On Dec. 31, I finally finished reading a great book I started on Jan. 1, 2025.

Yep, it took an entire year to read. But that was the plan. And I think it would please the author, Tom Nissley of Seattle (an eight-time champion on “Jeopardy!”)

The title lays it out: “A Reader’s Book of Days, True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year.”

The author deserves some kind of trophy for his research to find something interesting about different writers, or a character they created, for every day of every month of the year, although sometimes the year was unclear.

My 2025 morning routine has been to sip a bit of coffee, open the book and read that day’s “chapter.” Just one page. I have to mention that I also began sharing tidbits every day with my friend and avid reader Chris on April 28, the birthday of Harper Lee (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” born 1926).

Here’s the bang you get for your buck: Each day/date lists birth years and places for a couple of authors and years of death for a couple more. The rest of the page provides snippets on writers or one of their characters linked to the date and the year.

On the first day of my routine, I did what the author expected. I paged forward to July 1, my birthday. I found it a bit ironic that I share a birthday with William Strunk Jr. (1869), author of “The Elements of Style,” a sacred book in thousands of newsrooms.

Also, on July 1, 1950, Ernest Hemingway needed three stitches after banging his head while docking his fishing boat in Cuba. And Nissley shared this from 1923: “Young reporter Margaret Mitchell (‘Gone With the Wind’), while interviewing Rudolph Valentino, was carried through a window by the screen star amid ‘gasps of admiration from a crowd of ladies.’ ‘But,’ he told her, ‘there are as many men that come to see me as the ladies.’”

Nissley said he spent a lot of time in libraries and was surrounded by piles of books. He was most excited when he came across “the historic and the humdrum.”

“June 14, 1950, I learned, is not only the day Charles M. Schulz signed the syndication contract for his new comic strip,” he wrote. “It’s also the night he came home and celebrated by asking red-haired Donna Mae Johnson to marry him. (She turned him down.)”

I made several notes. Such as on Feb. 17, 1847 … “After Thomas Dunn English called him ‘thoroughly unprincipled, base and depraved … not alone an assassin in morals but a quack in literature,’ Edgar Allan Poe was awarded $225 in damages for libel, as well as six cents for costs.”

I had to save the quote from author May Sarton, who returned to her journal on April 9, 1986, for the first time after a stroke at age 73. She wrote: “There in my bed alone, the past rises like a tide, over and over, to swamp me with memories I cannot handle. I am as fragile and naked as a newborn babe.”

And you’re going to love this from May 4, 1976: “Mike Royko had been battling the Daley Machine in his Chicago Daily News column for years, so making fun of Frank Sinatra and his ‘army of flunkies’ for the free, around-the-clock police protection the Chicago police provided the singer at his hotel was no big deal. But Ol’ Blue Eyes didn’t think it was funny, writing Royko on this day to call him a ‘pimp’ and ask ‘why people don’t spit in your eye three or four times a day.’

“Royko obligingly printed the letter in his next column and then auctioned off the original to the highest bidder, Vie Carlson of Rockford, Illinois. Three decades later, Vie, whose son Brad, as it happens, was in the music business too, drumming for Cheap Trick under the stage name Bun E. Carlos, brought her letter onto the PBS show ‘Antiques Roadshow,’ where it was appraised at $15,000.”

The book is full of this. I loved it. A great way to help start my day for a full year. Now … to dig into my pile and find another page-turner for 2026.

• Lonny Cain, retired managing editor of The Times in Ottawa, also was a reporter for The Herald-News in Joliet in the 1970s. His PaperWork email is lonnyjcain@gmail.com. Or mail the NewsTribune, 426 Second St., La Salle IL 61301.