Sara Nelson, So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading. New York: Putnam Publishing Group, 2003. "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," write Sara Nelson in her memoir So Many Books, So Little Time. But this book is much more than what she intended it to be. It reads like a memoir including interracial marriage, sibling rivalry, teaching an eight-year-old to hit a baseball, erotic literature, all these seemingly disparate elements of Nelson's life brought to bear on the art of choosing the next good read. By the end, Nelson admits, "[ ... ] for every moment that was exhilarating, there was one that was frustrating. For every reading experience that was edifying, there was one that was elusive. And just as I thought I had a handle on what I was doing and how important it all was, I realized I was as clueless as ever." But what a great read the year made for the rest of us.
Nelson begins the new year with a reading list and a plan "to read a lot of nonfiction, to pay attention to poetry, to fill in at least some of the holes in my [literature] education," but finds that by the end of week one even the best laid plans fall through. Nelson starts with Ted Heller's Funnymen but becomes distracted due to her physical location--a secluded Vermont lodge once inhabited by the exiled Russian thinker and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. As Nelson attempts to read Funnymen, she finds herself blending her present situation into the narrative of the novel. "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." Moments like this occur throughout the book as Nelson vividly draws us into her interior world of reading so we too can experience a year dedicated to reading--something most book lovers can only dream about.
