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year.
    I smiled and cried some more when Natasha called to wish me a happy day. After breakfast I answered e-mails wishing me joy for the coming year. Only a few people knew of my plan to read a book every day for a year, and no one mentioned it. Everyone was sure I would have to drop out of the planned year of reading, and no one wanted to make me feel embarrassed if I did. They figured my obligations at school or the kids getting sick or holidays and vacations would force me to miss a day here or there. They thought I would end up scaling back, reading one or two books a week. But I knew I would stick with my books project. I was ready for the discipline. The plan could work around school hours and the driving, cleaning, cooking, and grocery shopping, and still meet its goals of escape, learning, pleasure. I was aching for that, needing that comfort of reading and anticipating the pleasure of sitting down in my purple chair with a book and calling it work. By giving it the name of work, I sanctified it.
    Reading had always been a favorite thing to do, but now it would become a worthy endeavor. I could excuse myself from coffees, PTA meetings, and exercise by having work to do. Most everyone thought my project was crazy, but that didn’t matter, not too much anyway. It was what I needed. I knew I was lucky to have the time and support to do this, and I wouldn’t waste either. Once I’d made the decision to take on my book-a-day year, I did not question the commitment or the pleasure ahead. I made a plan, and then I stopped debating the pluses or minuses. I would take the time I could have spent debating my choice and instead throw myself into carrying it out.
    When Jack and I talked about getting married, and then when we thought about having kids, I had been the same way. I made my choice and followed through with actions taken full force ahead, body and soul. Jack was the one, and I married him, for better and forget the worse. Four kids I wanted, and I had them one after the other, sticking my legs up into the air after sex to ensure fertilization and then, nine months later, using those legs as an anchor during delivery.
    Now I had committed to reading a book a day. Not quite like marriage or motherhood but a commitment, nevertheless.
    Reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog on the train was tough going at first. The first forty or so pages of the novel have lots of obscure references thrown in here and there about philosophy and music, movies and art. But I soon fell in love with the two narrators, Paloma and Renée. Paloma is twelve years old and mired in existential angst. She hides both her intelligence and her despair behind a caustic wit and manga novels. She’s certain that there is no purpose or meaning to life, and she vows to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. Wow and whoa: this kid cannot be serious. But I feared that she was.
    Renée, the concierge of the high-toned building where Paloma lives, hides behind the facade of a dull, slow-witted working-class drone so that she can be invisible to the people around her. She wants to be left in peace to secretly enjoy the pleasure and comfort that books, music, art, and good food bring to her. I knew I had found a kindred spirit in Renée when I read her thoughts on books: “When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment, than in literature?” Right on.
    By the time my train hit New York City, I was hooked on The Elegance of the Hedgehog . I put it away long enough to have a birthday lunch with Jack and my parents. We sat on a balcony overlooking the Main Concourse at Grand Central and drank champagne. As we ate our meal, I told them about how it had been Anne-Marie who’d first pointed out Grand Central’s magnificent ceiling to me, its golden