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books

Slowing Down for Summer

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Summer has been the time I’ve always used to “catch up” with things, in part because summer always meant Summer Reading Club at the library, which was frantic, fast-paced, and energy zapping. I’d find it incredibly therapeutic to spend free time speeding through book after book in order to be ahead of the reading game. I wanted to be well-read for when fall approached so I could write about the newest and hottest, as well as be prepared to give great reader’s advisory on those new titles.
This is the second year, though, I haven’t been at a library during the summer. I…can’t say I miss it much. I certainly miss working with the teens, and I definitely miss the opportunities afforded in working with people and books, but I don’t miss things like the over-programming, the stress about budgeting, about bureaucracy, about time and energy and being “on,” even when I felt completely and utterly “off.” 
Whereas last summer I was new to my job and learning the ropes, this year, I’m firmly into my routine and my projects. I know how much time is needed to accomplish the necessary things, as well as how much time I have to work on new things. Being away at BEA was an opportunity to think a lot about what I want for this summer, and in reflecting, I realized how valuable summer is not for getting ahead, but instead, for slowing down. 
I’m not going to spend this summer trying to plow through things. I’m not going to pile my to-be-read plans with miles-high stacks of everything coming out this fall so I can be the first to talk about it or know about it. 
Instead, I’m slowing down and investing in reading those back list titles that I’ve always intended to read but have yet to pick up.
I want to slow my roll — and my role! — a bit. There are so many things to know, to read, to think, to reflect, and to share. And the truth is, as much as I’d love to be ahead of the game where I can be, it’s important to realize that this is a thing I can’t and can never control. I don’t have the time to be first, and my prioritizing of energy over time management means that sometimes I don’t have the reserves in me to give everything I want to do the attention it deserves immediately. What’s best for me, I realize, is having a plan but allowing myself plenty of opportunities to be flexible within that plan. 
Despite having read abundantly in middle and high school, despite majoring in English, despite my library science background, there are still so many classics, especially more contemporary titles, I’ve missed out on. I’ve never read Toni Morrison, for one, and this summer I’m changing that, picking up The Bluest Eye. I’ve never read Margaret Atwood’s classic The Handmaid’s Tale, despite knowing how many books I adore reference it or are modern takes on the story. I’ve yet to crack open Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, even though it’s a book I admire on my shelf every single time I walk by, thinking about how much people I know absolutely adore it. 
There are less “classic-y” titles on my reading plans agenda this summer, too. I just picked up one of Megan Abbott’s earlier noir titles, This Song Is You, after reading and thinking about this great piece on the rise of feminist noir (I read and enjoyed the Larssen series, even though the writing itself left so much to be desired). I’ve got Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects to get through, as well as Night Film, which I think I talked about reading months and months ago. Maybe now is the time to follow through with that plan. 
A handful of unread Haruki Murakami titles are sitting on my shelf, too. I’ve always loved his strange, surreal, magical worlds. I want to fall back into one. 
I went through a big phase of buying backlist YA titles over the last couple of years, too, and I’m eager to dive into them headfirst. Bad Apple by Laura Ruby is one, as well as Rebecca O’Connell’s Myrtle of Willendorf (a recommendation from Liz from years ago I bought and let languish on my shelves) and Laura Kasischke’s Boy Heaven — I read Feathered years ago and still think about it. I admit to never having read S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, despite having read some of her other work, and perhaps it’s time to break that tradition, and I should certainly pick up one of the Francesca Lia Block bind-ups I’ve got on my shelf, too. I’m also still working through some Sarah Dessen backlist; I think I have just three left. 
Do I admit here, too, that perhaps I need to finally sit down and read Harry Potter from beginning to end? I made it to book 5 or 6 one summer while I was teaching middle schoolers about Shakespeare — they pressured me to — but it’s become such a cultural reference point that I feel obligated to revisit with a different, perhaps more excited, mindset. 

I’m feeling way less pressure when it comes to reading now, and a big reason is that I’ve made the conscious decision to not just slow down, but to not feel obligated to read everything that’s new. While that still makes up the bulk of my reading diet, I’m much more intentional about my choices. I’m not picking something up just because. Instead, I pick it up because I’m interested in it; I’m reading far more books across genres and styles not because of that. Perhaps it’s changed how I’m blogging a bit, since I don’t write reviews as much as I once did, but it’s changing my reading life for the better. Choosing to be intentional about reading backlist this summer and slowing down to drink in the words, language, and stories makes me even more excited to discover new favorites.

Without doubt, making this choice will encourage more excitement and engagement with those fall titles when I’m ready for them.

What are you reading this summer? What backlist should I be looking into? I am open to YA and adult fiction, as well as really solid, engaging non-fiction — memoirs by people of color or microhistories are especially appealing to me. Tell me your reading plans and what should be on my radar.

Reading Fatigue

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Last year was my first year as a Round 1 judge for the Cybils, and I think it contributed a lot to just a feeling of general reading fatigue. Aside from school, reading has never felt like a chore to me, but it got to be that way sometimes during Cybils season. This is not to say I didn’t enjoy it, but I definitely read a lot more, a lot faster, and a lot of it was stuff that I didn’t much like.

I knew I’d need a switch in my reading habits for a while afterward to recover. What I didn’t count on was how long that switch would last. I don’t know if it’s permanent or not, but I haven’t been reading much YA speculative fiction at all this year. My hands aren’t itching for the sequel to the book I loved so much last year, and I’ve picked up stuff I’m usually guaranteed to like and set it back down almost immediately.

This is not to say I’ve stopped reading YA SFF completely. I still have several books in that category going at a time, but I don’t consume them at the rate that I used to, and often I’ll put off finishing the last 50 pages of a YA fantasy to instead start something else completely different. Below are the categories that I’ve been reading a lot more of lately – let’s just call 2015 (or at least the first half of 2015) the year of the audiobook and the romance novel.

Audiobooks
I’m a fidgeter. I can’t just sit and watch a television show or movie, I also need to be doing something with my hands, like putting together a puzzle or playing Candy Crush. Sometimes when I’m reading a book, I’ll feel like I also need to be doing something with my hands, and holding up the book doesn’t cut it. Audiobooks fulfill this need so well, because I can listen to a book while also messing around on my phone or doing laundry. While I’ve listened to some YA on audio this year, most of my audiobook listening has been in the categories below.

Romance Novels
I love romance novels for many, many reasons, but the primary one this year has been the guaranteed happily ever after. There’s a lot of changes (and potential changes on the horizon) happening in my life right now and I just don’t want stress from my fiction to contribute to stress in my reality. I read everything Courtney Milan has written that I could get my hands on, dove back into Julia Quinn, brushed up on Sarah MacLean, and gave Scribd a trial run so I could consume a bunch of other authors in short order. I’ve finally overcome my aversion to e-books thanks to my romance reading, since a lot of what I want to read is only available in e-formats. But I’ve also listened to a lot of romance on audio, which isn’t actually as awkward as I thought it would be. Though I do tend to put my headphones in when the sexy times happen. Even if no one’s around.

Nonfiction
I’ve listened to some really heavy nonfiction, but most of it is narrative nonfiction, meaning that I can actually go and research what happened so I’m not surprised going into it. It removes the suspense, which may seem boring to some readers, but is really reassuring to me at this point in my life. I’ve read a lot about cults, including some memoirs of people who have escaped some really awful stuff. But that’s the important part: they’ve escaped it. I’ve also read some really fascinating science nonfiction that has enabled me to learn more about my world and myself. Most recently, I inhaled Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which is a book about women’s sexuality. It’s awesome enough that it deserves its own blog post, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but if you are a woman and/or have sex with a woman, you should read it.

Mysteries
I’ve always loved the classic sort of mystery where an amateur sleuth solves a whodunnit, bonus points if there’s lots of humor (which is why I tend to stay away from mysteries featuring actual detectives or FBI agents or whatnot). Again, these sorts of stories provide a lot of comfort, much in the same way romances do: I know the sleuth will catch the bad guy by the end of the book. My Elizabeth Peters binge belongs in this category. I need an Amelia Peabody in my life.

Subtitles
OK, this one doesn’t really count. But I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek Deep Space Nine and Bob’s Burgers. I’m not saying Tina Belcher is my hero, but I’ve known since early this year that I’ll be dressing as her for Halloween.

Comfort Reads

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Comfort reads are, I think, different from favorite reads. Sometimes they overlap with each other, but often my favorite reads aren’t comforting at all – they’re painful and tear my heart into tiny little pieces. There’s a certain amount of emotional preparation I have to do before diving into some of my favorite reads.

Comfort reads, on the other hand, are those books I return to again and again simply because they make me happy. Rather than breaking my heart into tiny little pieces, they heal it. Protagonists in danger can be relied upon to make it safely out, along with all of their beloved companions. People who fall in love stay in love. The characters are fundamentally good. They make missteps, but they make it right in the end, too.

I’ve been on a big comfort read kick lately, perhaps because a lot of what’s going on in my own life is pretty chaotic and uncertain right now. Below are a few that I’ve been dipping into again and again the past few months.

Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters (and its sequels)
This is the first in an historical mystery series featuring amateur sleuth and Egyptologist Amelia Peabody. Crocodile was first published in 1975 and it spawned several sequels, the final of which is being published in 2016. It was in editing stages when Peters died in 2013 (I’m still sad about this. Go read about Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Mertz and be in awSorceree). I love that this series is about archaeology and excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, and I love that it’s also about Victorian era customs and mores, as both of these time periods have always fascinated me. I love Amelia even more: she’s outspoken, a loyal friend, an ardent feminist, whip-smart, funny, believes completely in herself and her family, and loves passionately. She has some foibles (some of which she acknowledges, some of which she doesn’t), which add to the humor of the series. Her voice is among the strongest I’ve ever read in adult fiction. And of course, these are mysteries at heart, though the combination of excavation and sleuthing is still rather unique I think. Amelia and her husband Emerson age throughout the series (they’re in their 60s in the last book), but they still go on adventures, and the next generation gets to have a few of their own too. These books are just lovely, and I highly recommend you get a hold of the audiobooks narrated by Barbara Rosenblat, who voices Amelia and Emerson to perfection.

When He Was Wicked by Julia Quinn
Romances are my go-to comfort reads. They guarantee a happily ever after and the ones I pick usually have a good dose of humor. Julia Quinn’s books were my entry into romance and her books remain the ones that can best soothe my heart when it’s troubled. When He Was Wicked is actually one of her more angst-ridden books, but I think it’s the best (and you won’t find that many who agree with me, sadly). The hero and heroine grow to love each other over time, and it feels like a true, lasting love because of something that happens early in the novel that they both then have to come to terms with. The conflict is entirely internal, which often seems less exciting at the outset but is usually more fulfilling in the end. There’s a particular scene near the end of the book that I go back and read over and over again because it’s so emotionally satisfying.

Harry Potter books 1-3 by J. K. Rowling
The first line of the first Harry Potter book is as perfect a first line as you can get: “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” Sorcerer’s Stone is a practically perfect children’s book that never ceases to make me feel happy. Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban are equally wonderful in their own ways, with Azkaban probably my favorite among the first three (time travel!). But it’s only the first three books that really count as comfort reads for me, as things get quite dark starting with book 4. Goblet is where you begin to realize that maybe things aren’t going to work out for the best after all. My favorite Harry Potter isn’t one of the first three, actually, but these are the ones I’ve probably listened to most anyway. Jim Dale is wonderful and these first three books are safe and funny and heartwarming.

Uncollected Reading and Book Buying Thoughts

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Nothing really connects these ideas or pieces of my reading life together, but they’re things I’ve been thinking about and doing and couldn’t not put them into some sort of place. They’re uncollected. But they’re probably all really connected, too.

1. The weather here has really changed. It’s gotten so nice. After a long, cold winter inside, all I want to do is spend time outside. I’m not an outdoors person, so my speed of spending time outdoors is sitting on my front porch or in the backyard hammock with a book. Often the view looks something like this:

Sometimes it looks like this:

The bookmark in Hold Me Like A Breath is my all-time favorite bookmark. I’ve had it since 2008, when a professor I worked for at UT went to Tasmania. She knew how much I have a love for that place — because of a book, The Ghost With Trembling Wings by Scott Weidensaul, about lost species of animals and travel and nature and tasmanian devils — and she picked up the bookmark for me because it’s made of Tasmanian wood. It’s a Huon Pine, and to this day, many years later, it still smells good. 
2. I’ve been buying books by the bucket loads. I went to three bookstores in three weekends. For someone who is quite a ways from any bookstore, this is a lot of driving to visit bookstores. It hasn’t just been purchases in store, though. I’ve done some online ordering, too. Mostly things that have been sitting on my “to read” list for a while that I don’t have access to via the library and can’t find in store.
I haven’t read any of these books. I haven’t started any of them yet, either. Most were from recommendations of others. It’s a mix of non-fiction and fiction. I’m really looking forward to digging into each of them, and I plan on getting to The Diary of a Teenager Girl soonest, probably. It’s an older backlist title, a mix of prose and graphic elements. It’s being rereleased this summer, as a movie’s being made from it. The preview in EW is where I heard about it and then I became determined to track down reviews before putting money down for it. 
Headstrong, a book of short biographies of women in science, looks like it’ll be great research for my anthology. 

I bought all of these books, too. Again, some were from a to-read list. Others were things people told me about or I had connections to somehow — I bought two romance novels, my first ever, because Kimberly has raved about Sarah MacLean. I really think she’s a neat person (and I’ll tell you more about why in the near future, I think), and I’m excited to dig into them. 
The Last Life came to my awareness from this wonderful Reading Lives podcast with Nova Ren Suma. I picked up Astonish Me after talking in the Book Riot backchannel about my love for dance themed novels, and The Bluest Eye will be my first Morrison read, on deck for next month. 
I adored Amy Spalding’s funny, feminist Kissing Ted Callahan when I read it earlier this year, and so I had to pick up a finished copy. The librarian in the story has a familiar name, too. 
Selfish is a small literary magazine. Jenn Northington, who is the Director of Events and Programming, has a piece in it. This is the first issue, and it sounds fantastic.  
3. It’s not just books I’ve been buying. I went on a bit of a comics binge buy, too. 
After I heard there was going to be an Archie vs. Sharknado issue this summer, I decided it was high time to catch up on Archie I never read. I consulted a friend who is an Archie expert and decided on three mega collections. I then bought Afterlife with Archie because zombies.
Everywhere Antennas is one of the most beautifully drawn graphic novels I’ve ever read. It’s a story about a girl who never feels well and attributes it to living in a city, where there’s a lot of electricity. The wires and buzzing are hurting her and she chooses to move to rural Canada, where she can connect with the Earth, go off grid, and create. It’s a comic in translation — a thing I’ve really come to enjoy lately — and I can’t wait to revisit it. This is definitely the kind of comic you could consider “new adult,” if that were a thing comics could be. The main character is post-college, but she’s not entirely sure yet where her life will take her.
Both Ms. Marvel and Sex Criminals just released their second trade issues. I loved their respective first trades, so I had to pick them up.
Not pictured: Black Widow, Volume 1. You cannot find it anywhere. It’s backordered. I hope I get it some day. I’m waiting, still. 
4. Of course, there have been review copies coming to my house, too. Fortunately, it’s been in lesser quantities than the purchased books. I think. I can’t always tell since books get put places around the house and I have become bad about knowing what is where. It’s somewhere. But not always easily accessible.
The covers of these are so great. There’s the new Blythe Woolston. The new Sarah Darer Littman. A horror novel — We’ll Never Be Apart — which has almost the same exact cover as After the Snow. 
Todd Strasser’s The Beast of Cretacea was compared to Moby Dick, which is a dangerous catnip for me. I love Moby Dick. I’m tentative and a little hesitant about picking up Sugar because it’s about a fat girl. This could either go very well or very poorly. I want it to be great. I worry I might be let down. Reviews haven’t told me much either way. I’ll be getting to it sooner, probably, rather than later. 
5. I’ve not been in the mood to write reviews lately. I’ve been in the mood to read and really think about my reading in a private, personal way. A lot of those thoughts end up coming out in bigger, more developed pieces, outside of reviews. I’ve found a short review on Goodreads works, along with talking up a great book on Twitter, is about my energy level for reviews. 
But here’s a peek at recent reads, with a quick pitch/comparison.
Hold Me Like A Breath by Tiffany Schmidt comes out on the 19th. It’s a retelling of “The Princess and the Pea” with organ trafficking. It is as thrilling as it sounds. And there’s romance. And also, there’s a sequel forthcoming that I can’t wait to get my hands on. Satisfying, well-paced, and unique. 
Scarlett Undercover by Jennifer Latham comes out later this month, too. It’s about a Muslim American girl who is, without question, as snarky, quick-witted, and smart as Veronica Mars. Very little romance in this one, though it is hovering in the background. Teens who want teen sleuths and who want a story where a Muslim girl’s identity plays a role in the story and in her character development will eat this up. I know I did.
Invincible by Amy Reed came out last week. Like all of Reed’s books, we have a broken main character and she’s broken because she has to be. This isn’t at all like TFIOS, which is the unfortunate comp it’s gotten from the publisher. It’s about a girl who learns she’s not on the death sentence with cancer she thought, and coming back into real life after that means she’s grieving everything: her entire life is now different. And so, she seeks out comfort with a boy who is not good for her, not even a little. If anything, maybe this is the kind of book you hand to readers who are over TFIOS. It’s not sentimental, and it’s not at all emotionally manipulative. 

Kissing in America by Margo Rabb hits shelves later this month and if ever you wanted a Trish Doller read alike or a read alike to the also forthcoming, also outstanding A Sense of the Infinite by Hilary T. Smith, here you go. The title is, I think, unfortunate. There’s very little kissing in this book at all. It’s about friendship, about Eva seeking out some sort of life after the unexpected death of her father in a plane crash. It’s one of the most well-done grief books I’ve read, and it features a road trip and a series of realistic bad decisions at the hands of a 16-year-old girl. The writing is outstanding. I blew through this, as well as the Smith title, in no time. 
I didn’t get a picture of A Sense of the Infinite, but it is without question one of my favorite reads this year. When it comes out later this month, pick it up. It’s about friendship, about family, about grief, about girls growing up. It’s a true coming-of-age story. I talked more in depth about why this book is so phenomenal over at Book Riot in our Best of the Month round-up. 
Also not pictured — well, it is, at the very top of this post — is my reading of Jesmyn Ward’s outstanding, poignant, painful memoir Men We Reaped. It’s Ward’s reflection on losing five young black men in her life and where and how their stories and their deaths are connected. Read this. Especially if you care about black lives and stories. It’s not easy. It’s not pretty. But it’s important and powerful and so damn humanizing. 
6. This isn’t a writing blog, nor will it turn into one. But I wanted to round this post out by talking briefly about my anthology. 
It’s weird. I feel two things about it at once: I feel like I know exactly what I’m doing, in part because I feel like the work in putting together blog series, especially the “About the Girls” one, has taught me that giving other people freedom to explore the things they’re passionate about within a theme allows them to be at their best. On the other hand, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve not told anyone who else is involved, so it’s a big secret. Contributors know what they’re writing or creating (I have people creating things for my book — that feeling is unreal) but I don’t know how it’ll look in the end. 
In thinking about the things I want to put in myself, I get a little overwhelmed. Then I get excited. But I float back and forth on the knowing/not knowing line. 
The very last class I took in college for my English major was meant to be a capstone experience. The final project was about anthologies. We explored how they were put together. Why they were crafted as they were. What the editors’ choices meant in terms of their work and in terms of having an impact on those who read those anthologies. Our project for the course was to create a mock anthology and talk about why we made the choices we made. What those choices said about our biases and our knowledge.
My group made an anthology about censored children’s literature. It’s still online in bits and pieces, but since some of the copyright choices are questionable (we were young and so was the internet, honestly), I don’t link to it. 
I’ve been thinking a lot about that project, about the choices and conversations that went on, and I have definitely been influenced by that class in working on this project. I spend a lot of time thinking about each contributor I reach out to. About what I ask of them. About where their work will land in the greater conversation. 
And I’ve been asked really good questions back. Some of them have led me to reconsider visions I had, but not in bad ways. While it’s my work in the editing, I cannot wait to see where my invisible work — those conversations, those decisions — ends up taking the creators. 
I’m looking forward to when I can begin sharing who is a part of this project. 
It’s a treat to work with some of my feminist heroes and heroines. 

A Few Bookish Things

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A few bookish things making me happy on the internet recently:

1. The Bridgertons are back in 2016. I have no idea if this means novels, novellas, or something else entirely, but it’s exciting regardless.

via Julia Quinn’s website

2. An historical romance novel by Courtney Milan featuring an Asian protagonist. Yes, please. It’s the third in a series and the first isn’t yet published (it’s coming out in May), but I bet all of them will be good.

via Courtney Milan’s website

3. A flowchart I created for my library’s Tumblr was picked up by this Buzzfeed article: 15 Insanely Useful Diagrams for Book Lovers.

via Buzzfeed

4. Lindy West is writing a coming of age memoir called Shrill.

via Publishers Weekly