Tom Nissley

I intended to read a page or two every day of this year... I managed to do that until March and then sporadically picked it up once or twice. I then panic-finished reading the majority of the book the last week or so of December.

It's a well-researched book, but it is quite dry. I personally gravitated to the entries about authors or books I've read, but there was some interesting facts about other writers I've never heard of too. This is certainly a good coffee table book, but a riveting read? Not for me.

Who knew Ernest Hemingway got injured so frequently though? Not me until after reading this book. (I could have survived without knowing that though...)… (mere)

There is an story story or 3 for every day of the year, and each one concerns an author, a book, a poem - and each one is massively interesting to a reader. For instance, the entry for July 21, 1940 concerns H.A. and Margret Rey escaping Nazi France to end up in New York with a pile of manuscripts and drawings about a mischievous monkey named Fifi - later changed to Curious George. The 21st was the actual day they sailed from Lisbon to Rio, but the entry briefly covered the back story and the conclusion to their journey. I read it rapidly because I found it so interesting, but now I keep it by my bed to read each night before sleep.… (mere)

Questo libro è pane per i denti di ogni bibliomane. Ogni giorno è un libro da leggere, scrivere e catalogare. I giorni in un anno, si sa, sono 365, il che fa già una cospicua biblioteca. Se aggiungete poi a questo il fatto che la vita di un bibliomane è fatta da un numero imprevedibile di anni, avrete una pallida idea di che grandezza sarà la sua biblioteca. La mia è quella di un "dinosauro", uno di quelli che ho visto a Londra nel Museo di Scienze Naturali che occupano decine e decine di metri. Aggiungete a questi scaffali il fatto che la mia biblioteca, i miei giorni, le mie letture sono in due lingue, avrete raddoppiato gli spazi mentali e digitali della mia biblioteca. Non tutto quello che gli autori di questo libro segnalano per ogni giorno dell'anno ovvimanete mi interessa, ma e un modo per aumentare ancora di più gli scaffali dando spazio a scrittori, eventi, fatti, personaggi e quant'altro che non si conoscono e così la spirale degli scaffali si allunga all'infinito.
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This book is bread for the teeth of every bibliomaniac. Every day is a book to be read, written and cataloged. As we know, the days in a year are 365, which already makes for a large library. If you add to this the fact that the life of a bibliomaniac has spanned an unpredictable number of years, you will have a faint idea of what size his library will be. Mine is that of a "dinosaur", one of those I saw in London in the Natural Science Museum that occupy tens and tens of meters. Add to these shelves the fact that my library, my days, my reading are in two languages, you will have doubled the mental and digital spaces of my library. Not everything that the authors of this book report for every day of the year of course I am interested in, but it is a way to increase the shelves even more by giving space to writers, events, facts, characters and anything else that do not know each other and so the spiral of the shelves stretches to infinity.… (mere)