A Reader's Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year, by Tom Nissley
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A Reader's Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year, by Tom Nissley
Best PDF Ebook A Reader's Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year, by Tom Nissley
A witty and addictively readable day-by-day literary companion.
At once a love letter to literature and a charming guide to the books most worth reading, A Reader's Book of Days features bite-size accounts of events in the lives of great authors for every day of the year. Here is Marcel Proust starting In Search of Lost Time and Virginia Woolf scribbling in the margin of her own writing, "Is it nonsense, or is it brilliance?" Fictional events that take place within beloved books are also included: the birth of Harry Potter’s enemy Draco Malfoy, the blood-soaked prom in Stephen King’s Carrie.A Reader's Book of Days is filled with memorable and surprising tales from the lives and works of Martin Amis, Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Roberto Bolano, the Brontë sisters, Junot Díaz, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Keats, Hilary Mantel, Haruki Murakami, Flannery O’Connor, Orhan Pamuk, George Plimpton, Marilynne Robinson, W. G. Sebald, Dr. Seuss, Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag, Hunter S. Thompson, Leo Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace, and many more. The book also notes the days on which famous authors were born and died; it includes lists of recommended reading for every month of the year as well as snippets from book reviews as they appeared across literary history; and throughout there are wry illustrations by acclaimed artist Joanna Neborsky.
Brimming with nearly 2,000 stories, A Reader's Book of Days will have readers of every stripe reaching for their favorite books and discovering new ones.
100 drawings A Reader's Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year, by Tom Nissley- Amazon Sales Rank: #537174 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x 1.20" w x 5.60" l, .80 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 464 pages
Amazon.com Review Author Tom Nissley on A Reader's Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers
I never knew what day it was when I was writing A Reader's Book of Days. I was caught up in other days, consuming books at times as if the dates they contained were their only fruit: biographies of writers and their diaries and letters of course, but also novels, short stories, poems, and essays. I skimmed indexes, tracked through endnotes and down trails of references, and typed "january," "february," and the rest into Amazon and Google search boxes. But if I was looking for dates, what I really wanted to find were stories, ones that went beyond the usual almanac staples of births, deaths, and publication dates. April 15, after all, isn't just the day that Robinson Crusoe was published, Henry James was born, and Edward Gorey died. It's also the day that Walt Whitman mourned the death of Lincoln, Charles Dickens called the Mississippi the "beastliest river in the world," George McGovern's political director told Hunter S. Thompson he was worried about his health, and Thomas Higginson received four poems from a woman named Emily Dickinson with a note that began, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"
As I wrote, though, I realized that A Reader's Book of Days wasn't just a book of a thousand stories. It was a book of books. I had planned from the beginning to recommend reading for each month--Suite Française for June, Bleak House for November--but, especially as other people started to read it, I understood that the entire book was full of recommended reading: introducing readers to writers they might not have read, like Walter Tevis or Vera Brittain or Michael Winter, or reminding them of books they've always wanted to try, or return to, like Woolf's Orlando or Wright's Black Boy or Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley.
But for me the Reader's Book didn't really become a book itself until I came across the drawings of Joanna Neborsky. As soon as I saw her "Partial Inventory of Gustave Flaubert's Personal Effects," a poster illustrating the items Flaubert left behind at his death, including the skins of a bear and a lynx, five waistcoats, thirty-five champagne glasses, and the unpublished manuscript of Bouvard and Pécuchet, I knew that she had the good humor and obsessiveness this book demanded. A Reader's Book of Days includes a hundred of her drawings, and you can see three of them below, along with the stories they accompany.
Tales from A Reader's Book of Days with Illustrations by Joanna NeborskyMarch 13, 1601 The traces left in the archives by the daily life of William Shakespeare are famously scant and, for the most part, dry and businesslike, hardly hinting at the full-bodied humanity of his plays and poems. But among the property and tax records there is one mention that, in its identity-shifting japery, seems taken directly from one of his comedies. In his gossipy diaries, London lawyer John Manningham told the story of an Elizabethan groupie who, taken by Richard Burbage's performance as Richard III, invited him home after the show. "Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was intertained, and at his game ere Burbidge came. Then message being brought that Richard the 3d. was at the door, Shakespeare"--answering "from the capon's blankets," as Stephen Dedalus retells the story in Ulysses--"caused returne to be made that William the Conquerour was before Rich the 3."
June 12, 1857 When no one came to shave him on his first morning as a guest at the country home of Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen sent for his host's eldest son to perform the service. This may have put him on the wrong side of the Dickens children, who found his stay interminable. As Kate Dickens remembered, "He was a bony bore, and stayed on and on." Having suggested he would visit for a week or two, Andersen stayed for five, and though he entertained the children with his ingenious paper cutouts, he could tell they despised him. Their busy father was friendlier, but after Andersen finally went home to Denmark, Dickens posted a card in his guest room that read, "Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks--which seemed to the family AGES!"
September 26, 1929 "We very much like your title The Secret of the Old Clock," wrote L. F. Reed of Grosset & Dunlap to Edward Stratemeyer about his latest idea for a girl detective series. However, Reed didn't like most of the names Stratemeyer suggested for his teen heroine: "Stella Strong," "Nell Cody," and "Diana Dare." He preferred "Nancy Drew." Stratemeyer already had a thirty-year track record of creating series like the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, and, most recently, the Hardy Boys, so he confidently put the new sleuth in the hands of a young journalist named Mildred Wirt, and beginning with The Secret of the Old Clock, Wirt wrote nearly all of the first twenty-five Nancy Drew books published under the pen name of Carolyn Keene.
From Publishers Weekly In his eclectic and wide-ranging, if uneven, collection of literary trivia for book lovers, delightfully illustrated by Neborsky, eight-time Jeopardy! champion and former bookseller Nissley offers an amalgam of anecdotes, quotes, reviews, diary entries, and letter excerpts. Each section begins with an introduction to a given month, as well as a list of recommended reading related to, or set during, that time of year. Each day then receives a page of its own, with lists of notable births and deaths, and short entries about events or publications that took place on that date. February 21 alone brings us details about Shakespeare, William James, Marcel Proust, and Alison Bechdel. Entries are by turns fascinating, obscure, and puzzling. A May 6 story about Emily Dickinson turning down a friend's offer to go walking in order to stay with her ill mother will break reader's hearts. Nissley occasionally blurs fact and fiction, with varying levels of success; some events from novels are listed as if real, and he assumes a certain level of familiarity with literature. Scholars should note there are no citations, though the collection will charm nonetheless. 100 illus. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Nov.)
Review “A treasure hunt between book covers ― and my new favorite gift book… This book is a joy… [Nissley] is a marvelous storyteller.” (Elizabeth Taylor - Chicago Tribune)“Tantalizing long entries on such writerly topics as day jobs, marriage, mothers, Melville, sports, and suicide.” (Mary Norris - The New Yorker)“Essential… Terrifically fun.” (Kate Tuttle - Boston Sunday Globe)“Eclectic and wide-ranging… Delightfully illustrated.” (Publishers Weekly)“Charming, funny, beguiling, this literary miscellany combines true events in writers’ lives and fictional events in their books. The perfect gift for any reader.” (Shelf Awareness)“Oh, this is a true delight!” (Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love)“Brilliant, fascinating, and fun!” (Ken Jennings, Jeopardy! champion and author of Because I Said So!)
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Most helpful customer reviews
28 of 29 people found the following review helpful. "What, after all, is born in the dead month of January besides a new calendar?" By Luan Gaines Trivia for one reader is a feast for another. Nissley's A Reader's Book of Days is filled with the arcane and the fascinating, a dreamer's treasure hunt to inspire a return to a favorite author in this literary companion. Nissey- eight-time Jeopardy! champion and former bookseller- captures the lives of authors in diaries and letters, quotations and details, an almanac that expands beyond the usual boundaries to encompass personalities, events and human reactions. An example: "April 15th wasn't just the day that Robinson Crusoe was published, Henry James was born and Edward Gorey died. It's also the day that Walt Whitman mourned the death of Lincoln...and Thomas Higginson received four poems from a woman named Emily Dickenson..." Such is the charm and fascination of this remarkable collection of days, ideas, accomplishments, thoughts, memories and anecdotes. The joy of discovery is experienced in the manner an individual reader approaches the book, whether at random, seeking a particular date, say a birthday, or choosing a favorite name from the index "the historic and the humdrum".Nissley harbors another ambition in this tome, stories from the fictional lives of characters along with their writers, a mix of fact and fiction, where actual events occur, as do fictional events in novels, an ambitious undertaking, but one that adds yet another layer to the collection. Nissey's careful attention to the details of writer's lives- and those of their characters- is a paean to the rich world of writing, "private moments behind public triumphs", the beginnings of our favorite novels, each month introduced with appropriate comments and a list of recommended readings, peppered with black and white illustrations and an expansive index. Luan Gaines/2013.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful. Charming, interesting, timeless By Reader I've been dipping into this treasure of a book for the past week and am blown away by its charm, wit and wisdom. The illustrations are lovely. This book is a terrific gift for book lovers of all generations. Highly recommend.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful. A gem By AR This book is dangerous (in a very good way indeed). The opportunities it provides for delicious procrastinatory pursuits for years to come are unparalleled. I defy you to read more than a page or two without jotting down a book you have suddenly developed a desire to read or reread.Tom Nissley is extraordinary in many ways, and one of his many gifts is on display in A Reader's Book of Days in a way that will delight readers. Tom can take the most enormous, confusing book/person/period of time and hone in on the most interesting part. All you the reader have to do is sit back and enjoy the fruits of his erudition and careful selection.He has the reader in mind at all times, and his kindness both to the reader and to the writers he profiles is an important quality of the book. This book is written by a man who loves the written word, and serves it. He does not write to impress but to share the best of what is out there on the page.There are few books out there that teach so much in such a short amount of time while giving so much pleasure. It is the perfect book to treat oneself to, and to give to others.Thank you Tom for a gift that will keep giving for years and years.
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