Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.

Biography, Literature, Nonfiction

Didion and Babitz

Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.

Crafts, Hobbies & Home, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Garden Wonderland

With its seamless integration of gardening principles with advanced design ideas, Garden Wonderland is the perfect gift for new gardeners—or anyone in need of a little inspiration.

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Gabrielle Hamilton

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

by Carla Jean Whitley

Prune, an unpretentious, 30-seat restaurant in New York City’s East Village, drew attention upon its 1999 opening. And so did its chef-owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, who was quickly approached by people suggesting she write a book.

“I remember at the time thinking, oh man, this is so cheap. Everybody gets a book? You open a restaurant and you get a book?” recalls Hamilton, whose essays about the intersection of food and life have appeared in the New York Times, Food + Wine and other publications. The flattery would have convinced others, but Hamilton wasn’t so easily persuaded. “I love books. I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.” And so she said no to every offer of a book contract or agent representation, choosing instead to focus on her restaurant business.

But as Hamilton’s skills developed, both with a pen and with a stove, she thought she could make a greater contribution. The result is Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a riveting memoir that explores her sometimes tumultuous family life and years spent in catering kitchens before opening Prune. The book has drawn ecstatic praise from fellow chefs, including Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali.

Hamilton’s story begins with idyllic childhood family dinners with her French mother, artist father and four siblings at their rural Pennsylvania home. But when Hamilton’s parents divorce, the children’s lives are flipped on end. During one summer, weeks pass when then-13-year-old Hamilton and her brother Simon are literally left alone. That’s when Hamilton steps into a professional kitchen for the first time, trying to make money to support her prematurely adult life. She wanders into a kitchen in her tourist town and is put to work peeling potatoes. “And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start,” Hamilton writes.

"I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.”

The ensuing journey takes her down a path seasoned with trials, errors and colorful relationships. Hamilton moves to New York, is in and out of college (it takes her three tries to graduate) and kitchens, often scraping by financially while learning about hard living from her fellow kitchen staff. After years of work in restaurants, catering kitchens and even a summer camp, Hamilton decides to pursue her long-held desire to be a writer. And so, with 30 on the horizon, she leaves her final freelance cooking gig and her girlfriend to head for the Midwest and the University of Michigan’s MFA writing program. It’s not long before she finds herself back in a catering kitchen, and upon her return to New York, Hamilton is seduced by the idea of her own restaurant—and later by an Italian man who pulls her into a green-card marriage, all while charming her with family summers in Puglia, Italy, familial joviality and Italian cooking. The result is a beautifully told tale of a colorful and sometimes spicy life.

The book’s conversation unfolds at an easy pace, like getting to know a new friend, tale by life-defining tale, and Hamilton’s writing becomes almost electric when she sees a restaurant space that could become her own. Her style mimics both the winding life path she’s traveled and her casual, conversational attitude. “Basically, it’s an invitation. So here, I’m going to start the conversation,” she explains, “and hopefully people will reciprocate.”

The time Hamilton spent crafting the memoir mimicked her story’s more exhilarating moments. As she wrote, she juggled two children under the age of three and a bustling restaurant. Sleep wasn’t a priority, and in the process Hamilton gave up on striving for balance.

“If I keep pursuing it, I feel like I’ve failed constantly. So now I’m resigned to the idea that it is not balance. It’s a binge and purge,” Hamilton explains from Prune’s dining room. “I just have to change my mind about whether that sucks or not.”

Sometimes that meant seeing her children only when they were asleep. On other occasions, she left her restaurant staff to run the kitchen while she spent time with her sons. And when it came time to transform the first draft of Blood, Bones & Butter into the finished product, the restaurant’s office became Hamilton’s refuge.

But she wonders, what’s the alternative? “I have this restaurant that was very popular, I have this book deal, I have these incredible children. What was I going to do, say no to all of that? It sucks that it all happened at the same time, but that’s a high-class set of problems right there,” she says, laughing. “I could die now and feel content.”

“I remember at the time thinking, oh man, this is so…

Betty White

by Deanna Larson

History

History

Erik Larson

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Erik Larson, author of the nonfiction bestsellers The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck and Isaac’s Storm, believes he has the “tiniest office in the world.” He’s never actually measured it, he admits. But he says the teeny room—a sort of foyer to the master bedroom’s closet—once served as the makeup room for a previous owner who was a prominent local newscaster.

“It is very small, but it’s cozy,” Larson says during a call to the home in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood that he shares with his wife, Dr. Christine Gleason, who heads the neonatology department at the University of Washington medical school, and their three daughters. “It’s probably the best office I’ve ever had.”

“No one really studies the very first year of Hitler’s rule. This is about the first dark warnings on the horizon."

One of its saving graces, Larson says, is that “a good chunk of it has windows. I’ve got what you call territorial views to the north. I see a hilltop, then a valley, then the next hilltop and the next hilltop, then a little lake. It’s very, very nice.”

And that captivating perspective—along with his “addiction to tennis”—seems to have provided at least a partial antidote to the gloom Larson experienced while researching and writing his riveting new book about the first year of Nazi rule, In the Garden of Beasts.

“When you get immersed in this era there’s something so repulsive about it that it can really drag you down,” Larson explains. “No one really studies the very first year of Hitler’s rule. This is about the first dark warnings on the horizon.

“What I found was that when you’re writing a book like this, in territory that has been pretty heavily mined in other ways, you have to read the basics. And there are a lot of basics to read. You just have to read and read and read. That’s what starts to infect you,” he says. “It’s the accumulation of these little bits and pieces of horror. It began to drag me down. And you feel this immense frustration: Why didn’t anybody do anything?”

That is one of the needling moral questions that haunts a reader throughout In the Garden of Beasts. To bring that and other questions vividly to life, Larson presents the experiences of an American family who were there and witnessed the almost-overnight changes in Germany. Charles E. Dodd, appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to be U.S. ambassador to Germany, arrived in Berlin in 1933 with his wife, his son and his daughter Martha.

“Dodd and his daughter were probably ideal characters to follow because they came from very different perspectives,” Larson says. “Martha’s life in Berlin really does follow an almost novelistic arc. She begins utterly enthralled with the Nazis, becomes less so, and is finally so disgusted that she goes over—as many did—to seeing the salvation of the world in Communism. She became a very mediocre, more or less useless agent, and it destroyed her life.”

Martha is, frankly, a piece of work. She has affairs with highly placed Germans and a long-term affair with a Russian agent. She is out and about provoking grumbling, if not consternation, among consular staff. How did this not exasperate her rather strait-laced father?

“My sense is that this is a time when people gave their children a lot more independence at a younger age,” Larson says. “I’m a father of three daughters [they are 22, 20 and 17 years old] and we’re close, but I can’t pretend, at this moment, to know what goes on in their REAL lives. They could be dancing on a table in a bar right now. I think there is a sort of wishful blindness that all fathers engage in.”

Ambassador Dodd, on the other hand, is an almost Mr. Smith Goes to Washington character. A history professor with a dry sense of humor and a strong belief in Jeffersonian principles, he was friends with Carl Sandburg and President Woodrow Wilson. He shipped his unprepossessing Chevy to Berlin, raising eyebrows among both scornful U.S. State Department elites and the Nazi leadership, which prized symbols of wealth and brute power. Many in the foreign service thought he was out of his depth.

“To his credit I actually think he did exactly what he should have done in that era,” Larson says. “He wasn’t kowtowing to the Nazis. He had his own prejudices about the Jews and so forth, but they were sort of an ambient background prejudice, they weren’t going to get in his way. I think in some weird way he was the right man, in that place at the right time, because he drew a line, a moral line. Especially after the events of June 30, 1934, he reacted appropriately, with horror. If the world had done the same thing, who knows how things would have turned out. The conventional wisdom is to criticize him. But there are those who refer to him as Cassandra, because he knew before everyone else what was happening. I think that’s accurate.”

In Larson’s telling, what happens in Berlin unfolds in chilling detail. “Getting the detail right is a very important part of my mission,” Larson says. “I want to present, to the extent I can, what something smelled like, what the weather was like.”

Yet despite his love of discovering historical detail, Larson doesn’t think of himself as a historian. “Partly that’s because there are multiple layers of dust that accumulate in one’s mind when one says the word historian,” he says, laughing. “I think of myself more as an animator of history. Now I’m not talking at all about making stuff up. I mean finding enough details to put into the narrative that readers will connect the dots and the story will come alive. So my goal is to bring the past alive and to create a historical experience.

“Ideally, I want somebody to jump into the book at the beginning and in one night or two or three or four read all the way through it and at the end come out of that book feeling as though they had experienced a past time in almost a physical way,” Larson says.

By that measure in particular, In the Garden of Beasts is a resounding success. It will keep you up late at night, turning the pages.

Arthur Phillips

by Tasha Alexander

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

William Deresiewicz

Interview by Catherine Hollis

by Catherine Hollis

Literary critic William Deresiewicz discusses his charming new memoir, A Jane Austen Education, and Austen’s timeless appeal.

Your book describes a series of “life lessons” you learned by reading Jane Austen’s novels, such as how to truly listen to other people’s stories and the value of a true friend. Do you think Austen consciously embedded these lessons in her novels, or was it unintentional?
Definitely intentional. As someone once said, she was a moralist without being moralistic. She didn’t preach, but she definitely wanted to teach—by example. The examples are what happens to her heroines. The lessons Austen imparted are the ones they learn themselves. Their stories are about learning to live better, and we’re supposed to get the idea, too.

You also document your coming-of-age through reading Jane Austen as a graduate student in English. Why do you think it was Austen who brought about this change, and not George Eliot or James Joyce, for example?
Partly it was simply a matter of timing. I discovered Austen at an age when I was probably ready to start learning these things, and through a professor in whose company I was eager to learn. But I also think it’s Austen. For reasons that I think I still don’t fully understand and probably never will, she just spoke to me in a way that no other novelist ever has. There’s something intensely personal about her writing, which is why I think so many people feel they have a personal relationship with it. You feel like she’s talking directly to you. Which is not to say that I haven’t learned important things from George Eliot and James Joyce: Joyce at a younger age than Austen, in college, when every young literary man identifies with Stephen Dedalus; Eliot at an older age. She’s more a writer of limitation and disillusionment.

Your professor Karl Kroeber acts as a kind of father figure in this memoir , introducing you to Austen’s Emma and modeling good teaching. Is it fair to say that Jane Austen was a mother figure?
Yes, I think that’s fair, all the more so because in a lot of ways she projects a maternal presence in her fiction—though the kind of mother who’s as apt to smack you in the head if you do something stupid as she is to nurture and defend you. She regarded her characters as her children, a fact that comes out explicitly in her letters. But for me, I also think it’s more complicated. A mother figure, but also a friend. Maybe a big-sister figure.

What drew you to write this hybrid of memoir and literary criticism for a general audience, as opposed to your scholarly work on Austen?
I’ve been writing about literature for a general audience for a long time, as a book critic. Actually, the fact that I was more interested in doing that than in scholarly work is the reason I decided to leave academia. The memoir part is new for me, though, and it’s been an interesting challenge: a technical challenge to blend the two and a personal challenge to be so candid in such a public way. The second part is a little frightening. As for why I decided to write the book this way, well, the idea was to convey the lessons I learned by reading Jane Austen, and I realized pretty quickly that the best way to do that would be to actually talk about the way I learned them, not just explain them in some kind of abstract and impersonal way.

What did you think of the recent Masterpiece Theater production of Emma? Was it faithful to that book's lessons?
Oops. I haven’t watched it yet. I tend to be wary of Jane Austen adaptations because so many of them are such travesties. But I should give it a shot.

Jane Austen taught you moral seriousness, how to be an adult and, ultimately, how to love. What would you like your book to convey to its audience?
First, that her books aren’t just soap operas and aren’t just fun—though of course they’re incredibly fun—they also have a lot of serious and important and very wise things to say. Second, that they aren’t just about romance (which is usually the only thing the movies have room for, or interest in). And finally, that they aren’t just for women. I would love it if the book helped introduce more men to her work. Maybe people could get it for their boyfriends/husbands/brothers.

What advice do you think Jane Austen would give to a contemporary single woman in want of a relationship?
Ha! Great question. The first thing I think she would say is, don’t settle. Then, marry for the right reasons: for love, not for money or appearances or expectations. But most importantly—and this is what I talk about in the love chapter, the last chapter—don’t fall for all the romantic clichés about Romeo and Juliet and love at first sight. For Austen, love came from the mind as well as the heart. She didn’t believe you could fall in love with someone until you knew them, and then what you fell in love with was their character more than anything else, whether they were a good person and also an interesting one. So I guess that means, date someone for a while before you commit, and don’t get so carried away by your feelings that you forget to give a good hard look at who they are. As for sex, it’s not so clear she would have disapproved of sleeping together before marriage. I think she maybe even would’ve liked it, as a chance to learn something very important before it’s too late.

Do you think Jane Austen still has more to teach you?
Absolutely. Every time I read her novels I learn something new.

RELATED CONTENT
Review of A Jane Austen Education.

Literary critic William Deresiewicz discusses his charming new memoir, A Jane Austen Education, and Austen’s timeless appeal.

Your book describes a series of “life lessons” you learned by reading Jane Austen’s novels, such as how to truly listen to other people’s stories and the value of…

Mitchell Zuckoff

by Edward Morris

Biography

Biography

Steve Coll

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

The events of September 11, 2001, changed the world—or at least, most Americans' perception of it. In his 2004 bestseller, Ghost Wars, Steve Coll put that event in context by detailing the history of foreign involvement in Afghanistan, explaining why it was the perfect place for Osama Bin Laden to pull together a radical organization like al Qaeda.

Now, Coll puts Osama Bin Laden himself into context with The Bin Ladens, a comprehensive look at a sprawling family tree. Not even Tolstoy had to handle this large of a cast—Osama is one of 54 children sired by Mohamed Bin Laden, though of course not all of them are introduced here—but readers will find their concentration rewarded with a new understanding of a dynasty that has strongly influenced the modern world.

The Bin Ladens is an incredibly dense and information-packed narrative. Did the topic ever overwhelm you with its complexity and depth?
It was very hard work. It was hard to track down the people who could help me understand the family as fully as possible—they were scattered literally all over the world. And it was hard to spread my research over time in a way that would support writing in depth about an entire century. My goal was to try to write something fresh and specific that was located in the history of Saudi Arabia—not just a narrative of the royal family, which has been done before. So that meant digging under a lot of rocks that had not previously been turned over.

If Americans could take away one lesson from your book about the rise of Osama Bin Laden and his influence in the Muslim world, what would it be?
I think it's important to see him as a modern figure, not as a medieval figure in a cave. He represents not only a reaction against the West and against globalization, but also an adaptation of Western ideas and technologies for anti-Western ends. These are the layers of complexity in his identity, his appeal and his actions that I think are too often neglected in analysis of Osama and Al Qaeda.

What would you identify as the key factor that radicalized Osama?
He was initially recruited by a Muslim Brotherhood gym teacher in his elite prep school in Jeddah. But in some way his early beliefs, while puritan and rigid, were rather orthodox in a Saudi context. His violence arose from his experiences in war in Afghanistan, where he met violence-minded volunteers from across the Islamic world.

Do you see Osama as a product of the Bin Laden family as a whole or an extreme departure from it?
Both. He is a Bin Laden in the sense that his talent as a leader and his understanding of border-crossing technologies, among other things, are derived from his membership in his own family, as was his wealth. He is not the only Bin Laden of his generation to have become deeply religious. But his embrace of violence and war against the United States and Saudi Arabia is an extreme departure from his family's interests and values—in the end, he declared war, in a sense, against his own family.

What is the one thing most people should know about the Bin Laden family, but don't?
The diversity of views and lifestyles within it. The Bin Ladens include some brothers and sisters of Osama who were as enthusiastic about America as he was hostile to it.

You note that although Saudi Arabia makes up less than 2 percent of the world's Muslim population, it has had a pervasive influence on Muslim thought. Do you see that trend continuing in the future? Or will another nation usurp Saudi Arabia's role?
Oil wealth, and the centrality of Mecca and Medina to the Islamic world, will ensure that the kingdom will continue to have influence greater than the size or proportion of its population. But I do think that there will be—and may already be—a gathering backlash in the Islamic world itself against the extreme religious and political beliefs that emanate from the kingdom's most conservative clerics.

You write that in the late 1990s, The U.S. intelligence community simply did not know very much about the Bin Laden family, and an important aspect of what it claimed to know was wrong. Without these intelligence failures, do you believe we could have prevented the 9/11 attacks?
If the U.S. intelligence community understood the family and Osama's wealth better than it did, it might have helped shape a more intelligent, more effective campaign to cut off Al Qaeda's resources and restrict its operations, but I don't think it would have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

What ties, if any, currently remain between Osama and the rest of the Bin Ladens?
The main branch of the Bin Laden family says that all ties are completely broken. His mother and one of his stepbrothers visited him in Afghanistan as recently as early 2001. Osama's wives have left him behind since the 9/11 attacks. But he has more than 20 children and some of those seem to still be in exile and perhaps some of them are in contact with him from time to time.

What do you foresee for the third generation of the Bin Laden family?
There are so many of them—hundreds—and it will be a challenge for them to develop the leaders and the cohesions to continue the extraordinary business success of their parents' generation. But I think they are generally a more worldly generation than their parents, more comfortable with the West and all of its pressures, and so many of them may be able to enjoy fully the success and wealth they have inherited.

Do you feel Osama continues to play a crucial role in the world of terrorism? Or is he a figure of the past?
Al Qaeda has revitalized itself along the Afghan border and its leadership plans and supports attacks in Europe and elsewhere from that sanctuary. Osama himself is surely more isolated within Al Qaeda than he used to be, but he remains an important media spokesman and source of visibility and, for some, at least, a source of inspiration. He is not a figure of the past—not yet.

What are you working on next?
I have the kernel of an idea about American foreign policy that I intend to work on, but I'm in the very early stages and it will be another long research road ahead.

Guy Fieri

by Deanna Larson

Arts & Culture, Humor, Nonfiction, Pop Culture

Nonfiction Pop Culture Humor Arts & Culture

Michael Barson

Interview by Lynn Green

by Lynn Green

Michael Barson has been a comics collector for decades, in addition to his day job as co-director of publicity for Putnam/Riverhead Publishing. He’s collected some of the finest examples of 1940s and 1950s love comics in the new anthology Agonizing Love.

In the panels of the brightly colored comics that once filled newsstands, young women of the era picked up pointers on finding and keeping love. These tear-jerking pop culture delights feature such stories as “The Man I Couldn’t Love,” “My Heart Cried Out” and “I Loved a Weakling.” Cheesy as the comics might seem to the modern reader, Barson thinks these vintage “morality plays” might still offer all of us some important lessons on love.

We asked Barson to tell us more about his obsession with collectibles, the appeal of romance comics and the agonizing nature of love through the ages.

How and why did you begin to collect romance comic books?
I started pretty late in life in terms of collecting the classic Romance comics. I had been collecting all sorts of other genres since the mid-60s—Superhero, War, Sci-Fi, Horror, even Funny Animal—but it wasn’t until I bumped into a big collection of vintage Love comics that was being offered for sale in the early ‘80s at NY’s Forbidden Planet store, in their collectible comics section, that it suddenly clicked—How cool are these? It was a group that contained most of the early Simon & Kirby Young Romance issues, and those proved my entry point into collecting this category for the first time. Later I bemoaned the fact that I probably had passed over several hundred (if not several thousand) tasty Romance issues over the previous 10 or 12 years while collecting in all those other genres; love comics just didn’t register for me at that time.

Why did you decide to share your collection with readers?
What’s the fun in collecting something for almost 30 years if you can’t share it with others? Let’s face it, 99 percent of the world out there would never have a chance to read any of these little gems if someone—in this case, me—didn’t take the time and effort to rescue them from obscurity. I feel I am performing a service, however modest, for humanity.

For those who aren’t familiar with the genre, can you give us a capsule description of what a “romance comic” is?
To oversimplify terribly, most of the stories that appeared in Love comics during their golden period—to me, 1947 to 1960 or so—are little morality plays that have been given a seven- or eight- page stage on which to play out. Sometimes the resolution is a happy ending, but not always. But I think it’s fair to say that in 98 percent of the cases, a lesson is learned by one of the characters in the story—a lesson that will change their attitudes and philosophy going forward.

These comics look hilariously cheesy today. Do you think readers took them seriously back then?

To the extent that even a teenage girl or young woman (probably the target audience for these comics) would take any kind of comic book in a totally serious manner, I would answer with a qualified “yes.” In that pre-Ironic era, the main reason for someone to buy and read Love comics was because they connected to both the medium and the message. They weren’t partaking of these in order to get a quick laugh—there were humor comics such as Archie and Betty and Veronica for that purpose. So while the readers of the day were not treating these romance issues as the second coming of Madame Bovary, I believe they were reading them in a serious frame of mind.

Do you have a favorite romance comic cover or story?

I don’t have a single favorite, but I will admit to being partial to the Mother-in-law subgenre. There’s something about those that just tickles my fancy, even though my own real-life mother-in-law is perfectly benign. But not so in the stories about them that I’ve included here! And I do have friends in real life who are very much embroiled in a problem of this exact nature.

What's the most important lesson you've learned about love from a romance comic?

If you just got hitched, don’t invite your mother-in-law to move in with you on your wedding night. That goes for both of you!

Is love any different today than it was in a half-century ago?

Love, and its surrounding mysteries and problems, is exactly the same, I am convinced. The only difference is that eHarmony didn’t exist in 1951. Not that it (or any of the other popular dot-com dating sites) seems to have done all that much good.

Is love always agonizing?

In my experience, yes. Because if it isn’t you that’s doing the agonizing, then the other person probably is. The real question is, would we really have it any other way? The empirical evidence of the past 100 years suggests the answer is no.

You’re the father of three sons. If you could give your children one piece of advice about love, what would it be?

Collect stamps instead. Or at least try to avoid the 434 mistakes I was too dumb to avoid.

You’re an avid collector of pop culture memorabilia—everything from postcards and posters to magazines and comics. Where on earth do you keep all this stuff? Does your collecting drive your wife crazy?
Yes, I have in fact driven my wife crazy because of the millions (nahhh, it’s really just thousands) of pieces of moldering antique memorabilia over which she stumbles every morning. And afternoon and evening.

But let me ask you—does that make me a bad person?? Right—I was afraid of that.

In the panels of the…

Michael Sims

by the editors of BookPage

Arts & Culture, Literature, Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir Literature Arts & Culture

Nina Sankovitch

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

In October 2008, Nina Sankovitch launched a year-long project: She would read one book a day, every day, for a year. The idea was to give some structure to her life after the tragic death of her older sister. In addition to reading the books, Sankovitch also committed herself to reviewing each of them on a website she created, ReadAllDay. As word of her task spread, her audience grew—and, once the project was completed, Sankovitch wrote a book of her own about her experience, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, an "affectionate and inspiring paean to the power of books and reading." We had to ask Sankovitch a few questions about this ambitious project. Her answers just might inspire you to increase your reading goals!

Even people who read a lot might find the thought of reading a book a day daunting. How did you do it (and have any kind of life!)?
By reading wherever and whenever I could! I'd started my year with a plan to read while the kids were away at school (treating my reading project like a job—the best job I could ever imagine!) but life quickly intervened in the form of sick children, needy cats, curious friends, and a few unexpected twists and turns. Then I realized that I could fit in so much reading by pushing out unnecessary preoccupations, like folding laundry (what's wrong with a clean pile for foraging?) or watching TV or going online (no need to change Facebook status: "reading" just about covered it).

Reading a book a day didn't take away from "having a life"; it made my life better, richer, fuller, more satisfying. And there was never, ever a day never a day when I woke up and thought to myself, "Oh darn! I have to read a book today." On the contrary: I was eager to get out of bed every morning because I knew I had something new waiting for me: a new landscape to explore, new characters to meet, a new plot to lose myself in and new lessons to learn.

Have you always been a reader? When did you fall in love with reading?
I have always loved books. One of my earliest memories is of going to the local bookmobile: how the three steps up seemed so huge to me and how good it smelled when I got inside the cramped, dusty space crowded with books. I was too young to read but I could pick out books for myself and look through them on my own at home or have my mother or sisters read them to me. Once I started to read for myself, I always had books around me, next to my bed, piled on the kitchen counter, in my school bag—and I still live that way! I cannot imagine a day without reading or a home without books.

What was your favorite read of the year?
I read too many wonderful books to have one favorite out of 365 books read. On my Readallday site where I posted my daily reviews, I kept a list of "Great Books," books I'd particularly loved. By the end of the year, I had more than 90 books on that list.

Was there a book you read–or reread—that surprised you?
Every book I read during my year was new to me—one of my self-imposed rules was no re-reads! But I read many books that surprised me because they were from authors I had not known before: it is such a lovely experience to discover books written by someone new, offering something different than anything I'd read before. Ruins by Achy Obejas, The Curriculum Vitae of Aurora Ortiz by Almudena Solana, The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, The German Mujahid by Boualem Sansal, The Sun Field by Heywood Braun are just some of the gems I discovered.

How did you make your selections?
I went through the stacks of my local library or the stacks at book stores, and looked first for books about an inch or so thick, which translated to about 250 to 300 pages. That was the optimal number of pages for a day of good reading. Then I looked through the book, read the first few pages, and if everything clicked for me, I added it to the pile in my arms. Friends gave me books, visitors to my website offered recommendations, and even my kids chimed in with the books I "had" to read.

On top of reading a book a day, you wrote a review of it. Did you enjoy writing the reviews?
I loved writing the reviews, although the more I'd enjoyed a certain book, the harder it was to write a review: how could I do justice to the beauty, the wit, the creativity of the author, or the magnificence of the book? Whenever I got stuck, I said to myself "What did you love about this book? Just be honest!" and the words would come. By writing about each book I was able to reach deeper into the book and into my own reactions about it, and thus I pulled out even more from the experience of reading. I also was sharing my reviews with other readers and getting responses back, further deepening both my understanding of the book and my experience of it.

What did your family think of your reading obsession?
They saw how restorative the experience was for me, and how much I was flourishing under the daily reading and writing. It was such a pleasurable regime for me that the good feelings spread throughout our house, mellowing everyone and energizing us all, at the same time.

What would you say to a person who tells you, "I don't have time to read."
Always carry a book with you and you will discover that there are moments that build into significant time for reading. And the more you find the time, the more you look for it, because reading is such a pleasure, a stimulation and an escape.

Why should people make an effort to incorporate reading into their lives?
Because of all that books offer: wisdom, humor, company, comfort, and pleasure. My advice to people is that they find books they like to read—what is enjoyable for them, not what someone else dictates as a "must read"—and indulge in the pleasures found there. And don't worry about how many books you read or if the books are "important" enough: every book is worth reading if it brings pleasure, escape, comfort or wisdom, and the number of books matters less than the everyday experience of reading.

Since completing the challenge of reading a book a day for a year, have your feelings toward reading and books changed at all?
Through my year of reading, I now understand how reading connects me to so many other people. I may read alone but in that reading I am in great company! I remember riding in a cab with a Nigerian driver during my year of reading. He and I began to discuss Chinua Achebe and Buchi Emechata, two writers I had just read. We had a great time talking and when the ride was over, we shook hands good-bye. Two strangers, from opposite sides of the world, and we connected over books. Those connections forged by reading have made me more addicted to reading than ever. The great thing about being addicted to books is that there is such an abundance of books! I will never run out of the stuff that feeds my need to read. I might run out of chocolate, but I can always find books on my shelves, new ones yet to discover or old favorites to enjoy.

Elaine Sciolino

by Trisha Ping

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