.”—Pat Conroy
“This book is bliss . . . Whatever your subject, you have to treat it with ‘fearlessness, attitude and energy,’ writes Nelson, and she goes at books with this same unbeatable combination.”—The Boston Globe
“Any reader’s ticket to bliss. What a joy this chronicle is! Sara Nelson is a splendid writer—smart, witty, tough-minded, and kindhearted. Book lovers everywhere are sure to add So Many Books, So Little Time to their list of favorites.”—Susan Isaacs
“Part memoir, part bibliophile’s exploration of great novels, overhyped classics, and the occasional brilliant piece of good luck. Nelson lovingly blends her life and literature, and makes me want to crawl through the dust jacket and curl up with a list of my own.”—Linda Fairstein
“A smart and delightful celebration of one of civilized life’s essential pleasures. What sort of person picks up a book in a bookstore and checks out the little promotional blurbs . . . ? A person like you, obviously—someone who enjoys looking at books, enjoys thinking about books, enjoys reading. If you also happen to respond well to laugh-out-loud wit, passionate opinions, deeply charming candor and unpretentious wisdom, then Sara Nelson is your perfect companion.”—Kurt Andersen
“For those who devour books, a porterhouse, perfectly rare. Or, if you prefer, an enormous bowl of paper-thin handmade potato chips. A smart, witty, utterly original memoir about how every book becomes a part of us.”
—Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors and Dry
“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 . . . a work that will make readers run to the shelf to discover which book beckons next. Recommended.”—Library Journal
“Nelson is highlighting a central aspect of reading often ignored by critics. We all look for ourselves in books. And just as we always see faces in clouds, we can find ourselves in almost any work.”
—Scripps Howard News Service
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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Copyright © 2003 by Sara Nelson.
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To Charles Nelson,
1917—1990, who didn’t know
what he was getting himself into when
he taught me to read all those years ago
and
To Charley Yoshimura,
who lives with the result, every day
Acknowledgments
Like Groucho Marx, who knew he couldn’t do any horsewhipping if he didn’t have a horse, I am first and most grateful to all the authors and publishers out there who’ve produced the books without which this book could never have been written. Even when I don’t like something I’ve read, I’m glad that I read it—most of the time, anyway—and I owe you all for that.
On the other hand, Groucho also said, more famously, that he wouldn’t belong to any club that would have him as a member. With this, I profoundly disagree; I consider myself very lucky to have lived and worked with a lot of different people, in a lot of different clubs, and to have been accepted by a lot of them a lot of the time. There are many I can’t thank by name, because I don’t know their names, but I’ve recorded their offhand, funny, and often inspiring comments about books and a whole lot of other stuff.
But here is a partial list of the ones I do know, the ones who are welcome at my club, anytime: my agent, Mark Reiter, who saw the possibilities in a book about reading almost before I did, and my editor, Neil Nyren, who generously jumped at the chance to publish it; and my friends and colleagues Nan Jones,
Jake Morrissey, Alexia Brue, Annik LaFarge, Adrian Zackheim, David Hirshey, Gil Schwartz, Jessie Woeltz, Judy Coyne, Judy Stone, Kathy Rich, Mary Duenwald, Elisabeth Egan, Lindsey Turner, Leigh Haber, Trena Keating, Marjorie Braman, John Martini, Laura Mathews, Andy Russem, Bill Goldstein, Lynn Goldberg, Louisa Ermelino, Stephen “Kuff” Nelson, Jonathan Nelson, Joanne Kaufman, Sarah Crichton, Rachel Clarke, Lorraine Shanley, Constance Sayre, Robert Sabbag, Ira Silverberg, Hazel Shillingford, Lizz Winstead, Ruth Liebmann, Robin Wolaner, Lindy Hess, Miwa Messer, Jake Brown, Ellen Ryder, Maura Fritz, Dennis Wurst, Leah Rosch, John Kaye; everybody from Inside.com, particularly David Carr, Stephen Battaglio, PJ Mark, and Kurt Andersen; everybody at Glamour, particularly Cindi Leive, Alison Brower, Kristin Van Ogtrop, Jill Herzig, Erin Zammett, and Allison Mezzafonte; everybody at The New York Observer, particularly Maria Russo and Peter Kaplan; and of course, the St. Luke’s Moms, particularly Maria Turgeon, Lauren Turner, Kara Young, Sabrina Turin, Paulette Bogan, Jane Stewart, and Susan Holmes.
I especially want to thank the following, without whose daily support, advice, and faith I’d still be on page 1:
James Ireland Baker, not only a find of a friend but a reader and writer extraordinaire.
Liza Nelson, for a sisterhood that rarely exists outside of books.
June Nelson, for an amazing example.
And Leo Akira Yoshimura, the only person I know who can describe me as “relentless” and mean it as a compliment.
Prologue
Call me Insomniac.
It’s three A.M. and as usual, I’m awake, wandering around my New York apartment. I stumble toward the space my husband and son call the family room but I privately think of as “my library.” From floor to ceiling on three walls, it’s beautifully lined with cherry shelves. My husband, Leo—a production designer for Saturday Night Live, and somebody who knows a thing or three hundred about woodworking—built these for me with husbandly pride, professional exactitude, and only a modicum of marital resignation. “Just don’t ask me to do the same for your shoes,” he said.
I love this room and have spent hundreds of late-night hours here surrounded by my books. There’s the set of proofs I kept putting off for two years until I met—and adored—its author at a party. There’s the novel by a writer I knew of only by reputation, until he became my favorite boss. Then there’s the out-of-print biography I scoured the Web to find—and finally scored from a used-book dealer in Denver.
I’ve spent more than late-night time in this room. I’ve also expended lots of thought and energy here, reading novels I’d saved up for just the right moment, fretting that my books would soon outgrow the precious personal real estate Leo had provided for them, worrying that some favorite book had gone missing, even briefly attempting mass alphabetization. You might not be able to figure out what’s going on here organizationally, but I have a Rain Man-like capacity to visualize the books, almost title by title, and put my hand on any one within seconds. If I have an urge to dip into, say, John Hubner’s Bottom Feeders, an odd biography of the San Francisco pornographers the Mitchell brothers, I see it in my mind’s eye, nestled next to Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger at the bottom of the shelf behind me. There’s no discernible logic for those two very different books’ existing as neighbors except, perhaps, that they both have bluish covers.
But tonight, unlike most nights, I have an agenda. Tomorrow I’m leaving for a visit to my friend Sabrina’s house in Vermont, and I need to choose a book to take with me. I have a New Year’s plan: I’m setting out to read a book a week for the next year and write a diary of the experience.
“A book a week?” some friends have asked, shaking their heads in what I blithely assume is envy. “How are you going to do that while you also have a job, a son, and a life to live?” But until now, I haven’t been worried. For twenty years, as I worked as a reporter, a teacher, an editor, a TV producer, a book reviewer, and a freelance magazine writer—and for seven as a mother—I’ve been reading, and usually way more than a book a week. I’m ravenous for books and awake half of most nights—a good combination, it turns out, since the best reading time is from three to five A.M. in this very room.
You should know that I wasn’t always like this. I mean, I’ve always been a night crawler, but there were periods of my life when the rooms I crawled through were a little more populated—and a whole lot louder—than my lovely library is today. I used to go to movies almost compulsively. One of my favorite things, as a teenager, was to spend weekend afternoons at what we quaintly, in those small-town pre-multiplex days, called double features. I used to go on dates, until I met Leo fourteen years ago and our marriage put an end to that, at least more or less. I used to go, honest to God, dancing. I wasn’t, in short, the kind of egghead graduate student who showed up at the publishing programs I’ve taught at over the years, kids who claimed their love of reading dated back to toddlerhood, when a book fell from the shelves onto their tiny heads and they wiped off the blood and opened the book and voilà, their lives were changed forever.
I wasn’t a particularly early reader or even a very avid one; I don’t have bittersweet memories of sitting by the window devouring Little House on the Prairie as other kids whooped it up in the playground. I never once, as an adolescent, chose a fictional Heathcliff over my personal real-life version, who was a boy named Brett Friedman who looked more like Mick Jagger. I was a good student, sure, but I was motivated more by a need to please the teachers (and my parents) than by any love of literature. In other words, when it came to reading, I did what I was told: Moby-Dick required in the eighth grade? No problem. Luckily, I was always a fast reader, which meant I still usually had time to busy myself with my more “interactive” pursuits, like torturing my little brother and perfecting my role as the family crybaby.
And when I did read for personal pleasure instead of academic profit, I wanted escape, not enlightenment. I remember, for example, a period immediately post-college when my best friend (who was soon to become my biggest rival) landed one of her first freelance magazine assignments. She was to read and review a novel, Enchantment, by the longtime New Yorker writer Daphne Merkin. Apparently, this was a serious novel that made some important points about growing up in America, but I would never have known it had another friend not chosen to rub my face in it: “She’s reading that, and what are you reading?” she chided. “Jackie Collins?”
I’ll still never understand how she knew.
In other words, through most of my life, up to and including now, there are holes in my reading experience wide enough to drive the proverbial Mack truck through. I read a lot in college, of course, but my major was Latin American Studies (I had an affinity for foreign languages) instead of the more usual English. Consequently, I’d read a lot of the magical realists and just about no Dickens. My specialty, in fact, was obscure Latin American poets, like the Chilean Cubist Vicente Huidobro, but I knew nothing of, say, Keats. In fact, all I could have told you about that poet’s famous odes was a joke my older brother Kuff used to make at the dinner table. What’s a Grecian urn? He’d ask. Answer: About a buck an hour.
So when did my life change? Looking back, I can see the early warning signs of readaholism, like when my mother gave me Marjorie Morningstar when I was thirteen and I pulled an all-nighter reading—and weeping over—the Herman Wouk novel. I remember one long and lonely summer just before college when I worked as a Kelly Girl in Boston and turned up at my only local friend’s house every weekend with a different novel. (“You’re reading The Golden Notebook?” I remember her saying. “Last week it was Paul Bowles!”) But I guess I’d say my “disease” reached full flower soon after I’d started living alone in New York, with little money and a narrow social circle that included not-so-friendly friends like the ones above. Slowly, it dawned on me: Books could be more than a path to good grades or something to do when, in those pre-cable days, you’d already seen the Movie of the Week.
I started paying closer attention to book r
eviews and began taking advantage of the free review copies that were pouring into the magazine at which I worked as an editorial assistant. I didn’t have much to do on weekends anyway, so I began cruising bookstores and got myself a New York Public Library card. And soon I was hooked: not only were books cheaper than movies and easier to find than suitable human dates, they could take me with them to fabulous places. I could be sitting in my dank studio apartment with five dollars to my name, but simply by opening a book, I could be in Paris in the nineteenth century. I started to beg, borrow, or buy just about any novel, biography, or memoir I could find. I even went through a period when I turned my knowledge of obscure Latin American literature into a tiny—and I mean minuscule—cottage industry by translating a couple of novels and poems for which I was handsomely rewarded with sums, as Calvin Trillin once said, in the high two figures.
Don’t get me wrong: I eventually did start to have a life, plenty of work and friends and trips and movies and dramas—of the interpersonal, not just the bookish, kind. Nobody who knows me would ever confuse me with Marian the Librarian (“Why, Miss Nelson, when you take off your glasses, you’re actually pretty!”) or suggest I left a single social stone unturned in my pursuit of literature. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite: the busier I’ve gotten over the years—the more family and work activities, the more friends to keep up with, the more duties of adulthood and parenthood, the more, well, life—the more, not the less, I’ve read. Maybe I’m perverse, but there’s something comforting to me about knowing that whatever is going on in my outer world, bad or good, exciting or boring, I know I will find comfort and joy and excitement the minute I get home to my book du jour or semaine or, very rarely, mois.