However, Sara Nelson comes across as a lively kindred spirit whose observations are bound to resonate with anyone with a passion for books and reading. Like Triggerfish, I did expect more about books and less about the author's life, and wished I'd actually heard of more of the books she mentions, which I suspect are more familiar to American readers. I've really enjoyed having this volume of short essays based on Sara Nelson's "year of passionate reading" as a companion over the last few days. Most readers will probably come away from this love letter to books eager to pursue some of Nelson's favorites-Nora Ephron's Heartburn, perhaps, or Emma Donoghue's Slammerkin-which is what makes Nelson's reflections inspiring and worthwhile. She becomes enamored of David Mura's Turning Japanese, a memoir that helps her understand her Japanese-American husband better, and looks to Henry Dunow's The Way Home, about coaching baseball, while trying to help her second-grade son improve his athletic skills. Along the way, Nelson unearths treasures. But she succeeds in sharing her infectious enthusiasm for literature in general, the act of reading and individual books and authors. She doesn't necessarily stick to her list, which includes classics ("the homework I didn't do in college"), books everyone's talking about (like David McCullough's John Adams) and titles as diverse as Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth, and Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. "I have a New Year's plan," Nelson writes in the prologue to this charming diary of an unapologetic "readaholic." Her goal: to read a book a week for a year and try "to get down on paper what I've been doing for years in my mind: matching up the reading experience with the personal one and watching where they intersect-or don't." Armed with a list of books, the author, a Glamour senior contributing editor, the New York Observer's publishing columnist and a veteran book reviewer, begins her 52-week odyssey.
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