简介

作者在2012这一年里，做了一个大挑战，挑战自己每天读一本书，一年即是366本书。作者为此做了许多的努力，制定了相应的原则。最终，到新年的钟声响起时，作者......

366 Days, 366 Books

By Jeff Ryan

(Jeff Ryan is the author of "Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America.")



Illustration by Mark Stamaty.译者：大卫的李

Like many of you, I have a nagging problem: I’m not a heroin user. Nor am I a knuckle-cracker, a nail-biter, or a thumb-sucker. I (usually) pay off my credit cards every month. I travel, I see my family, I’m not stressed. And the big three—drinking, dieting, and smoking cessation? I’m good.

和很多人一样，我有唠叨的毛病：我不吸食海洛因。我不是一根筋，不是一紧张就咬手指甲的人，也不是有事没事就吮大拇指。我（通常情况下）每个月都会付清信用卡。我也出去玩，也常看看我的家庭。我没有压力。另外三件大事-喝点酒、节食及戒烟-我都做得不错。

This is all great for my insurance rates, but not when trying to determine a New Year’s resolution. So what can someone like me do for 2013? Other than tweet a humblebrag on the subject? (I’m no good at New Year’s resolutions … life is too perfect I guess LOL!)

这一切都对我的保险金有利，但于我的新年决心却没有什么。所以像我这样的人2013年能做什么呢？而且不同于在微薄上对一件事的评头论足。（新年的决定我做得不好...我觉得是因为生活太完美了，哈哈！）

I had the same dilemma last year, and my solution, while ingenious, turned out to be quite a challenge. I decided that I would read more. Not a book a month, or even a book a week. One entire book every day. Three hundred sixty-six books by year’s end. “Challenge accepted!” the Barney Stinson of my soul boasted. No sweat.

去年我也是这样，之后我的解决方案，天才的想法，成了很大的挑战。我决定我应该多读书，不是一个月一本，也不是一周一本，而是每天一整本。到年底最后一天读完三百六十六本书。“接受挑战！”我内心深处的小巴尼史汀森鼓动着。没问题。

If you’re like me, the list of books you want to read is a hydra. Cutting one head off (that is, reading a book) just scribbles new titles onto the list. I’m never ahead. My whole life I’ve been fighting this hydra tactically, trying to bleed a head dry by reading, say, one of Bob Woodward’s or Neal Stephenson’s books every year. But they keep writing more books! Time for a new solution: overwhelming firepower. Force-feed my eyeballs like every tomorrow was a final exam. By year’s end, my 366 books would have that hydra on its knees.

如果你也像我，一列列你想读的书的书目就如九头蛇。砍下一个头（即读完一本书）后再草草的在书单上写一个新的。我从来不提前做好。我这一生在与这九头蛇“战斗”的时候都自以为很高明，试图让每个蛇头的血都流尽，例如一年读完鲍勃伍德沃德或尼尔史蒂文森的书，但他们又不断的写新书。该到了用新方法的时候了：压倒一切的火力。强迫自己的眼睛始终睁着，想像每一个明天都会是一场期末考试。等到年底，我的366本书会压的九头蛇跪倒在地。

And, believe it or not, it worked.

不管你信不信，计划就这么开始了。

In the cold light of New Year’s morning, my challenge seemed a bit daunting. So I gave myself a week. If I didn’t have seven books finished by Jan. 7, I obviously wasn’t going to be able to keep such a meth-addled pace.

在新年第一天清晨的清冷的阳光中，我的挑战多少让人有点生畏。于是我给了自己一个星期。如果到一月七日我没有完成7本书，很明显我是不能再以这样量变叠加到质变的步伐了。

The resolution almost didn’t last 24 hours, but New Year’s night I forced my eyelids open and read a short horror novel. The following day I finished Cinderella Ate My Daughter, which, despite its title, was not a horror novel but a pop-culture history I’d been working on for a few days. The day after that I peeled off a Walking Dead collection. Driving to work, I hit the final disc of a Nelson DeMille audiobook. The night after that, I read the final chapter of a Narnia book to my daughter at bedtime.

这个决心几乎没能撑过24小时，但到了新年当天的晚上，我逼着自己强打精神读完了一本短篇恐怖小说。第二天我看完了《灰姑娘吃了我的女儿》（作者佩吉·奥任斯汀，对NBC新闻说过度性感的娃娃的影响是腐蚀性的。），除了书名，该书并不是本恐怖小说，而是一部流行文化史，我还为之研究了一段时间。第三天我拿下了一套《行尸走肉合集》。次日开车上班的路上，我听完了《纳尔逊德米勒有声读物》最后一张碟子。到第五天夜里，我给女儿睡前讲完了最后一章的《纳尼亚传奇》。

Seven days, seven books. So far, so good. A good six of those books were timing and luck—it can take me three weeks to finish an audiobook, and more than a month to finish a bedtime story. But I gave it another week. And another. Soon my every waking thought was on reading.

七天，七本书。截止到此时还不错。其中六本书的完成比较及时且幸运-因为正常听完一张有声碟子需要三个星期，讲完一个床前故事要一个多月。但我在下一个周还是这样，再下一个还是。很快我走路时的脑子里想的都是读书。

The prime directive for this sort of project, you might think, is to pick short books. I don’t deny that 2012 was not the year for me to launch into Terry Goodkind. Want some Tolstoy? The Forged Coupon, not War and Peace. But as it turned out, Read Short Books was rule No. 2.

这件事的首要原则，你可能认为，是挑选短篇的书籍。我不否认2012年我不应该把特里古坎德列入名单。想读托尔斯泰吗？那就应该是《伪券》而不是《战争与和平》。但结果证明读短篇却是次要原则.

No, my prime directive was: no min-maxing. In Dungeons and Dragons, “min-maxing” is focusing on one character attribute to the exclusion of everything else. (Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory is an excellent example of someone who min-maxes intelligence, stealing points from charisma and dexterity.) If you’ve ever been in a team sport, school play, or med school, you know how that commitment supersedes all others. Parties are missed, sleep is skipped, emails go unreturned. “I can’t—I have practice/rehearsal/a corpse to dissect.”

其实，我的首位原则是：无最大最小原则。在龙与地下城里，‘最大最小原则’是由于排除了其他所有事情而只关注其中一个角色。（在美剧《生活大爆炸》中的谢尔顿库伯就是一个典型的例子，极限化了才智，取代了外在魅力和身体灵敏度。）如果你身在一个团体运动，或校园剧，或医学院，你是清楚承担义务完胜于其他任何事情。个人派对错过了，睡眠也减了又减，邮件也没时间回复。“我不能-我还要练习/预演/做尸体解剖。”

My plate is already pretty full: I work full-time, try to be a good husband, and am always up for a good game of Pretty Pretty Princess. Mine isn’t a tougher schedule than that of other working parents, but it is tough. So the challenge was to see if a heavy-lifting year of reading could be done almost exclusively in the crumbs of found time in my life. The oil-change can wait, I don’t need those sick days or lunch hours. My test for this was my wife: I didn’t even tell her I was tackling a book a day until six weeks into the project. If she suspected I was slacking—dishes undone, litter box a ruin, laundry growing sentient—then I was failing my prime directive.

我的“盘子”已经很满了：我有份全职工作，要成为好丈夫，还有时刻准备和女儿玩好好公主的游戏。我的事务安排并不比别的需要工作的父母更繁琐，但确实很紧密。所以这次挑战要看看，这重压下的一年我能不能做到近乎刻意的从生活中发现零碎的时间。改变饮食就等等再说吧，我不需要那些病假休息或很长的午餐时间。我对我妻子这样尝试的：我直到六个周的时候才告诉她我在每天一本书的计划。如果她怀疑我有所松懈-盘子没洗，各种盒子乱七八糟，洗衣服更加不自觉-那我的首位原则就不通了。

The idea of a full book a day—going from title page to back-jacket blurbs—went quickly out the window. I read lots of books at once, and can go days making progress in five or six volumes without technically finishing any of them. Then there are flat-out busy days, where the actual drop-dead demands of my job and parenting mean there is not a second to spare for reading. My worst lull was during a Florida trip, when I barely plowed through the 300 pages of John Irving’s The Fourth Hand. And that was during a whole week of family vacation—the time when normal people read more. It took a month of catchup to get back at pace.

每天一整本书的想法-从扉页到最后一页的广告-很快就读到户外去了。我会同时读很多书，每天都制定五六本书的单日进程，但不用非要在一天内读完其中一本。随后就有超忙的时候了，工作和教养孩子的现实迫切需求意味着我实在拿不出分秒时间来阅读。我最糟糕的间隙是在一次去佛罗里达的旅行中，那时我仅勉勉强强翻完了一本约翰欧文300页的的《第四只手》。那是一整周的家庭度假，本来应该是正常人会读的更多的时候。之后我花了一个月的时间才赶上原来的进度。

But for every period behind the eight ball, I had weeks when I was days or even weeks ahead of schedule. A slack day at work, an hour doing yard work with the iPod, a solo plane ride or overnight stay—these were my moments, and I seized them. Believe it or not, I grew so far ahead of my pace that I successfully read all 1,016 pages of George R.R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons. It took me three full weeks, but I slew that Dragon.

但8号之后的每个时段，好几个星期里，我会有好几天甚至好几个星期超前于我的日程。白天松散的工作，听着音乐做一个小时的收拾庭院的活，独自乘坐飞机或在外住一晚上，这些时刻都属于我自己的，我都很好的利用起来。不管你信不信，我进度如此之快致使我成功读完了乔治马汀1016页的《与龙共舞》。我整整花了三个星期，但最终我得以“屠龙”。

I did have to give up some things. I listened to audiobooks exclusively—no music for me. I gave up video games, which wasn’t as big a deal for me as I expected it would be. Mainly, though, I decided that Starship Troopers 2, Lost Boys 3, and Saws V-VII weren’t worth the midnight oil I was expending on them. Yes, you, too, can read a book a day, just by giving up direct-to-DVD horror films!

为此我确实不得不放弃一些事情。我听有声读物的时候也仅仅是书的内容，不再有音乐随放。我放弃了电子游戏，后来觉得并不如我之前期待的是件多么大不了的事。更主要的，我决定-星河战队2，迷失男孩3，电锯惊魂系列电影-不再值得我花费时间点灯熬夜。是的，你也能一天一本书，只要你放弃高清恐怖电影首映。

If you’re hoping to read a book a day, I also encourage shamelessness. You don’t see salad-eating contests on the Fourth of July; you see hot dogs. So I grabbed as much literary junk food as I could stomach for the days when I wasn’t reading a “real” book. For you, that might be erotica, or category romances. It might be fan fiction or Star Warsnovels, pulps or New Age tracts. Whatever floats your boat. Reading is reading. My particular boat, by the way, was floated by the following, each of which I read to a double-digit degree: zombie novels, books about Old Hollywood, books about video games (I can’t play you anymore, but I can read about you!), comedians’ memoirs, andessay collections.

如果你正希望一天读一本书，我也会鼓励要你没有羞愧。因为你在七月四日（美国独立纪念日）时不会看到吃沙拉比赛，而只是热狗。所以当我没有读一本”真正“的书籍时，我就搜罗尽可能多的文学“垃圾食品”填充我的胃口。如你而言，这些可能是色情作品或言情类的。但也可能是同人小说或星球大战系列小说、低俗小说或新世纪连载。但无论怎样浮起你的船就行。读书就是阅读。顺便说一下，我自己的船是由这些浮起来的：僵尸小说，老好莱坞杜撰，电子游戏书籍（我不再玩给你看，只能读给你听了），喜剧演员回忆录，及一些散文集。

Here’s another not-so-shameful secret: capes. Superheroes have saved me so many times I might as well be Lois Lane. I can start and finish a six-issue collection of Captain America or Green Lantern comics in less than an hour. That’s a book, or at least it is under my definition of “something printed that cost about $20.” Don’t blame me, blame Marvel Comics. And lest you think all I did was splash in the literary kiddie pool, I also read works of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Nicholson Baker, Thomas Hardy, James Baldwin, Umberto Eco, and Weird Al Yankovic. I have now read everything by Mary Roach and Alice Sebold, and am thiiis close to having the complete set of Bill Bryson and Sarah Vowell.

这个事另一个不会很让人羞愧的秘密：英雄漫画。超级英雄如此多次的把我救出，可以和解救路易斯莱恩（电影超人里的女主角）相媲美。我从开始到结束一本**集的《美国队长》或《绿灯侠》漫画，可以不用一个小时。那也算是一本书，至少按我对“书”的定义“一些印刷的值20美元的东西”来看是符合的。不要指责我，要想就指责惊奇漫画（美国漫画系列）。另外免得你认为我所读的书都只是从幼儿文学的海洋里溅了几个水星，我还读过弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫（英国意识流文学的代有性作家之一）、薇拉·凯瑟（美国女作家）、尼克尔森•贝克（《文集编撰者》）、托马斯·哈代（英国小说家）、詹姆斯·鲍德温（美国黑人作家）、翁贝托埃可（二十世纪后半期西方符号学领域最为重要的代表人物之一）以及怪人艾尔杨科维奇。我已经通读了玛丽·罗奇和艾莉丝·希柏德两人的所有著作，以及几乎整套比尔布莱森和萨拉沃威尔的书。

If you follow my path and read a book a day in 2013, you’ll find that you truly, truly will not be reading more than usual. Right now, you are probably reading a comparable amount to me—but you’re reading newspapers, Facebook and Twitter, and the work of the fine folks at Slate. I let that stuff go for a year in the interest of making my quota. (Maybe that’s why I liked essay collections so much; they’re like magazines in book format.) I always dreamed that in retirement I might be able to knock off a book a day: Turns out, I didn’t have to wait.

如果你跟从我的脚步，在2013年每天读一本书，你会发现你真的，真的不会读得比平时多。如今，你虽然很可能读的数量和我差不多，但你读的是报纸，脸谱网和微博，还有一些名流的花边新闻。当然为了完成这一年的定额我也会读这些东西。（也许那也是我如此喜欢散文集的缘故，他们就像成本的杂志。）我以前总是梦想到了我退休后也许可能会一天啃掉一本书。结果证明，我不用等到那个时候。

Truth be told, I’m a day or two behind right now, with the thousand-pound hammer dropping on New Year’s Eve. I’m confident I can scramble my way to all 366 books, though I may need to break my min-maxing vow and ask my wife for help with the laundry. And I already know what my New Year’s resolution will be for next year. Should be easier to do in 2013: That’s only 365 books, not 366.

说实话，现在我稍落后了一两天。伴随着千斤大钟在新年之夜敲响时，我自信我能按我的方式解决完全部366本书，尽管我可能得破坏我最大最小原则的誓言，而且要让我妻子帮忙洗衣服。我已经明了我在新的一年里的决心，而且2013年会较为容易些：这一年只需读365本，不用366本书。