76 Pick Speaks the Language of Booklovers

Sara Nelson considers herself a maniacal reader -- you know, the sort of person who reads two to three books at once, thinks about books countless times each day, and is always being asked by friends and associates to recommend something good to read.

Thus, those of you who already have pages-long "To Read" lists and yards of books piled in your abodes and offices should beware: Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time (Putnam) will inevitably result in making your list even longer, and those piles even higher.

Nelson comes to authordom with a distinctly bookish pedigree: she's the books editor for Glamour magazine and a publishing columnist for the New York Observer. She's also talked books at Inside.com and Book Publishing Report, and her sister Liza is a novelist (Playing Botticelli). Clearly, books and reading are essential to Nelson's life and identity.

It's not surprising, then, that book addicts galore have discovered they can relate to So Many Books, So Little Time, and it was the number one pick of independent booksellers for the November/December 2003 Book Sense 76. Nelson said that the positive response the book has received "has been extraordinary, largely due to booksellers." She noted, "I'm a book maniac, so I love booksellers because they're the only people who can talk to me on my level," and added, laughing, "whether that level is high or low, I'm not sure!"

Quick wit infuses the book, which reads like a memoir and offers an engaging daily commentary on the year that Nelson spent reading. She discusses "double-booking" (reading two books at once), praises books she loved (Kate Manning's White Girl) and pans books she didn't (Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie), and reveals the strategies behind certain books' acknowledgements pages. We learn about her relationship with her husband, Leo Yoshimura, a production designer for Saturday Night Live -- who, as it happens, doesn't read very much. Then, there's the friend who loans Nelson a book, thus sending her into a temporary tailspin … after all, what if the book isn't good? Does that mean the friend isn't good, either?

These humorous and insightful glimpses into Nelson's life are interesting and entertaining, and cleverly illuminate the ways in which the people and places we encounter often guide our tastes in literature. And those with writerly leanings will enjoy going along for the ride of Nelson's writing process: we are there when she runs out of motivation (the chapter entitled "Nothing Happened") … then feels a flash of inspiration, thanks to Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird … and then moves along with new alacrity, 'round about the chapter called "Dear Mr. Robert Plunkett."

Said Nelson, "The book happened when I stopped thinking about what I was supposed to be reading, and what I was supposed to be saying about what I was supposed to be reading." She added, "Once I gave up on trying to be a writer, I could do it."

Nelson said she hopes to have another project in the works in the next few months. In the meantime, she's reading Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events with her son and going on a "tourlet" to promote her book. She's done readings at the Tudor Bookshops in Pennsylvania, joined Inside.com cofounder Kurt Anderson for a reading-centric show on NPR's Studio 360, appeared on The Today Show, and will be on Wisconsin Public Radio this month.

And, of course, Nelson keeps on reading. When she spoke to BTW, she'd just finished Tobias Wolff's Our School and Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club ("I would think booksellers would go crazy for this book"), as well as Edwidge Danticat's upcoming Dew Breaker. And, she's always giving and getting recommendations for more must-reads. After all, she said, "We [readers] are like dog people -- we speak a language others may not get."

The message boards for the book at her Web site, www.somanybookssolittletime.com, are active as well. People posting to the site give and get reading suggestions, and many of the message-writers indicate that reading So Many Books, So Little Time made them feel as if they were reading about themselves -- as Nelson's voice is at the heart of the book's appeal.

The author said of that notion, "I would like to think [the book] does for reading what Bird by Bird does for writing. In a lot of ways, that book was my model…. [Anne Lamott] really had information to impart, but she did it through the prism of her personality. That's what I was going for." --Linda M. Castellitto