Reading resolutions

Back in the day I was a mess. I made resolutions each New Year’s Eve and promptly broke them the following morning. After several years of this self-destructive (and totally pointless) cycle I just stopped making them. I’m still a mess, but I stopped trying to annually catalog my flaws and failures.

This year is different.

This year I’m trying a different approach: reading resolutions. I’m going to read. I’m going to read a lot. Why not give myself some goals to broaden my literary horizons? So dear reader, I give to you my 2014 reading resolutions:

1. (see below)
2. Read this year’s Everett Reads! book
3. Read something difficult, either due to subject matter or writing style
4. Read an award-winning book
5. Read something that is super-popular
6. Read a book that was the basis for a TV series or movie
7. Read a classic work of literature
8. Read an annotated classic work of literature
9. Read something that will help me plan for the future
10. Read something that will help me reconcile the past
11. Read a graphic novel
12. Read an entire series that is new to me

Ask anyone who works in a public library and they will agree: everyone gives us book recommendations. All. The. Time. I’ve been working in public libraries for fifteen years. That’s a lot of book recommendations. After a few years of indiscriminate reading suggestions, you stop trying to tell well-meaning folks that you just don’t enjoy reading that type of book or that you already have a ‘to-be-read’ stack taller than yourself. You just sit back, nod, smile, and maybe write the title down for future perusal. There’s no way we can read them all.

Well I got lucky. I got to talking with a patron who frequents both the brick-and-mortar libraries and our Facebook page. After we bonded over our love of Walter the Farting Dog, she gave me a book suggestion that actually sounded like something I would enjoy. She described it as “funny, a Harriet the Spy for grownups.” Who wouldn’t respond to such a description?

The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz definitely lives up to the hype. Izzy Spellman’s family is odd. Her parents are both PIs and she and her siblings grew up learning the family business. As such, they are completely dysfunctional but love each other very much—even if they have some odd ways of showing it to each other: running a complete criminal and financial background check on your date, following you around town for a week straight, bugging your phone. You know, the little things. One day Izzy snaps and wants out of the family business. Her parents give her one final case: a missing person case that’s more than a decade old and so cold it’s freezing.

Told from Izzy’s point of view, the story jumps through time from the present-day to the distant and then not-so-distant past. The reader really learns what it is to be a tight-knit family with trust and privacy issues. A family whose members will truly fight for those they love and solve a lot of cases together to boot.

The patron who recommended this to me said she had some issues with the lax editing (tenses were mixed up at a few points, things like that) as well as an ending she disliked. Knowing that a bad ending can kill an otherwise enjoyable book for me, I rolled the dice and cracked the spine of this book anyway. And I have to say the patron’s assessment was right on the money, but I feel like I enjoyed the book enough to read the entire series. Who knows? Maybe this will be the start of crossing #12 off my reading resolutions list.

So what I have I learned from this? Through all the static that is the volume of book recommendations library staff receives, I was lucky enough to finally have a book recommendation that was right up my literary alley. I’ll be slightly more likely to actually try the book you suggest to me instead of adding it to that “someday” list from now on. And to the person who recommended this book to me: thank you for taking a chance on this jaded reader.

Use the comments section below and tell me what you’d like me to read. I’m feeling lucky.

Be sure to visit A Reading Life for more reviews and news of all things happening at the Everett Public Library.