Not long ago, USA Today ran a feature on memoirs about obsessions — such as the wife who vowed to have sex with her husband nightly for a year (somehow this one doesn’t seem all that obsessive to me), the couple that likes to vacation at sites related to atomic weaponry, the sportswriter, who, like George Plimpton, tried to play in the NFL, the guy who spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary, another who read the Encyclopedia Britannica and then spent a year “living Biblically.”

Also known, according to USA Today, as extreme writing, narrative nonfiction, immersion journalism, experiential journalism, radical self-improvement, these books make an appearance on my sidebar, though mostly in the form of anthologies, such as Dealing with Divas, about serving as a personal assistant to celebrities, and Who ARE You People?, about folks with just the type of obsessions the USA Today article describes.

It does seem like a pretty sweet concept for a book — find something wacky to do for some period of time and then write about about it.