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I resisted opening this book, even though it was an
autographed gift from the author’s sister-in-law, a longtime
Springfieldian. I thought that it was another book hammering me with all
the books I ought to read when I already felt guilty enough about all the
books I hadn’t yet read, and never would, given so many books, so
little time. But out of deference to my friend, and the book’s
continual resurfacing, I finally did open it — and found it less
about books than about the reading of books. There was even a chapter on
what to do when a friend pushes a book on you or when you find a friend
utterly despises a book you adore and what that says about the friendship. Sara Nelson, a book lover, has been in publishing all
her life, and she shares her life in a chatty, witty style. She confides
her plan: to read a book a week for a year and write about the experience
weekly. She pretty much carries out that plan, though she often tells us
less about the book she chooses in any given week than about the choosing
(sometimes the book chooses you), the circumstances of reading the book
itself, thoughts on that book’s genre or reputation, comparisons with
other books, or another book by the same author. Some choices are of new
books, some of oldies she’s never read — Charlotte’s Web was on her
son’s third-grade reading list, and she and Charley were a tag team,
reading a chapter together but not aloud, then discussing it — or
oldies she had read but then reread at a different point in her life (Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina). Sometimes she skips a week; we learn why. If she
starts a book but finds that she can’t get with it, she quits without
a pang of guilt, be it on page 20 or page 220, and advises us to do the
same — unless, of course, it’s on a required-reading list for a
class. She discusses the perils of loaning books. How the place and time in
which you are when you read a book, as well as your state of mind, affect
you during the reading. The afterlife, like a comet’s tail, of
reading an absorbing book. The importance of covers, of acknowledgments.
What about reading the book before seeing the movie or vice versa? Nelson says she never goes anywhere without a book in
purse or suitcase, as a hedge against boredom — or of not needing to
be thoroughly in the life she’s leading — and this is the final
point of her book. She quotes an author’s statement that reading
takes you away from your “proscribed little here to a vast and
intriguing there” but continues, “While I certainly did
discover, this past year, that there were all sorts of connections between
my world and the ones that authors have been creating for centuries,
there’s also a lot to be learned by taking a break, by closing the
book and looking around at actual, not invented, people and places.”
Don’t be daunted by the title of this book.
It’s a delightful read. I thanked my friend, belatedly.
Jacqueline Jackson, books and poetry editor of Illinois Times, is a professor emerita of English at the University of
Illinois at Springfield.
This article appears in Oct 18-24, 2007.
