Title: A Reader’s
Book of Days
Author: Tom Nissley
Illustrations: Joanna
Neborsky
Genre: Non-fiction 809.9339
Publisher/Date: W. W.
Norton/2014
Dates read: 1/1/17 – 9/11/17
IBSN: 978-0-393-23961-1
Sub-titled: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year.
Mr. Nissley has done a wonderful job of recording minutia in this read. Like he says you can read it cover-to-cover or start with your birthdate, like he did, or open at random or seek out your favorite names in the index. I did a combination of all of these trying at first to read each date as it occurred on the calendar. Then I fast forwarded and read a number of days at once. It’s fun to wallow in the obscurity of the facts. For example, did you know that Harper Lee was given, as a gift, money and the wherewithal to write a book and that her first choices for To Kill a Mockingbird (that book) were Go Set a Watchman and Atticus.
Mr. Nissley has done a wonderful job of recording minutia in this read. Like he says you can read it cover-to-cover or start with your birthdate, like he did, or open at random or seek out your favorite names in the index. I did a combination of all of these trying at first to read each date as it occurred on the calendar. Then I fast forwarded and read a number of days at once. It’s fun to wallow in the obscurity of the facts. For example, did you know that Harper Lee was given, as a gift, money and the wherewithal to write a book and that her first choices for To Kill a Mockingbird (that book) were Go Set a Watchman and Atticus.
Tom’s research goes back to before St. Augustine who in 387
invented the modern autobiography with his Confessions. On
June 18, 1982, at age seventy in Ossining, New York; age eighty in Franklin
Park, New Jersey; and age ninety in New York City, respectively, John Cheever,
Granville Hicks, and Djuna Barnes died.
Another obscurity is recorded on July 7, 1938, when F. Scott Fitzgerald
wrote to his daughter, Scotty, with lots of reading advice that reading Sister Carrie is as easy reading as a True
Confession.
Each month begins with an essay about the month. He asks “(But) is August august?” Then he recommends certain books to read for
the month. This is my second year in
reading or listening to these suggestions.
I usually like to listen to the selection so go through the public
library’s inventory looking, first for it on compact disc. It’s almost time to decide what I’ll enjoy in
2018. I’m thinking Ms. Hempel Chronicles
by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum for next September.
Some of his monthly seven or eight mini-blurbs I’ve already read, such
as The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (September) and Peyton Place by Grace
Metalious (October) and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (November.)
Each day starts with a couple births. March 8 -- 1931 John McPhee (Coming into the Country, Oranges),
Princeton N. J.
And deaths. January 28
-- W. B. Yeats (The Tower, “The
Second Coming”), 73, Menton, France
July 10 -- 1993 Ruth Krauss (A Hole Is to Dig, The Carrot Seed), 91, Westport, Conn.
No comments:
Post a Comment