If you come into the Library this month, and take a look at our Card Catalog Display, you’ll notice our efforts to help you fulfill your New Year’s Resolution to read more/different/diverse (or all three!) books in 2018. And even if you weren’t planning on reading more books, or more diverse books, I think it might be safe to say that our resolution suggestions are more fun, and easier to keep, than most that are out there. After all, reading yields instant rewards, like improving your empathy, broadening your horizons, enriching your imagination, potentially lowering your blood pressure and improving your mood!
In our Card Catalog Display, we have two checklists for you to use to track your reading. The first has been designed by Scholastic, and while it was designed for younger readers, honestly, there’s plenty there for grown-up readers, like “Reading a biography of a person you admire,” or “Read a book by an author who shares my birthday or Zodiac sign.” My personal favorite on this list (and it was really difficult to choose!) is “Ask a friend or parent to grab ten random books. I have to close my eyes and pick one blindly. No matter what it is, I have to read it.” I can almost guarantee you that this practice will result in you finding a new, terrific, edifying book that you’d never have imagined reading on your own. And how sensational would it be to discover a new favorite book this year?! There are 100 suggestions on this list for you to fulfill, all of which were designed by Scholastic to keep readers of any age enjoying and encountering new stories by new people all year long.
The second list we offer is from our friends at Book Riot. Their “2018 Read Harder” Challenge has been sponsored by Libby and Overdrive–which, for those of you who download e-books and e-audiobooks from our website will know very well! Book Riot designed their list with the goal of widening your reading horizons. So the topics on their checklist involve items like “A book with a female protagonist over the age of 60” or “A mystery by a person of color or LGBTQ+ author,” both of which require a bit of looking, but are perspectives that I don’t often get in the books I read, so I’m very excited to get started with this.
The goal with this display, and with both these lists is to help you read books outside of your favorite authors or genres, and to help you expand your personal horizons by encountering viewpoints, ideas, and concepts that you might otherwise not. There’s even a chance to reconcile with old enemies; Book Riot, for example, has an entry for “An assigned book you hated (or never finished).” There have been many of those in my life. And even if I (or you?!) hate-read a book (as in, reading it merely to have the fodder to talk about how much you still hate this book), this is a chance to meet up with your former self, and see if you still share the same opinions about books. I’m really eager to re-assess at the end of the year and see how far we’ve all come as readers!
Stay tuned here for some of our recommendations to help you through these reading challenges–and feel free to come by and share your new literary discoveries with us!