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A book a day a year

Nina Sankovitch is reading one book a day for one year. Today she is on Day 350.

By necessity she mostly sticks to books 250 to 300 pages or fewer — Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid primer “The Crying of Lot 49,” for example, rather than the weightier, in all ways, “Gravity’s Rainbow.” But on March 1, she made it through all 560 pages of “Revelation,” by C. J. Sansom, a murder mystery set in Tudor England.

She’s partial to high-intensity fiction, but also reads memoirs, mysteries, science fiction, graphic novels and general nonfiction, with niche interests including punk rock (“Please Kill Me,” by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain) and tennis (“A Terrible Splendor,” by Marshall Jon Fisher).

Shashi Tharoor did this when he was very young, and didn’t get as much publicity for it:

I read eclectically, and I must say, indiscriminately. Remember that reading was my principal activity outside schoolwork. I loved the game of cricket and I played it very badly, but also I wasn’t often well enough to go out and play. And so that and the absence of television, computer games, and all the distractions that my children now enjoy, meant that if I wasn’t writing I was reading. And actually there was one particular year, the year of my thirteenth birthday, that I decided to set myself a challenge of finishing three hundred and sixty-five books in three hundred and sixty-five days. And I did and I kept a list at that point to prove it. So I was a voracious and rapid reader, and with that kind of volume, I obviously read all sorts of stuff.