What is by now a familiar sight: Nina Sankovitch reading at her home in Westport, Conn.
Last Oct. 28, on her 46th birthday, Nina Sankovitch read a novel, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” by Muriel Barbery. The next day she posted a review online deeming it “beautiful, moving and occasionally very funny.”
The next day she read “The Emigrants,” by W. G. Sebald, and the day after that, “A Sun for the Dying,” by Jean-Claude Izzo. On Thanksgiving she read Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Isaac Newton; on Christmas, “The Love Song of Monkey,” by Michael S. A. Graziano; on July 4, “Dreamers,” by Knut Hamsun. When seen Friday, she was working on “How to Paint a Dead Man,” by Sarah Hall. She finished two more over the weekend when her family (husband; 27-year-old stepdaughter; four boys ages 16, 14, 11 and 8) traveled to Rochester for her in-laws’ 60th wedding anniversary.
In a time-deprived world, where book reading is increasingly squeezed off the page, it is hard to know what’s most striking about Ms. Sankovitch’s quest, now on Day 350, to read a book every day for a year and review them on her blog, www.readallday.org.
Helpful reminder that we have more time than we think, if we did not waste so much of it? Envy-inducing lesson in parenting? (The kids are all dedicated readers, too.) Meditation on the channeling of grief? (She was inspired, in part, by the need to make sense of her oldest sister’s death.) Gentle celebration of the glories of books?
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