What is the "Book a Day" Project?

I was a tremendously avid reader as a kid. We're talking stacks of novels ranging from the Boxcar Children to the Brontës; the skills to make a PB&J (without crusts) with one hand as the other was thumbing through beloved dog-eared copies of the Anne of Green Gables books; an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the March family; a pair of enormous, round, purple glasses that predated Tina Fey geek-chic; and a continued inability to conduct a normal conversation without working in a Harry Potter reference of some sort. That's not to mention that it is virtually impossible for me to leave a Half Price Books without buying something, and that my currently terrible vision is certainly the result of the hundreds of pages I read (clichédly) under the covers, in the semidarkness, way past a strict 9pm bedtime.

Unfortunately, one of the sad truths of growing up is that being assigned things to read makes them less fun, and the more assigned things one has to read, the less one actually tends to read. A very recently graduated college student, I'd found myself reading less and less of anything outside of my thesis topic (most recently the Bush torture memos, which were both gory and questionable in both style and substance) and the required stuff on the syllabus (generally completed the night before a test, which made it decidedly less enjoyable). Having gone to a math and science high school, I missed out on a lot of the classics and made a heroic effort to catch up--which ended the moment I read the first two sentences of Moby-Dick.

Seeing as I am entering law school this fall--the place where assigned reading reaches its hyper-apotheosis, in those capital-S Serious books whose sole function is to intimidate those who think you, the bearer, understand its contents--now seems like the perfect time to start my Book a Day Project. The "book a day" idea was inspired by a beloved political science professor's PBS series on the Supreme Court, which included a feature on Justice Hugo Black, who--according to the series--read a book literally every single day until he died. I intend to do the same--except just for the summer, and with breaks for weekends (and for catch-up, if need be). If a book is excessively long I'll spend a couple of days on it, but I'll try to stick to the promise and title of this blog as best I can. As the above-mentioned prof often says, once Hugo Black, you don't go back.

"Why?" you ask. "Aren't you going to be doing Herculean amounts of reading for the next three years and likely the rest of your life?" To which I respond, "Probably. Actually, definitely." But this is my last, glorious, extended stretch of summertime freedom, and I intend to milk it, sprawled out on a hammock (until the weather gets fried-egg-on-the-street-like, likely in July) with a new or old classic. I'll catch up on things I never read, things I've always meant to read, things I didn't know I wanted to read until someone mentioned them. I'll try to cover fiction and nonfiction, novels and shorts, biographies, autobiographies, even prosopographies! Religious and heretical, prosaic and poetic. Memoir and fantasy. I'll try to sample little bits of everything without taking the fun out of anything. And ultimately, as everyone probably does, I hope to rekindle my first, best love.

Stay tuned for a reading list!