A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

Other authors: Joanna Neborsky (Illustrator)

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225	13	120,325	(3.83)	4
Book connoisseur Tom Nissley has combed literary history to capture the stories that make writers' lives perennially fascinating: their epiphanies, embarrassments and achievements. Each handsome page in A Reader's Book of Days is devoted to a day of the year, featuring original accounts of events in the lives of great writers, and fictional events that took place within beloved books.… (more)

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I intended to read a page or two every day of this year... I managed to do that until March and then sporadically picked it up once or twice. I then panic-finished reading the majority of the book the last week or so of December.

It's a well-researched book, but it is quite dry. I personally gravitated to the entries about authors or books I've read, but there was some interesting facts about other writers I've never heard of too. This is certainly a good coffee table book, but a riveting read? Not for me.

Who knew Ernest Hemingway got injured so frequently though? Not me until after reading this book. (I could have survived without knowing that though...) (

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bookwyrmqueen | Jan 8, 2024 |

There is an story story or 3 for every day of the year, and each one concerns an author, a book, a poem - and each one is massively interesting to a reader. For instance, the entry for July 21, 1940 concerns H.A. and Margret Rey escaping Nazi France to end up in New York with a pile of manuscripts and drawings about a mischievous monkey named Fifi - later changed to Curious George. The 21st was the actual day they sailed from Lisbon to Rio, but the entry briefly covered the back story and the conclusion to their journey. I read it rapidly because I found it so interesting, but now I keep it by my bed to read each night before sleep. (

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LeslieHolm | May 19, 2022 |

I posted my review on my blog The Itinerant Librarian.

Link: http://itinerantlibrarian.blogspot.com/2013/08/booknote-readers-book-of-days.htm... (

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bloodravenlib | Aug 17, 2020 |

A book with an amazing miscellany of book and author tit bits.
I use it as a part of my morning ritual while drinking coffee.
I dip into Timothy Keller's Daily Devotions in the Psalms (or Proverbs)
for the day.
Then the 'A Reader's Book of Days' for the day.
Often following an author in '1000 books to read before you die!'
by James Mustich, or some other 'Book on Books'. (

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GeoffSC | Jul 25, 2020 |

Some fascinating sidelights about books and authors here. The presentation is serious but not tedious. This would be a great book to read in tiny bits.
I read it all in one go, rather than spacing it day by day or even monthly. This may have distorted my impression of the content, which included far too many mentions of Dickens (and I'm a fan) and a ridiculous amount of information about Hemingway, much of it not related to books.
Still, well worth a read for any but the most casual of readers. (

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Matke | Apr 1, 2016 |

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Author name	Role	Type of author	Work?	Status
Tom Nissley	—	primary author	all editions	calculated
Neborsky, Joanna	Illustrator	secondary author	all editions	confirmed

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▾Book descriptions

Book connoisseur Tom Nissley has combed literary history to capture the stories that make writers' lives perennially fascinating: their epiphanies, embarrassments and achievements. Each handsome page in A Reader's Book of Days is devoted to a day of the year, featuring original accounts of events in the lives of great writers, and fictional events that took place within beloved books.

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A witty and addictively readable day-by-day literary companion.

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 Brontë sisters, Junot Díaz, 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.

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