Scan barcode
A review by toniclark
So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading by Sara Nelson
3.0
It’s easy to have mixed feelings about this book. Most book lovers, I think, will admire the project and promise but be a little disappointed with the result. Sara Nelson sets out to read a book a week for the year (2002) and to write about the books. She actually writes about far fewer than 52. I wanted to hear a lot more about the books and a little less about Nelson’s life, personality quirks, family, marital problems, son’s baseball games (though said son, 7-8-year-old Charley is endearing). I appreciate books in which the writer relates her reading to her life, but I didn’t find a good balance here.
Nelson is disarmingly honest (a phrase used by another reviewer here, but it’s spot on), but at the same time often seems frivolous, shallow, dismissive of huge swaths of literature because they strike her as “homework.” I found it odd that she worries over what she’s reading in public, and how people might judge her by what they see her reading. How bizarre for someone who’s just written a book about exactly what she reads, likes, and dislikes.
At the end of the book, Nelson provides a list of the books she intended to read and those she actually did read. No faulting her there. What we read is determined as much (or more) by mood, whim, and serendipity as by design. I totally get that.
I’m glad a read it. And I highlighted many passages that really resonated with me. I now have a few more books on my endless TBR list. I’ve read many books in this mini-genre and plan to read quite a few more. I enjoyed Nelson’s much more than Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing and Andy Miller’s The Year of Reading Dangerously, but not as much as Nina Sankovitch’s or Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life.
"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." — Sara Nelson
Nelson is disarmingly honest (a phrase used by another reviewer here, but it’s spot on), but at the same time often seems frivolous, shallow, dismissive of huge swaths of literature because they strike her as “homework.” I found it odd that she worries over what she’s reading in public, and how people might judge her by what they see her reading. How bizarre for someone who’s just written a book about exactly what she reads, likes, and dislikes.
At the end of the book, Nelson provides a list of the books she intended to read and those she actually did read. No faulting her there. What we read is determined as much (or more) by mood, whim, and serendipity as by design. I totally get that.
I’m glad a read it. And I highlighted many passages that really resonated with me. I now have a few more books on my endless TBR list. I’ve read many books in this mini-genre and plan to read quite a few more. I enjoyed Nelson’s much more than Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing and Andy Miller’s The Year of Reading Dangerously, but not as much as Nina Sankovitch’s
"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." — Sara Nelson