Posts for category ‘reading’

- Congratulations to Jandy Nelson, whose wonderful book The Sky Is Everywhere is out today, and I am so excited for you lucky people who get to read it for the first time. I adored this book. See Jandy’s site for a lovely little book trailer and what people are saying (scroll down). Here’s what I said: “Jandy Nelson’s story of grief somehow manages to be an enchantment, a celebration, a romance—without forsaking the rock-hard truths of loss.” And, the narrator, Lennie, plays the clarinet just like I did as a kid and teen. Bonus! It’s one of those books you want to hug to your chest when you’re finished or, like Sonya Sones said, marry.

- Congratulations also to Varian Johnson on the release of Saving Maddie, a book I’ve not yet read but am very eager to, because, hello, preacher’s kid, mysterious bad girl, reconciling faith and family. Follow Varian’s blog and go on tour with him; today he’s in the Author’s Tent with Melodye Shore.

- Debbi Michiko Florence has kicked off a new blog series—Coffee Break Tuesday—in which authors share a bit about their writing lives and paths to publication. When you’re looking for inspiration or company, check it out. The series kicks off with a few words from yours truly.

- I continue to encourage you to subscribe to Poets & Writers if you don’t already. This month, there’s a great profile of Sam Lipsyte (The Ask) and a masterful essay on the poetry of John Donne by William Giraldi. Both are only in the print edition, but you can read some of the issue’s content online. I love this quote from Lipsyte:

“One of my big revelations…was that nobody cares whether you write your novel or not. They want you to be happy. Your parents want you to have health insurance. Your friends want you to be a good friend. But everybody’s thinking about their own problems and nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, ‘Boy, I sure hope Sam finishes that chapter and gets one step closer to his dream of being a working writer.’ Nobody does that. If you want to write, it has to come from you. If you don’t want to write, that’s great. Go do something else. That was a very liberating moment for me.”

- I’m interviewed at Moonlight, Lace, and Mayhem, displaying my ignorance of all things Irish. And here’s a nice review of OWL at 60secondrecap.

- If that isn’t enough for you, I did a podcast interview with the International Reading Assocation’s ReadWriteThink blog while I was at NCTE this past fall. If the podcast is half as great as the conversation felt at the time, I think you will like. Many thanks to Jennifer Buehler for the time and care she put into this. (Teachers: I actually think there may be some potential classroom use for this and/or the video I made for Holly Cupola’s blog.)

Visual aids and purchase links—show some love to an author today by buying a book! If not one of these, something else you’ve been wanting…

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Me and Varian at TLA 09. Pre-bangs.

Author and Readergirlz diva Holly Cupola graciously invited me to participate in her Story Secrets series, and I put together a video blog about how the story of Once Was Lost developed from real life events. (No spoilers, don’t worry.) Thanks for having me, Holly! Don’t have your copy of Once Was Lost yet? Find it at a local independent book store, or ask for it at your school or public library.

Congrats to the PEN/Faulkner fiction award finalists—a blessedly diverse group in light of the white-male-ification this season among the bigger awards. I’m especially pleased to see comrade Sherman Alexie honored for his wonderful collection War Dances. Congratulations also to L.A. Times Prize finalists; I love how comprehensive the categories are. The only book from that entire roster that I’ve read is Dave Cullen’s Columbine, which is definitely a worthy selection.

See you back here next week, or in Jacksonville this weekend!

Matt de la Peña is the author of three acclaimed novels for young adults, and has also had short fiction published in various literary journals. I’ve known Matt awhile—our friendship began when we were forced to ride around in a stretch limo together at the Rochester Teen Book Festival. Yes, sometimes this job is hell.

While on tour for Once Was Lost, I picked up a signed copy of Matt’s latest book, We Were Here, at BookPeople in Austin and read it on the way home. This story, about three boys who break out of a group home and embark on a journey down the California coast, moved me from page 1, when the narrator, Miguel, muses about the book he’ll someday write:

“About what it’s like growing up on the levee in Stockton, where every other person you meet has missing teeth or is leaning against a liquor store wall begging for change to buy beer. Or maybe it’d be about my dad dying in the stupid war and how at the funeral they gave my mom some cheap medal and a folded up flag and shot a bunch of rifles at the clouds.”

Later, Miguel joins up with Mong and Rondell, and together they’re three characters I’ll never forget. While traveling for OWL and doing school visits and trying to connect with bored-looking teenage boys, I kept thinking, “I wish they could be listening to Matt de la Peña instead of me.” Not that I don’t have anything to say to bored teenage boys, because I think I do and usually once I get my talk rolling they are bored no more, but We Were Here truly speaks their language. It speaks your language, too, if you’re a writer, with prose that is both immediate and poetic, clear and complex, and has real drama and humor without straining for either. Matt and I have been having an email conversation about WWH for a few weeks—edited below for your reading pleasure.

My first and most important question before we even start: how do you get the little accent mark/tilde thing over the n in Peña?

So, the tilde over the “n” is tricky on the web. It’s easy on word — you just go to special characters. But I really don’t know what to do on the web. They make it hard to be Mexican online. And when I see my name without the tilde I feel naked. And I feel like I’m disrespecting my grandma.

(Fortunately, I figured out how to do this, because of course there is an entire wikipedia entry about it. On a Mac, you do option+n then the letter you want under the tilde. /PSA) Okay, at the risk of sounding like I’m asking where you get your ideas, what was the genesis of We Were Here?

When I was writing short stories I developed a weird strategy. I’d always take two partially finished stories and throw them together, no matter how odd the fit (sort of like Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked). It usually took me in totally new directions. One time I paired a landscaping story with a story about a relationship that was messed up by a cheating dude (not based on my own experience) (well, maybe a little). It seemed to work. For We Were Here I did something similar. Main character Miguel’s crime is something I took from a college basketball teammate of mine. He came to the first open gym of the year with one of those house arrest anklets. It wasn’t until six months later that he told me what happened. It broke my heart. And I always secretly watched him when everybody was goofing off or messing with each other. He’d be laughing like everybody else, but there was always something sad in his eyes. Such a complex crime (I guess I shouldn’t give it away). So, I took his crime and made it Miguel’s backstory. I also worked in a group home for a couple years after college. Tough job, but I remember looking through all the kids’ files after they went to sleep. Heartbreaking stuff. At least in some cases. So I threw Miguel into a group home setting. And last came the trip down the California coast. Seven years ago I started a failed novel about a musician living in LA. He’s originally from Stockton in Northern California. After his old man dies he drives the coast to LA and stops at random places to hang out solo. The book died because it didn’t have enough plot. But I stole the section where he travels the coast and gave it to Miguel, Mong and Rondell. And the last thing I had to do was find the right voice. Remember that story collection we were both in, Does This Book Make Me Look Fat? That was the first time I’d ever done 1st person in YA. And I was sort of practicing the voice I eventually gave to Miguel.

Anyway, that’s a very long-winded answer to your question, I know. The point is, We Were Here is a bit of a mashup. It came from all over. But the genesis, the core story I wanted to explore, was what happens to a kid who commits the kind of crime Miguel commits. What does that do to his psyche moving forward.

Ever since you mentioned Half Baked, I am jonesing.

Sara, I want you to seriously trust me on something, okay? Häagan Dazs’ Caramel Cone. Please try a pint. This son of a bitch ice cream is so good I can’t believe it.

(Insert several-day interval during which I ignore Matt’s advice, yet do consume a pint of Everything But The, against doctor’s orders.) The case files. The scene in which Miguel reads his friends’ case files had this powerfully physical effect on me I don’t often get when reading. I had to keep putting the book down, and was talking aloud to myself: “Oh God. Oh no.” Did you know when you started the story what would be in each of the three main characters’ files? On a related note: how much do you know when you start a book? Do you have it pretty well mapped out or do you allow yourself to be surprised, and allow the story to change because of those surprises?

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• In the Once Was Lost department, many thanks to BookBrowse.com for naming it Editor’s Choice, to VOYA for saying “Zarr’s fans will not be disappointed by this beautifully crafted novel about a teen coping with a loss of faith,” and (I don’t think I’ve linked to this yet – if I have, forgive me, oh merciful Internet!) Forever Young Adult’s great review, including this, “when it comes to the mysteries of the teenage heart, zarr knows how to create the Real Deal: the sweet awkwardness, the angst of uncertainty, the shimmering highs and the crushing lows.” Awwwyeah. Crushing lows, baby! You can’t have the shimmering highs without ‘em.

• How about them Saints? I thought it was a pretty great game, as Super Bowls go. Of course the best part of the S-Bowl is that it’s an excuse to re-arrange the furniture for maximum TV viewage, have people over, and eat the kind of crap food one normally denies oneself, such as kettle chips with classic onion dip. A veritable bomb of salt and fat. Until next February, my sweet!

• Over the weekend I read Richard Yates’ The Easter Parade. While I’ve always admired Yates’ prose and Revolutionary Road is a favorite (if you’ve only seen the movie, read the book!), it was pretty bleak (as is RR but this felt more so). Characters trying to transition from post-WWII times to pre-Vietnam, going from cocktail to cocktail and lover to lover, children neglected hither and yon…basically it’s Mad Men without the laughs. Okay, a couple of laughs, but it really could have used an in-office John Deere mishap. It was a fast read, about the same length as your average YA. For Sara the Slow, that is a plus. But now I want to read something happy. I’ve been peeking at G.’s library copy of Douglas Coupland’s Generation A, which looks promising if not happy.

You know what I love about shopping at my local independent book store? I go in there, and they know me. Okay, yes, part of that is because I’m an author and they are nice to authors, but when I go into Sam Weller’s or The King’s English and hang out awhile, it’s obvious that they know their other regulars, too. I know this doesn’t only happen at indies. I used to work at a little Crown Books in Daly City back when Crown Books used to be the biggest chain there was, and we knew our regulars, too, and could make recommendations and chit-chat and otherwise engage in human interaction not based on a five-star rating system or anonymous usernames.

Full disclosure: I have spent plenty of money on books at Amazon over the years, but have tapered off considerably after getting into the book business and understanding more about it. Lately I only resort to it when I need a hard to find book ASAP. But since the Macmillan debacle, and the letter from Amazon about it that felt…well, it felt hostile, frankly…I’m done with that, and keeping my Amazon purchases to blender replacement parts, the vacuum filters my hardware store doesn’t carry, and random medical supplies. Now, in saying that, I’m not berating anyone who chooses to buy books from the big A. I understand that sometimes convenience and pricing are the difference between you buying a book and not buying a book, and if you live in the boonies with no good library and you have to buy everything you want to read, it’s challenging to go indie. And, I bet that at some point in the future I will wind up clicking the buy button of a book (assuming it’s there), myself. But by shifting even 25% of your purchasing dollars to local stores, you’ll help keep the personal, human, passionate bookselling business—and the real people who make it happen—alive.

Anyway, speaking of Sam Weller’s, right now they are having a pretty fantastic sale for in-store customers—it goes through tomorrow the 6th. 50% off used (!), 25% off new, 30% off rare. Some restrictions. There is also chocolate. So if you’re in the SLC, go down there and show Catherine and Tony and the crew some love. Heck, you can even do that when there’s not a sale. All the better. To make it even more convenient, TRAX stops right at their front door, and there are two bars and a coffee shop and some restaurants on the same block, so you can eat, drink, and buy books all in one delightful outing. (All right, yes, sometimes you go downtown on Sunday or a weeknight and things are shuttered, but that seems to be changing. I am seriously hoping this “downtown rising” thing works out, because I live within walking distance of downtown and having it actually…rise…would make living here longterm so much more enticing.)

Here’s my haul from yesterday, a mix of new and used, and not counting the four books I have on order (you know you can order books through your local store if you don’t see them in stock, right?). The wrapped one (expertly, and for free by SW staff) is a top secret gift, obviously:

Coming on the blog next week: interview with Matt de la Peña, in which we talk about the wonderful We Were Here and other writery stuff. You’re gonna like it.

Have a great weekend! Go…Saints?

“I’ve always thought of encountering readers—of having any readers at all—as an unbelievable gift. Giving lectures, signing books, sitting hopefully behind a table at a bookstore in Wichita Falls: these rituals may be humbling, but I’ve never forgotten the fact that thousands of unpublished writers in this country would give anything to be humiliated in exactly this way. Of all the mortifications to be found in an author’s life, probably none hurts so much as the kind you get from not being able to share your work with another soul.” – Jennifer Finney Boylan in a NYT Op-Ed on Salinger, seclusion, PR in the digital age

“A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other. Each acquaintance is an alien, a well of unexplored difference in the experience of life that cannot be imagined or accessed in any way but through genuine interaction.” – Jaron Lanier in YOU ARE NOT A GADGET