So Many Books, So Little Time

When I saw So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading on my library shelves, it caught my attention.  The blurb for this nonfiction volume described author Sara Nelson as editor, reporter, reviewer, mother, daughter, wife and compulsive reader who chronicled a year’s worth of reading.  She discovered that books chose her as much she chose them.  I can relate.  I describe myself as a moody reader—a book can sit on my shelves for years before I rediscover it, then the timing is right, and the book and I are off and running.

So Many Books, So Little Time was published in 2003, making it somewhat dated, but this wasn’t a big issue for me.   I also realized from the start that my background and life experiences didn’t approximate Nelson’s.  She was Jewish, her parents were wealthy; she was the product of prestigious private schools and Yale University.  Her husband, Akira “Leo” Yoshimura was a Japanese-American who was the art designer for Saturday Night Live.  They lived in New York City and had one child.

She wove her daily experiences into her writing, which added human interest.  She revealed somewhat reluctantly that her mother didn’t read much to her as a child because neither enjoyed it, and she doesn’t enjoy reading to her own son, Charley.  She wrote honestly of the harsh arguments she and her husband had and his issues with anger management. 

I was familiar with most of the titles Nelson discussed in her books, such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Katharine Graham’s Personal History, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, even if I hadn’t read them all.  Her book was sufficiently interesting that I finished it, often reading late at night as I told myself I would stop at the end of a chapter but because her chapters were short, I would read another and another.

In the end, the book was worth reading for passages, such as:

[Books] remind me of the person I was and the people I knew at the time I read them, the places I visited, the dreams I had as I lay on the couch or in bed or on the beach and read them….I talk about my books as if they were people, and I choose them the way I choose my friends:  because somebody nice introduced us, because I liked their looks, because the best of them turn out to be smart and funny and both surprising and inevitable at the same time.

Out of curiosity I looked up Sara Nelson on the internet.  She is currently the editorial director at Amazon.com and was formerly the Books Editor for Oprah.  Her marriage to Leo Yoshimura didn’t work out, and she remarried in 2013.