My daughter was not eager to create any resolutions this year. After all, how many bad habits could an eight-year-old have accrued to this point (with the exception of chewing on her sleeves and leaving filtration experiments throughout the house)? However, she did arrive at a number for the novels she intends to read with me this year: 40.
It has thus become my own resolution to record the 40 books we choose, and to give some of our impressions of said books. Should my daughter leap up and down or shake, as she is prone to do, the book will be deemed "Exceptional." (The Children's Story by James Clavell is one such book: D., age six at the time, was literally trembling with excitement.) If my daughter is livid because an ending does not meet her expectations (e.g. The Giver, with its maddening ambiguity at the end), will been labelled "Infuriating," despite its obvious literary merit. And, well, there will be books slotted into the category of "Good . . . but not as good as ___________."
If, at the end of the year, we have not achieved our 40-novel goal, we may need to (as my daughter pointed out), count the occasional book as "two." The House of the Scorpion, although riveting, is a woefully long read.
