What my mother reads
My mother has been a school librarian for longer than I've been alive, and she reads like one. That is to say constantly, carefully, and in order.
She reads mysteries above everything else, and she reads them in series order, without exception. If a friend lends her the fourth book in a series she hasn't started, she thanks the friend, puts the book on the hall table, and goes to the library for the first. I once asked her what would happen if she read one out of order. She looked at me the way you'd look at someone who asked what would happen if they ate dessert first, which is to say she knew perfectly well and wasn't going to dignify it.
She keeps a notebook. Each series gets a page: the author, the detective, the titles in order, a check mark beside each one she's read, and a line or two about it in her small square printing. Agatha Christie took three pages. Some pages are short and finished, and those are the sad ones, where the writer died and the detective stopped with them. Sue Grafton has a page with the alphabet written down the margin, checked off through X. Y comes out next month. She has known the date since spring. She has put her name down for it at the library, and she has also, I happen to know, ordered her own copy, in case.
I got Raymond Chandler from her shelves. I was fourteen and bored, and she handed me The Big Sleep and said I was too young for it, which is how you get a fourteen-year-old to read anything. I read it in a day. Then I read the rest of them in order, because I'd been raised right. I still think about Philip Marlowe more than is reasonable for a grown woman with a job.
The other thing about my mother and books is the library sale. Twice a year the library sells off what it can't keep, and my mother goes on the first morning, early, with two canvas bags and a list. She is not there to browse. She is there to fill gaps: the third book of a series she owns the first, second and fourth of, in hardcover, so they match. She will put back a perfectly good paperback and wait a year for the hardcover to come around. I have stood beside her while she did it. She was not sorry.
Growing up, I thought this was how everyone read. It wasn't until college that I met people who'd start a series wherever they happened to find it, and it took me years to stop thinking less of them. I've mostly stopped. Mostly.
This summer, with school out, she's working through Louise Penny from the beginning, on the porch, with iced tea and a pencil. She calls me after each one to tell me what she thinks of the inspector. So far she approves of him, with reservations about his choice of friends.
Do you read in order? And if you don't, what do you tell yourself?