Number of words: 149

Time-lapse photography offers odd pleasures: Gaudy  flowers blooming in a second, skyscrapers flinging them selves upward in a half a minute. Reading someone’s life in one of these huge chronicle diaries can be a little like watching it that way:  you go through a year in maybe an hour or two. But the effects aren’t so amusing as they are with the flower and the skyscraper. Ye gods, you ask yourself how many times can someone have breakfast? In fact, the diarist doesn’t eat it any more often than you do; it’s just that recording it is his tic, and by reading so much of his book at once you’ve got to down a couple of hundred eggs in a sitting. Life from this vantage, seems even more repetitive than it is.

Excerpted from page number 11 of ‘Book of Ones Own People and Their Diaries’ by Thomas Mallon