Year of Intense Reading Leads to Insights, Memoir

When Nina Sankovitch's older sister was dying, her final words were "Read that. It's interesting." She took those words to heart.

From October 2008 to October 2009, Sankovitch spent part of each day reading a book from cover to cover and posting a review of it on her website, www.readallday.org. The project, which she started on her 46th birthday, began as a tribute to her oldest sister, Anne Marie, who died suddenly at the age of 46.

Sankovitch’s memoir of her year of reading, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, will be released on June 7.

“Turning the age that my sister was hit home like a knife to the gut,” she told Patch from her home in Westport. “We think we’re going to have all this time, but it’s limited.”

Sankovitch turned to books as a means of escape from her sorrow, as a way to honor an activity that she and her sister shared, and in a search for answers. “I was scared of living a life not worth the living,” she writes in her memoir. By reading, she sought answers to the questions many ask as they approach the mid-point of life but which her sister’s death intensified: “Why was I given the life card, and what was I supposed to do with it?”

Of all the emotions her year-long reading project stirred in her, there’s one thing she never felt: alone.

About two months into her project, she began receiving emails from readers all over the world. Some shared their own book recommendations, sometimes of books Sankovitch otherwise would not have discovered. Some expressed appreciation that she wrote enthusiastically about books in a range of genres. And others simply thanked her for inspiring them to begin reading again after a long absence.

“What a book is not,” Sankovitch said, “is what it’s most known for—being solitary. Reading is a social activity. Books connected me to my past, to my family, and to people all over the world.”

Though the memoir reveals how Sankovitch, a wife and mother of four sons, managed to get through a book a day—she stuck, for the most part, with books fewer than 300 pages—and includes extensive discussion of the books she read, it is not a collection of book reviews. Talking about books becomes an occasion for Sankovitch to examine her life and relationships, past and present. Good books, she discovers, illuminate universal human experiences and, through this, connect readers across time, culture, and history.

Sankovitch credits this ability books have to create bridges with returning her to a place of hopefulness.

“Books brought me forward to a place where I could believe life can be full of possibilities at any stage of life,” she said.

Though she no longer reads a book a day, she continues to read and review books on her website. And she hosts the Westport Library’s Book Chat series, which began as an adult summer reading program in the summer of 2010. Familiar with Sankovitch’s intensive reading project, the library’s Head of Collections Management Marta Campbell invited her to attend as a ‘special guest.’ 

“At the end of the summer, the Book Chat group decided to continue meeting once a month with Nina as host,” Campbell explained in an email. “Nina’s generous sharing of her book reviews has been the impetus for many lively and interesting conversations about books and reading…and life.”

From September through June, Book Chat meets the first Tuesday of every month at 10 a.m. in the Sheffer Reading Room. The next meeting is on June 7, the day of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair’s release. This year, the library’s adult summer reading program, ‘HOT READS,’ will meet bi-monthly during July and August, with morning and evening sessions available (Sankovitch will be hosting the morning sessions).

•      July 5 and 19 at 10:00 a.m.
•      July 6 and 20 at 7:00 p.m.
•      August 2, 16 and 30 at 10:00 a.m.
•      August 3, 17, 31 at 7:00 p.m.

Participants will receive reading journals, and registration will be available online after June 1.

Sankovitch will be speaking at the library about Tolstoy and the Purple Chair and her year of reading on Wed., June 8 at 12 p.m. in the McManus Room.