Tom Nissley - A Readers Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year

THANKS first to my collaborators. To Matt Weiland, editor, friend, and co-conspirator: thank you for believing there are books in my book-drunk head. To Joanna Neborsky: the moment I saw A Partial Inventory of Gustave Flauberts Personal Effects was the first time I could imagine what this book could look like, and the moment I saw Theodore Dreiser with his hot dogs I knew I was right. To Morgan Davies, wading through the stacks in Morningside Heights while I was doing the same in Seattle, whose marginal comments on the gems she found were as delightful as Miss Austens in her family copy of Goldsmiths History of England. To India Cooper, ToC 92, for close reading and Harper Lee fact-checking. To Jim Rutman, for when things get more complicated after this. To Sam MacLaughlin, for good humor and that little bit of Anne Carson when I needed it, and to everyone else at Norton.

THANKS to the institutions that, without knowing they were doing so, made this book possible. Most of all, to the Suzzallo and Allen Libraries at the University of Washington, where I burrowed in an earlier life and never expected I would again, for full, open stacks, generous alumni borrowing privileges, and the loveliest working space I could hope for. To the Seattle Public Library, for a superb, accessible collection and an equally lovely downtown reading room. (And to Peets in Fremont and Zoka in Tangletown, my other favorite offices.) To the hundreds and thousands of biographers and editors this book depended on, and whose meticulous labor I appreciate like never before. To Wikipedia, mocked and mistrusted and, by now, absolutely indispensable: almost never the end of my search, but more often than not the beginning. To search engines that make the worlds knowledge porous and available, and to the old-fashioned physical books that continue to make it readable.

AND thanks to all of my reading friends, many of whom I thought of when writing about the books I know you love. To Connie and Peter Nissley for making my first book-filled house, and to Elinor Nissley, once and future collaborator and calendar- and book-making inspiration. And to Laura, Henry, and Peter Silverstein, who stepped around my stacks of books (while making a few of their own), who thought that when I left my job that might mean they would see more of me, and whose excitement for this book, and for everything else we share, always increases my own.

Youd think more books would start in January. Does it not feel original enough to open a story with the new year? Or do we find more natural beginnings in the spring, or when we return to work or school after the summer? What, after all, is born in the dead month of January besides a new calendar?

There are exceptions. Theres Archie Jones, in Zadie Smiths White Teeth, roused to life on New Years Day from his attempt to gas himself in his car in the delivery zone of a halal butchers shop, and Bridget Jones, sourly recording in her diary the fourteen alcohol units, twenty-two cigarettes, and 5,424 calories she consumed on New Years Eve the day (and night) before. And there are January beginnings that seem like endings: the death just hours after midnight on January 1, 2021, of the last human born before the species became infertile in P. D. Jamess The Children of Men, and the New Years deadline haunting Michael Chabons The Yiddish Policemens Union, when the crowded but temporary Jewish settlement in Sitka, Alaska, is set to revert to local control.

Calendars do begin in January, although that wasnt always the case. In 1579 March was still, officially at least, the first month of the year in England, but Edmund Spenser justified beginning his pastoral poem The Shepheardes Calender in January because it was the first month after the rebirth of the decayed world through the birth of Christ. In colonial America the calendar was a printers bread and butter: an almanac was often the only book a household would buy during the year, which drew Benjamin Franklin, like many of his fellow printers, to create his own. The first edition of Poor Richards Almanack, which soon became the colonies favorite, included a tongue-in-cheek prediction that one of his main rivals, the American Almanacs compiler Titan Leeds, would die, by my Calculation made at his Request, at 3:29 P.M. on October 17 of the coming year. (Leeds was not amused, but survived the year.)

In his Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold was more content to observe than predict, and for him the barely detectable stirrings of January in Wisconsinthe venturing forth of a skunk from hibernation, the skittering of a meadow mouse from the melting shelter of the thawing snowmake observation almost as simple and peaceful as snow, and almost continuous as cold. There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.

RECOMMENDED READING FOR JANUARY

A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy (1909) What did Tolstoy, in his last years, believe was the great work of his life? War and Peace ? Anna Karenina ? No, this anthology he spent fifteen years gathering, which mixed his own aphorisms with those of the best and wisest thinkers of the world, organized by a theme for each day of the year.

At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft (1936) As the southern summer opens up the South Pole for exploration, a scientific expedition led by professors Dyer and Lake discovers behind a range of unknown Ant arctic mountains a vast, dead, and ancient city, one of the most evil and benighted of Lovecrafts inhuman horrors.

New Year Letter by W. H. Auden (1940) With hatreds convulsing the world like a baffling crime, Auden composed one of his great long poems as a letter to dear friend Elizabeth, whose hospitality in his adopted home of New York helped him toward this vision of order in art and life during a time of tyranny.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968) Many more people know Blade Runner than its source novel, set on a single January day in a post-nuclear 1992, which features, rather than Ridley Scotts rainy, neon glamour, Dicks equally thrilling and disturbing brand of stripped-down noir.

Airport by Arthur Hailey (1968) Arthur Hailey wrote blockbusters like no one else, earnest and fact-filled dramas set in a series of massive industrial monoliths: banks, hotels, power plants, and, in this case, Lincoln International Airport in Illinois during the worst winter storm of the decade, with one jetliner stuck at the end of a runway and another coming in fast with a bomb on board.

In California: Morning, Evening, Late January by Denise Levertov (1989) Levertovs pastoral is unseasonal in the temperate lushness of its California winter, and unsettling in its vision of the industrial forces invading and managing its beauty.

The Children of Men by P. D. James (1992) Another novel overshadowed by its movie adaptation,