Synopses & Reviews
A Reader’s Book of Days combines the sly charm of Schott’s Original Miscellany with the informative breadth of the Intellectual Devotional series. Jeopardy! champion and book maven Tom Nissley has combed literary history to capture the stories that make writers’ lives perennially fascinating: their epiphanies, embarrassments, and achievements. Each handsome page is devoted to a single day of the year and features original accounts of events in the lives of great writers (Proust starting In Search of Lost Time, Conrad defending the crew of the Titanic just days after it sank) and fictional events that took place within beloved books (the birth of Harry Potter’s enemy Draco Malfoy; the blood-soaked prom in Stephen King’s Carrie).
Synopsis
Candy for any book lover: an addictively readable day-by-day literary companion and guide from a former bookseller and eight-time Jeopardy! champion.
Synopsis
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 Bronte sisters, Junot Diaz, 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.
"
Synopsis
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 Bront sisters, Junot D az, 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.
About the Author
Tom Nissley is an eight-time champion on Jeopardy! and former Amazon book editor. He holds a PhD in English literature and has written for the Paris Review Daily, The Millions, and The Stranger. He lives in Seattle, Washington.