October 15, 2009--Julie, Julia, and Nina

I’m a reader. Have been for decades. Nothing gives me more pleasure than when curled up with a book and nothing gives me more anxiety than being on the road with nothing to read. I was more careful to pack a couple of books for our current trip to Florida than a bathing suit.

I like to think I’m a serious reader. This time I have with me Richard Russo’s Risk Pool, his second novel, and Richard Ford’s book of three novellas, Women With Men. Though I’m reading all the time I’m intentionally a slow reader. If Russo or Ford or Philip Roth spent a year or more working on a novel, and there is much to savor and think about, I want to give it my best attention.

Thus, you can only imagine what I thought when I read about Nina Sankovitch of Westport, Connecticut who is almost through a year of reading a book a day, writing a daily review, and posting them on her blog, www.readallday.org. I’ll give you a hint--nothing good.

I enjoyed the recent film, Julie & Julia, about Julie Powell’s successful attempt to cook her way through all the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (524 in 365 days) and blogging about it. But serious, books and cooking? A recipe or more a day, fine; but a book a day? Snob that I am . . . not my taste.

But then, guided by an article about Ms. Sankovitch in the New York Times (linked below) I looked at her blog and was frankly surprised to discover that her book list put mine a bit to shame. Unlike Nina, I haven’t recently been reading all that much Thomas Pynchon or W. G. Sebald. But when I saw the ground rules she set for herself, it gave me a bit of personal solace—to get the job done each day she opts to read short books—rarely any even 300 pages long. And she does throw in a decent number of gothic mysteries. Pages turners such as the very lengthy 560 page Revelation by C. J. Sansom. Far from my cup of tea.

So I turned to a few sample reviews, expecting, to be quite honest, that they would resemble the kinds of book reviews I was required to churn out in public school—long on plot summaries and very short on analysis. Thus, the inestimable value of Classic Comics and Cliff Notes. It’s a miracle I read any books at all after that stultifying experience.

But Ms. Sankovitch surprised me again. Yes, the Roth she read and wrote about, Indignation, is not only short (233 pages) but is far from his best or most demanding. As the New York Times reviewer Michiko Kukutani rightly in my view concluded, “In the end this little novel possesses neither the ambition nor the scope of the author’s big postwar trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain).”

She writes well and appreciatively:

The characters and the plot defy reader expectations, twisting along the narrative path and opening us to the wonder of life -- it is not what we expect! -- and so making the ending that much more heartbreaking. Knowing the outline of what is coming (Marcus tells us early on) cannot prepare us: the ending hits like a hammer to the heart.

And when she tells us, charmingly yet profoundly, what this all means to her, I am thinking less about soufflés and pressed duck than, well, why I read:

I've learned so much from all the books I've read and I need more. Both personally and in the world at large, I feel a little lost; what is my purpose in life, what is my place in the community, where is our country, the world, heading? And does any of this matter? Of course it does. Can I make a difference in how I live my own life, how I raise my children, mark my ballot, drive my car, heat my house, treat my neighbors? None of the issues underlying these questions are new: the themes of identity and responsibility and culpability and accountability have been debated and explored and examined in the great novels.