by Seth Warburton

I thought I knew myself as a reader.  Then 2020 happened.  Books I’d looked forward to reading fell flat.  I brought home new books from authors I loved and never even cracked the covers.  The shelves here at the Ames Public Library are full of good books, but I was having trouble finding one that fit my mood.  Books had been my gateway to adventure, my method of experiencing all the exciting lives I would never live, in interesting places and times I could never visit.  But when merely listening to the news could set my pulse racing, reading adventurously just wasn’t appealing.

And I wasn’t alone.  Writing in July’s issue of Booklist magazine, Chicago librarian Stephen Sposato reported that many readers are seeking books to help cope with stress, even readers that never sought comfort reading before.  His suggestions are good ones.  Short attention span?  Try short stories.  Need lifting up?  Try romantic comedies.  Can’t face the unknown?  Try rereading old favorites, as I did.  Knowing the twists that were coming meant that I could read without fear of a surprise twist and simply enjoy the ride.  As summer turned to fall, I had to admit that my mood had changed again.  The pandemic worsened.  My family cancelled planned visits and we called off holiday gatherings.  With comfort-reading wearing thin I had to reanalyze my mood.  As it turns out I was angry - I wanted to read with a vengeance. 

The perfect tonic was Natalie Zina Walshots’s debut novel “Hench.”  In a world of superheroes, it stars Anna, an office temp worker who finds herself doing data entry for a supervillain.  When her new boss is busted by a superhero Anna ends up as collateral damage, hospitalized with a horrifically mangled leg.  Brooding over her injury, Anna starts doing what she does best, compiling data.  She soon finds that the cost superheroes inflict on the world is so high that the difference between heroes and villains boils down to little more than public relations.  As she embarks on a journey to get even, Anna remains sympathetic even as her tour of vengeance gets satisfyingly messy.

Revenge, of course, is a firm fixture in the literary cannon.  It features as motive in many a murder mystery novel, but nowhere better than in the Agatha Christie classic “Murder on the Orient Express.”  Detective Hercule Poirot is bound westward from Istanbul on the Orient Express when the train is stopped by snow drifting over the tracks.  That night an unctuous American businessman is murdered and Poirot applies his little grey cells to the case, soon revealing that almost everyone on the train is connected to a years-old crime.  But which of the passengers took their revenge?  And if the victim deserved his fate, can Poirot bring himself to identify the killer? 

Perhaps literature’s completest tale of revenge was penned by Alexandre Dumas in “The Count of Monte Cristo.”  Edmond Dantès is betrayed by a pair of friends and sentenced by order of a corrupt magistrate to life in prison.  A fellow prisoner tells Dantès of a cache of treasure.  After a decade of planning, Dantès escapes, finds the treasure, and uses it to slowly, but inexorably, unravel the lives of those who wronged him.  In the end, Dantès finds true happiness in generosity to his allies, and in the arms of his beautiful lover, sailing his luxuriously appointed yacht into the Mediterranean sunset with a hold full of recreational drugs.  “Wait and hope,” Dantès advises, and things will get better.  We can heed his advice, if not his example, for our own difficult times.

Reading can help in tumultuous times, but finding the book to fit your ever-changing mood is difficult.  Revenge worked for me, but you may want to read for comfort, or to work out frustration.  Want to lean in to learn more about social justice issues, or do you need an escape?  Let our librarians find the perfect read for you with the Personalized Picks service.  Give us an idea of books or any other media that has the right feel, and we’ll return a list of titles that won’t just be good books, they’ll be the right books for you right now.