In the spirit of New Year's Resolutions, but without the insane pressure we usually put on ourselves for them, I ask this:
What are your reading resolutions for 2019? Do you want to explore a genre you've never tried before? Read past works of an author whose one novel you love so much in the hope that his or her other works may be in the same vein? Start a mystery series you've thought about for years? Stop torturing yourself over a book that's not connecting to you and simply drop it instead of slogging along, thinking, "Maybe if I get past this page, it'll get better?"
For me, as it gets closer to midnight on the east coast while I watch Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen on CNN (when the New Year starts there, it'll still be three hours to the New Year here), I looked at my bookcases and spotted "Eisenhower in War and Peace" by Jean Edward Smith, which I checked out from the library, a byproduct of my passion for presidential history. I admire Eisenhower, and I want to know much more about him. I'm going to start it in a little while.
And there it is: I want to read with passion. When I find a book that I spark to immediately, I want to read it right away. I don't want to do like I did at The Open Book in the Oaks Mall in Thousand Oaks, buying up almost $50 worth of books (thanks to a $25 gift card my mom got me for my birthday this past year), so excited by what I found, and they're still sitting on the floor next to my bed. It's not that I'm not interested in them, but of course, other books got in the way. And I want to remedy that. I want to get into those books in the very moment I spot them. I will try, anyway.
Perhaps this will be the year I delve deeper into science fiction. I do have an idea for a potential mystery series set on a college campus (maybe community college, as that's more accessible to me, since that's where I got my AA degree), so I want to read more mysteries. Maybe Westerns. That's always been in the back of my mind, and that time period fascinates me. Definitely novels set between 1890-1910. The Gilded Age then is a good lesson for today, too. More history of all kinds, more books about New York City, more, more, and still more.
How about you?