2014: The Year of the Books

Confession: we only made it about half way through the year before "Resolutions 2013" fell by the wayside, big time.  Apparently, I'm on trend with how my recent spate of resolution-ing has gone; I don't think that I've yet succeeded from start to finish.  Resolutions are a fairly recent tradition in my life and generally only concern me.  And reading.  As I think back over the last 3 or 4 years, reading has been numero uno on my to-do list almost every time.  Including this year!

I'm on the ball this year--at least with one thing.  I'm such a flustered chicken about many a thing  in my day-to-day living that I'm going to throw this out there almost a week early and just let it sink in a little.  As everyone is on tenterhooks as they read this, I'll suspend the suspense and let you all in on my resolution pact for 2014:

Read 12 books off of this list.  My mental math tells me that this breaks down to 1 book per month.  (I'm proving why my New Year's Resolutions never involve math; I'm obviously very gifted in this area.)

I came upon this list randomly a few days ago and thought that the idea for it is intriguing though the criteria used to judge the "most famous" books is sketchy at best.  And to that end, I would feel slighted if I lived in/felt emotionally invested in West Virginia (Shiloh???) and Washington state.  So here's my rules in this exploratory venture.

1.  I can't read any book again that I have already read and count it in my 12 books.  That's cheating.  I've already read 20 of them at any given time in my life, so those are off limits.  Yes, I count Shiloh as one of those that I've already read.  No, I don't count Twilight.  Nor will I ever.  EVER.

2.  I won't read Twilight.

3.  There's a lot of horror-ish books on that list.  That's not really my style, so I'm basically leaving those for others to enjoy for me.

That's about it.  My list includes 12 random books that I haven't read and have likely not heard of.  And I didn't research any of these before choosing them, so I really might end up with a horror or sci-fi albatross.  My selection process is what you might call titular selection.  And that's a real word.
January--The Saint of Lost Things by Christopher Castellani
February--To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway (don't be so shocked...I haven't read everything that he's ever written)
March--Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (again, it just never showed up on my syllabi)
April--A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
May--Drown by Junot Diaz
June--The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
July--The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
August--The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman (I have some preconceived ideas about this one; we'll see how they compare.)
September--Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
October--Housekeeping by Marilynn Robinson
November--Paradise by Toni Morrison (I'm pretty sure that I've checked this out from the library once before but never read it.)
December--A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks (I figure December with all it's busyness deserves an easy read...some book candy.)

Sometimes, I also need to work in a reading of The Prestige because of a book exchange idea that happened over the holidays.  I haven't seen the movie, nor will I in all likelihood.   

In other book news, I smashed my left ring finger in the book drop box at the library yesterday when I was unloading a whole stack of toddler books while wearing gloves, the knit kind (the slippery, no-grip kind).  It turns out that really hurts.  Really, really badly.  Why that thing has a spring with that much force to keep the little slot shut (keeping raccoons out?) is beyond my comprehension.  It also turns out that my 4-year old thinks that I am laughing when really I am crying big, fat, salty tears of pain.