Reading a Book a Day

Image by Ian Wilson via Flickr

Nina Sankovitch used to be an environmental lawyer. Now she seems to be making reading an Olympic sport. For the past 350 days, she has read a book a day. Yes, that’s 365 books a year.

A profile in Saturday’s New York Times reports that 46-year-old Sankovitch reads one book—usually 300 pages or less—each day, then posts a review on her site Read All Day.

According to the Times:

All the books are ones she has not read. She reads only one book per author. …

But mostly she makes it up as she goes along. By necessity she mostly sticks to books 250 to 300 pages or fewer — Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid primer “The Crying of Lot 49,” for example, rather than the weightier, in all ways, “Gravity’s Rainbow.” But on March 1, she made it through all 560 pages of “Revelation,” by C. J. Sansom, a murder mystery set in Tudor England.

She’s partial to high-intensity fiction, but also reads memoirs, mysteries, science fiction, graphic novels and general nonfiction, with niche interests including punk rock (“Please Kill Me,” by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain) and tennis (“A Terrible Splendor,” by Marshall Jon Fisher).

“You can’t go from ‘Little Bee,’ by Chris Cleave, which is about this young woman who witnesses torture and herself is a victim of abuse in Nigeria — a really great book, but you’re just crying or your stomach is clenched — to another book like it the next day,” she said. “If I read a book like that every day, I would have collapsed a long time ago.”

Admittedly, I am kind of in awe of Sankovitch’s ability to find and make time to read that much. How quickly I could whittle down my ever-growing “to read” list if I read a book a day! But in my world, like that of most other people, this seems impossible: I watch no more than an hour of TV a night, and yet I rarely make it through more than 60 pages of whatever book I’m reading in a given day. Other responsibilities and activities call, and the temptation of online “reading” and networking sucks up time I didn’t know I had.

Sankovitch’s story suggests that to some degree, these are just excuses. As the Times explains, Sankovitch reads “late at night, waiting to pick up her kids, at the United States Open.” She’s also “cut out a lot—the garden, The New Yorker, wasting time online, ambitious cooking, clothes shopping, coffee with friends.” She’s made time—a year’s worth—to do something she enjoys every single day, a little like Julie and Julia. Sounds like the making of a book to me.