It's Not You. It's Me. (My Quest to Find a Book I Like)

Lately, I've had a rocky relationship with reading. For several months nearly every book I picked up was a big miss for me. I felt like I was on a string of bad blind dates (not that I've ever been a blind date. But I can imagine the feeling.) You hear about the person from a friend. Or maybe you meet him online. You have high hopes that you'll hit it off. You really really want to like him. And then you meet, and for whatever reason, you just don't click.

I am not a picky reader! I've read and enjoyed all kinds of books. Classics. Literary fiction. Lots of young adult stuff because I write YA books and I like to know what my fellow YA writers are writing. I also read non-fiction. Memoirs. Mysteries. Romances. Whatever. As long as there's a decent story at the core, I'll give it a chance. Confession: I read the Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy. I'm not particularly proud of this fact, but I'm telling you to prove that I have never been hard to please.

And yet, I was starting to reconsider everything I believed about myself as a reader. Books had become a struggle. I felt like I'd read them before. I knew where they were going. The characters didn't seem like real people. I didn't care what happened to them. The writing wasn't great or it was downright bad. I found myself revising passages in my head. Why did the author use the word "murmur" 13 times in the last five pages? Did she really need to include a particular scene? And why was there another teen boy love interest described as having "piercing green eyes"? Do I know ANY guys with piercing green eyes?

Book after book after book had me feeling the same thing: a flash of hope and then the inevitable letdown when it didn't live up to the potentially promising premise.

OMG, I thought. Was I losing my ability to enjoy a book? Had I read too many books over the course of my lifetime and therefore read every possible scenario? Or was this condition a result of my work as a writer? I know how books are put together now. I've seen the man behind the curtain. Questioning every authorial decision and editing paragraphs as you read, let me tell you, tends to pull a reader out of the story.

Or what if my problem was a change in my brain chemistry? My computer science-y son had shared a study with me about the impact of internet surfing on the human brain. Apparently, we're losing our ability to focus, to read larger chunks of material. It's all that jumping around we do from website to website. All that tweeting. I confided my fears to my husband and he laughed. "Your brain chemistry has changed in the last two months?" he said. Okay. Maybe that was a stretch.

All I knew was that I didn't like books anymore, that I couldn't seem to read without pausing after every other sentence. Maybe I needed to stop reading. Or at least take a break from it. Give my twitchy tweeting brain a rest.

And then I happened to pick up a book. This was one from my stack, a book I'd been meaning to read for months, the popular and critically acclaimed dystopian novel Divergent by Veronica Roth. I read it in one sitting on plane trip. Huh. It was good. From the very first page I was hooked. On the plane trip home I read another book, Ask the Passengers by A. S. King, which also turned out to be absorbing and thought provoking. At home I picked up other books. They were good too. More than good. I practically cried in relief. I hadn't lost my ability to read books. I had lost my ability to read bad ones.

It wasn't me. It was them.

Which sounds snotty, I know. So I'll say it a different way: It's not them. It's me. Apparently, I AM a picky reader. What I've realized the past few months is that some books do it for me, and some don't.

Here's a rundown of the ones that clicked:

Divergent, Veronica Roth. It's no accident that this book and the sequel Insurgent are on YA best seller lists. I've grown weary of dystopian lit, but this book reeled me back into the genre. Main character Tris has grown up in an orderly world where people are divided into groups based on the personality traits they value. There's an honest group, risk-takers, scholars, and Tris's group--which promotes selfless behavior. At sixteen you take a test and choose which faction you'd like to join. But what happens if you don't quite fit into any of these? Weeks later, I'm still thinking about the societal questions this novel raises.

Ask the Passengers, A. S. King. Still wrapping my mind around this one. Brilliant. Should've won an award this year. I don't know why it didn't.

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, Carolyn Mackler. Not sure how I missed this one along the way. It won a Printz Honor in 2003. It features a self conscious and self deprecating teen girl's attempt to assert herself and figure out her place in a dysfunctional family. Funny and sad and ultimately inspiring.

Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson. I love all of Anderson's realistic contemporary YA novels, so it shouldn't have been a surprise to me that I'd love this one too. I think I'd put it off because I knew it was about anorexia and it might be painful to read. It sort of was. But so beautifully written and heartbreaking and somehow hopeful too.

Try Not to Breathe, Jennifer R. Hubbard. Absorbing story about a teen boy dealing with the ramifications of a suicide attempt and his relationship with a cool quirky girl who's looking for her own answers.

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn. I read this one for my book club and it was a total page turner. Told from two points of view. A man's wife goes missing and he's the main suspect. You get the feeling he's keeping secrets as he tells his side, but his wife has secrets too. The reader gets HER point of view from the pages of her diary. Brilliantly plotted with shocking twists and unlikeable characters that you somehow root for anyway.

Honey, Baby, Sweetheart by Deb Caletti. A spot-on description of toxic love. Ruby's mom struggles to let go of charming but irresponsible dad. Ruby struggles to let go of Travis, a charming rich boy who draws her into his reckless and dangerous world. All the characters are complex and realistic, including the dog, Poe, who has got to be one of the most adorably destructive dogs in YA fiction.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan. If you're having trouble, too, connecting with books, this might be the perfect antidote. It is a book with no words. It's shelved as a children's picture book or graphic novel, but it transcends any genre. It's the story of a man who leaves his family behind to start life in a new country, a country that sort of looks like America at the turn of the century. Except it's not. A few pages in, you will forget there are no words and fall under its spell.

Which--and I don't care how picky this makes me--is the only thing I ask for in a book.

"Reviews Are Not for Authors" and Other Bits of Wisdom from the Cool Chicks on the Dark DaysTour

It hit me when I had to park three blocks away from the bookstore that this was no ordinary writer book signing. The place, the awesome independent children's bookstore Cover to Cover, probably doesn't have more than fifteen parking spaces and every darn one of them was taken when I pulled up (naively) ten minutes early. I'm not good at counting people in crowds, but I'd have to guess that at least a hundred people were there--ranging from middle schoolers and moms to older teens and college types. The big draw, I realized at once, was Veronica Roth, author of the Divergent series. (I must confess here that I have not read the books yet, but I promise they’re on my short list.) The buzz is that this dystopian series will satisfy readers of the Hunger Games. Other fun trivia, the second book Insurgent is out, and Roth is working on the third, which she's jokingly calling Detergent. Her fans love this and LOVE her. The kids around me gushed about Roth like she was a rock star, and when she emerged from the back room, they cheered and giggled and swooned.

I had to sit on the floor behind a pole so I didn't actually get to see her at first (or the other authors along for the ride) but their voices all sounded cool. Sally Oddi, the owner of Cover to Cover, introduced the group--Roth, Bethany Griffin (Masque of the Red Death), Elizabeth Norris (Unraveling) and Aprilynne Pike (Destined--the fourth book in the Wings series)--then set the ground rules: twenty minutes of questions before we’d form orderly lines to get our books signed. The first questions were mostly for Roth--"Veronica! What's your biggest fear?" But then things settled down and we got into some interesting stuff:

Someone from the audience brought up a controversy on Goodreads. Apparently some writers are responding to negative reviews on that site. I wish I could've seen from behind the pole because I have no idea which author said what. I think it was Aprilynne Pike, though, who pointed out that book reviews really aren’t meant for authors. By the time a book’s out; it’s out, and there isn’t anything a writer can do to change it. Reviews, she said, are for readers. The others agreed, saying they tried to avoid reading reviews but couldn’t always help it, especially these days with social media. One of them laughed and said that there are readers online who tweet bad reviews directly to her. Maybe they don’t realize that she’s an actual person sitting at home in her pajamas reading this thing. But they all agreed that it was not cool to attack a reviewer and sometimes there was stuff they could learn from a negative review, that could at least help them with the next book they’re working on.

Then there was the mention of the controversial article in the New York Times recently that disparaged adults who read children’s fiction. I hate to even bring this up. One, because it ticks me the hell off when people attack an entire genre of literature—particularly one that I love so much—and two, because I think it just gives attention to a troll. Last year it was the article in the WSJ that painted all YA fiction as deliberately lurid. The ladies on the Dark Days tour waded in after the audience had finally quieted down (Yes, these rabid YA fans were ticked off too, offended that some blowhard would dare knock the books they love.) YA literature is popular right now, was one of the author’s responses. (again, could not see WHO since I was stuck behind a pole!) which makes it a fun target. But why not be happy people are reading more? Why attack books you haven’t read? Here here! (I get the feeling that certain critics are deliberately being provocative, trying to hit a nerve to throw a spotlight on themselves, and if we all ignore them, maybe they’ll go away.)

There were questions about the writing process. Two of the writers, Elizabeth Norris? and Bethany Griffin? (pole in the way!) have day jobs and fit writing time in at night. Veronica writes in spurts, working long days for weeks at a time, then taking as many weeks off after. Aprilynne has four kids and writes when they’re at school. She got a laugh when she mentioned that her only two goals every day were to write a certain number of pages and to run five miles. Cleaning and other stuff, including taking a shower, might not ever happen.

What do they do to combat writers’ block? One turns away from the blaring blank computer screen and writes by hand. Another (Veronica?) tries to figure out what’s really at the core of it—too much pressure, fear of failure—and address that first. And another said she doesn’t believe in writer’s block and because of that it can’t hurt her. Which prompted one of them to quip, “I want to live in your world.”

When the lines formed for the signings, I finally crawled out from behind my pole and managed to see these ladies. Oh, they were all very cool and hip and young-looking! Most of the audience squeezed into Veronica’s line. We sweated it out in a store not really built for over a hundred people, but everyone was polite and patient, and I was happy to see that most of those fans had bought at least one book by the other authors. Those writers were gracious and a little bowled over, I think, by the reception.

"What do you think of this?" Sally Oddi said to me at one point, clearly gratified herself by the mob of YA book lovers crammed into her store.

“It’s awesome,” I told her. “And it’s nice to see your place can handle a large crowd.” I nudged her then and we both laughed. We’ve been chatting for a couple years about my struggles getting published and now about my book sale, and Sally (because she's amazing and sweet and kind) offered to host my book launch party (Sept, 2013, mark your calendar). Can’t imagine I’ll have anything like the crowd for the Dark Days Tour. But hey. I’ll boost Sally’s sales with invites to all my family and friends. And now that I know Cover to Cover’s got the capacity (and plenty of parking on nearby streets) I’ll beg my bunco group to come too.