SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME: A YEAR OF PASSIONATE READING
By Sara Nelson
Publisher: Berkley Books
(ISBN: 0425198197)
MY thoughts exactly, I wrote in my book blog on receiving a review copy of Sara Nelson’s So Many Books, So Little Time. I could easily identify with the cover art, and of course the sentiments. It’s a predicament book-lovers enjoy complaining about, but actually revel in. How could we not? It simply means that all is well in our world. Imagine if instead of having too many books and too little time, we had all the time in the world and too few books!
Thus, this book is, as I see it, a bit of a gloat: “Poor me: All these books. And I’m getting paid to read them!” Of course, Nelson denies it. She embarked on this project – to read one book per week for a year, and then write about the experience – so she could try to “figure out why I read what I read when I read it; how one book leads to another, and, of course, what it all means about me, my life, and the nature of reading itself.”
This may interest you, or not. If you’re looking for 52 book reviews, this isn’t what Nelson delivers. She has a lot to say about the books she reads, but relates it all to her own life and experiences so that her work reads like a journal of someone who eats, lives and breathes books. So, if you love books, read practically round the clock and see yourself and your life in the books you read, you should enjoy So Many Books.
You’ll find it irresistible when Nelson says something that describes exactly how you feel about reading and books. For example, have you ever tried, in vain, to make someone (usually not a book lover) understand why you like a particular title? “Explaining the moment of connection between a reader and a book to someone who’s never experienced it is like trying to explain sex to a virgin,” says Nelson with witty empathy.
Yes, I could relate to some of her observations and enjoyed her ballsy humour, but not the self-satisfied air that permeates most of the book. Nelson is master of the droll and insightful one-liner, but it’s so easy to be penetrating and amusing when it’s your own navel you’re describing.
Personally, I found her flippancy (“I even liked Sabbath’s Theatre. So sue me.”) irritating. Also, while honesty is mostly a good thing, her frank descriptions of her, at times, rocky relationship with her husband made me squirm on his behalf. The problem was not so much her candour as her glib manner when talking about him. Is nothing sacred? Apparently not in Nelson’s book.
Worse of all is her tendency to judge people by the books they read. Nelson spends a whole chapter justifying this, in my opinion, intolerable case of snobbery: she reveals that when a friend recommends a bad book, she “ends up reconsidering the friendship”! Thus, in Nelson’s world, book lovers are equal, but some are more equal than others. Therefore, if you are devoted to bodice rippers or restrict your reading to murder mysteries or bestsellers, you would be, in her eyes, a comrade, but a second- ... maybe even third-class one.
And then there’s the description of a visit to the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s home in Vermont. There, she sees a book “whose title is spelled out in angry red Asian characters”. Her host, Sabrina (the widow of Solzhenitsyn’s stepson) tells her that it is August 1914: Red Wheel ... in Malaysian!
Other Malaysian readers may well puzzle over the incident and share my annoyance. God only knows what language the book was actually in. Chinese? Arabic? Why didn’t Nelson check the accuracy of Sabrina’s statement? I daresay I care so much only because I’m Malaysian. It’s a small detail but it niggles like the bite of a tiny, persistent ant.
What I did like about So Many Books is that it has introduced me to a handful of titles that I’m now dying to read. Nelson can make a book sound like the most wonderful thing on earth, which leaves me thinking that she should have written 52 reviews after all.
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