לצפות ב-NCIS או לקרוא ספרים?
October 12, 2009 Our Towns A Quest to Read a Book a Day for 365 Days By PETER APPLEBOME WESTPORT, Conn. Last Oct. 28, on her 46th birthday, Nina Sankovitch read a novel, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” by Muriel Barbery. The next day she posted a review online deeming it “beautiful, moving and occasionally very funny.” The next day she read “The Emigrants,” by W. G. Sebald, and the day after that, “A Sun for the Dying,” by Jean-Claude Izzo. On Thanksgiving she read Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Isaac Newton; on Christmas, “The Love Song of Monkey,” by Michael S. A. Graziano; on July 4, “Dreamers,” by Knut Hamsun. When seen Friday, she was working on “How to Paint a Dead Man,” by Sarah Hall. She finished two more over the weekend during a trip to Rochester with her family (husband; 27-year-old stepdaughter; four boys ages 16, 14, 11 and 8) for her in-laws’ 60th wedding anniversary.In a time-deprived world, where book reading is increasingly squeezed off the page, it is hard to know what’s most striking about Ms. Sankovitch’s quest, now on Day 350, to read a book every day for a year and review them on her blog, www.readallday.org. Helpful reminder that we have more time than we think, if we did not waste so much of it? Envy-inducing lesson in parenting? (The kids are all dedicated readers, too.) Meditation on the channeling of grief? (She was inspired, in part, by the need to make sense of her oldest sister’s death.) Gentle celebration of the glories of books? There’s some of all of that in Ms. Sankovitch’s Proustian year (so far minus the Proust) of reading avidly — late at night, waiting to pick up her kids, at the United States Open. But perhaps what stands out most is that, at a time when reading books can feel like a pre-Internet anachronism, she did it mostly because, well, she wanted to. “This is not someone trying to run an ultra-marathon,” said her husband, Jack Menz, a lawyer, whose first thought about her plan was, “How about a book a week?” He added, “It’s someone getting to do what she really enjoys.” Ms. Sankovitch, a former environmental lawyer with piercing blue eyes who wears a locket containing an image of a man on a toilet reading a book, follows some rules. All the books are ones she has not read. She reads only one book per author. She reads one day and posts the review the next morning. But mostly she makes it up as she goes along. By necessity she mostly sticks to books 250 to 300 pages or fewer — Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid primer “The Crying of Lot 49,” for example, rather than the weightier, in all ways, “Gravity’s Rainbow.” But on March 1, she made it through all 560 pages of “Revelation,” by C. J. Sansom, a murder mystery set in Tudor England. She’s partial to high-intensity fiction, but also reads memoirs, mysteries, science fiction, graphic novels and general nonfiction, with niche interests including punk rock (“Please Kill Me,” by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain) and tennis (“A Terrible Splendor,” by Marshall Jon Fisher). “You can’t go from ‘Little Bee,’ by Chris Cleave, which is about this young woman who witnesses torture and herself is a victim of abuse in Nigeria — a really great book, but you’re just crying or your stomach is clenched — to another book like it the next day,” she said. “If I read a book like that every day, I would have collapsed a long time ago.” Ms. Sankovitch claims not to be a Type A maniac and does seem pretty normal. A non-reading indulgence, she says, is watching “NCIS” while folding laundry. Still, to make this work she’s cut out a lot — the garden, The New Yorker, wasting time online, ambitious cooking, clothes shopping, coffee with friends. There were a few close calls — Christmas, for example, when she did not start reading until 10 p.m. She has household help for a day every other week, and it doesn’t hurt that the family is comfortable economically or that the household, now in full Halloween mode, seems to have a suburban Glass family quality. Peter, her 16-year-old, is reading Pynchon; the 14-year-old, Michael, reads Ayn Rand and political screeds like those by Al Franken; and asked what kind of books he likes to read, George, the 11-year-old, replied, “Long books.” Aside from the pleasure of it, Ms. Sankovitch had other goals — inspiring a love of books in others and finding her way through a period of sorrow and soul-searching brought on by the death of her sister Anne-Marie in 2005. “I’ve always thought great literature is all one needs to read to understand human psychology, emotions, even history,” she said. “For someone sitting around reading books, it’s been a really lively year.” Ms. Sankovitch, who has a law degree from Harvard and reads fast but does not speed read, is no doubt smarter than the average bear. Yet she’s convinced that reading a book a week is something most people can do. She said there’s never been a day when the reading seemed a chore, but with less than three weeks to go, she’s contemplating the experiment’s end. “I’ll definitely read a book, but I won’t read a whole book,” she said, thinking of her birthday. “Or maybe I’ll sit around all day watching ‘NCIS.’ ”
October 12, 2009 Our Towns A Quest to Read a Book a Day for 365 Days By PETER APPLEBOME WESTPORT, Conn. Last Oct. 28, on her 46th birthday, Nina Sankovitch read a novel, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” by Muriel Barbery. The next day she posted a review online deeming it “beautiful, moving and occasionally very funny.” The next day she read “The Emigrants,” by W. G. Sebald, and the day after that, “A Sun for the Dying,” by Jean-Claude Izzo. On Thanksgiving she read Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Isaac Newton; on Christmas, “The Love Song of Monkey,” by Michael S. A. Graziano; on July 4, “Dreamers,” by Knut Hamsun. When seen Friday, she was working on “How to Paint a Dead Man,” by Sarah Hall. She finished two more over the weekend during a trip to Rochester with her family (husband; 27-year-old stepdaughter; four boys ages 16, 14, 11 and 8) for her in-laws’ 60th wedding anniversary.In a time-deprived world, where book reading is increasingly squeezed off the page, it is hard to know what’s most striking about Ms. Sankovitch’s quest, now on Day 350, to read a book every day for a year and review them on her blog, www.readallday.org. Helpful reminder that we have more time than we think, if we did not waste so much of it? Envy-inducing lesson in parenting? (The kids are all dedicated readers, too.) Meditation on the channeling of grief? (She was inspired, in part, by the need to make sense of her oldest sister’s death.) Gentle celebration of the glories of books? There’s some of all of that in Ms. Sankovitch’s Proustian year (so far minus the Proust) of reading avidly — late at night, waiting to pick up her kids, at the United States Open. But perhaps what stands out most is that, at a time when reading books can feel like a pre-Internet anachronism, she did it mostly because, well, she wanted to. “This is not someone trying to run an ultra-marathon,” said her husband, Jack Menz, a lawyer, whose first thought about her plan was, “How about a book a week?” He added, “It’s someone getting to do what she really enjoys.” Ms. Sankovitch, a former environmental lawyer with piercing blue eyes who wears a locket containing an image of a man on a toilet reading a book, follows some rules. All the books are ones she has not read. She reads only one book per author. She reads one day and posts the review the next morning. But mostly she makes it up as she goes along. By necessity she mostly sticks to books 250 to 300 pages or fewer — Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid primer “The Crying of Lot 49,” for example, rather than the weightier, in all ways, “Gravity’s Rainbow.” But on March 1, she made it through all 560 pages of “Revelation,” by C. J. Sansom, a murder mystery set in Tudor England. She’s partial to high-intensity fiction, but also reads memoirs, mysteries, science fiction, graphic novels and general nonfiction, with niche interests including punk rock (“Please Kill Me,” by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain) and tennis (“A Terrible Splendor,” by Marshall Jon Fisher). “You can’t go from ‘Little Bee,’ by Chris Cleave, which is about this young woman who witnesses torture and herself is a victim of abuse in Nigeria — a really great book, but you’re just crying or your stomach is clenched — to another book like it the next day,” she said. “If I read a book like that every day, I would have collapsed a long time ago.” Ms. Sankovitch claims not to be a Type A maniac and does seem pretty normal. A non-reading indulgence, she says, is watching “NCIS” while folding laundry. Still, to make this work she’s cut out a lot — the garden, The New Yorker, wasting time online, ambitious cooking, clothes shopping, coffee with friends. There were a few close calls — Christmas, for example, when she did not start reading until 10 p.m. She has household help for a day every other week, and it doesn’t hurt that the family is comfortable economically or that the household, now in full Halloween mode, seems to have a suburban Glass family quality. Peter, her 16-year-old, is reading Pynchon; the 14-year-old, Michael, reads Ayn Rand and political screeds like those by Al Franken; and asked what kind of books he likes to read, George, the 11-year-old, replied, “Long books.” Aside from the pleasure of it, Ms. Sankovitch had other goals — inspiring a love of books in others and finding her way through a period of sorrow and soul-searching brought on by the death of her sister Anne-Marie in 2005. “I’ve always thought great literature is all one needs to read to understand human psychology, emotions, even history,” she said. “For someone sitting around reading books, it’s been a really lively year.” Ms. Sankovitch, who has a law degree from Harvard and reads fast but does not speed read, is no doubt smarter than the average bear. Yet she’s convinced that reading a book a week is something most people can do. She said there’s never been a day when the reading seemed a chore, but with less than three weeks to go, she’s contemplating the experiment’s end. “I’ll definitely read a book, but I won’t read a whole book,” she said, thinking of her birthday. “Or maybe I’ll sit around all day watching ‘NCIS.’ ”