This Woman is Living My Dream
I've Moved! The Boomer Chronicles has closed after 6 years, but you can keep up with me on my new blog at http://www.rheabecker.com
I just learned about a Westport, Conn., resident named Nina Sankovitch, 46, who is living my dream. She is reading a book a day for a year.
As a teenager, I clipped a story from a newspaper that contained the names of all the books a truly educated person should read. They were heavily weighted toward male-authored works (as in, like, all of them) and they were completely Western civ. So the list was faulty, but I needed some structure, so I began to read the books and checked them off as I finished. Years passed and I hadn’t gotten very far down the list. Now, Nina has a large family — a husband, a 27-year-old stepdaughter and four boys ages 16, 14, 11 and 8 — and still accomplishes her daily task. So what’s MY excuse?
Nina started her project last Oct. 28, so she has almost reached the finish line. Here is a bit from the New York Times story about her:
Ms. Sankovitch, a former environmental lawyer… follows some rules. All the books are ones she has not read. She reads only one book per author. She reads one day and posts the review the next morning. But mostly she makes it up as she goes along. By necessity she mostly sticks to books 250 to 300 pages or fewer… She’s partial to high-intensity fiction, but also reads memoirs, mysteries, science fiction, graphic novels and general nonfiction…
Granted, Nina’s family is well-off and she has household help, otherwise she could never do all the reading she is doing. But if she inspires anyone to read who hasn’t been reading, then I think her achievement is most notable.
You can follow Nina’s progress via her Read all day blog or on Twitter.
October 13th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
That is very cool, but one a day provides some serious restrictions on how long a book you can read.
October 14th, 2009 at 2:26 am
Maybe I can get into turbo-reading, now that I have a Kindle,which speeds my reading up a lot. But I would not be able to read the way Ms. Sankovitch does, since I like to read different kinds of books simultaneously: a book on politics, say, while also reading a novel, a history book or a biography, and a magazine or newspaper.
I wonder if she is planning to write a book, a la *Julie and Julia.* I don’t know if it would make much of a movie, though, since sitting around reading books isn’t very dramatic.
October 14th, 2009 at 8:44 am
Yeah, she reads books no longer than 300 words.
I think it would make a great action movie — NOT.