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2024 Resolving to Set Goals and a book review of Shame the Devil

New year's resolutions are a motherfucker. I make them every single year with the best of intentions, but every single year, they pass me by. As I've gotten older, I've learned to give myself some grace and I just set out to do better next year. This year I'm trying to flip the script and look at every day as a chance to walk the right path. In that spirit, instead of resolutions, this year I set goals in a bunch of different categories. What makes this year different is that I've resolved to track those goals on a weekly basis and regularly check in and hold myself accountable. 

It turns out, I'm already being tested. My 21 month old son has gone from having covid to now having croup so needless to say the last week has been a struggle of taking care of him, not sleeping much and trying to have a successful first week of 2024. And while other things have popped up that have made financial goals a bit tougher to achieve, there's definitely something to be said for remaining flexible and making exceptions to your goals when chances to do special things with life-long friends happen. 

One of the goals that I hope is easier to obtain is that I'm setting out to read 12 books in the new year. I am also going to listen to 12 as well. With that said, I finished reading my first book of 2024. It was George Pelecanos's Shame the Devil. It's the fourth book in what is referred to as the DC Quartet and it's a pretty breezy read. I'm an unconventional reader, so of course I have read one of the other books in this quartet (The Sweet Forever) but now I'm going to have to reach back and read the other two books in the series. 

I found the book to be enjoyable and while I didn't find the characters relatable, I thought they were well drawn and they felt like three dimensional characters. There are beautiful passages in the book that deal with death and some less beautiful discussions about faith and life after death. I do enjoy the fact that a couple of the characters were also featured in The Sweet Forever. There's something about serialized storytelling that I have always enjoyed. The idea that a character lives on across multiple books makes them feel more real to me. There's a big time jump in between the events of this book and the last one I read and Pelecanos does a great job filling you in on the life altering events that took place outside of the pages of the book.

Another thing that I loved was Pelecanos use of sporting events (in this case NBA games) as a marker of the time the events of the book take place. In the last book he used the NCAA tournament, and in this book he uses NBA regular season games. Just hearing the names of players from the era when I watched the most basketball (the 90s) really brought me back.

I have to say that I'm really not great at seeing the bigger picture when I read. I routinely struggle to see the themes that a work of fiction is trying to present to me. I really need to be hit over the head with them. I can't even begin to say (unless I did in an earlier paragraph) what the overall message was or what this book was supposed to make me think about, but I will say that when I was reading I thought about mortality, loss of a child, faith, what it means to be a coward, what it means to be a man, and if not drinking that much alcohol makes me an outlier. 

I don't read enough to rate them, but I would recommend this book to anyone that is looking for a crime novel full of interesting characters and some solid action. 

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Location: San Diego, CA, USA

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