365

A year’s worth of days doesn’t seem like quite so large a number when broken down into smaller, or at least different, units.

Coming off Bruce Goldstone’s Zero Zebras (2022), Chung moves to bigger numbers with bright views of a dark-skinned, dark-haired child and a lion companion illustrating Paul’s suggestions for turning a year into more manageable bits. Instead of 365 long days, for instance, individually depicted both in a calendar and a neatly arranged if dizzying block of lunar phases, how about thinking of a year as 365 “Good mornings” or 365 clean (“hopefully”) pairs of underwear? Or, better yet, 52 sleep-in Saturdays or just 12 monthly themes for the class bulletin board? Or one birthday? At this point the progression spins around to offer more conventional options for measuring the distance between a birthday and the next—in hours (8,760), minutes (525,600), or seconds (31,536,000). The author doesn’t get into seasons or alternative calendrical systems but does include enough astronomy to explain the necessity for leap days. In the end she moves beyond such objective measurements to counsel, perhaps wisely, taking a broad view by regarding the span as “1 marvelous collage / of 1 year / in the life / of you.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A bright, buoyant look at measurements, conventional and otherwise.