Keely's Reviews > A Book of Days

First things first: I loved the smell of A Book of Days! It’s a book of photos, and it smells just like my favorite childhood picture books. Sigh…Must be a similar kind of paper. Also, having listened to M Train on audio a few months back, narrated by Smith, I could hear her reading the captions of the photos in A Book of Days in her no-frills, straight-ahead voice. That added a nice, meditative quality to my experience of this book.

With the photos in A Book of Days, Smith shares her loves and lets us see where her eye is drawn. There are photos of gravestones, books, coffee cups, patches of garden, friends and family, idiosyncratic still life arrangements, her cat Cairo, and a surprising number of snaps are of famous people’s beds.

Bottom line: Loved it, even though reading through it all at once is a like drinking from a creative fire hose. It would be better to just sit with each page, day by day. There should be a page-a-day calendar version.