New Year’s Resolution

2010 is about to end and 2011 is right around the corner. There are lots of thing both personally and professionally that I hope will happen in 2011. But life never goes according to plan, and the unexpected is usually the most exciting, so I’m not going to make a list of goals for the coming year. Still, there is one general resolution I have for the coming year—I want to grow up. I’m 31, it’s about time I started acting like an adult.

This year for Christmas I got a couch. Our old couch was old, worn out, and lumpy. Reupholstering our old couch would cost almost as much as buying a new couch. So for Christmas, my husband bought me a new couch. This gift isn’t flashy or exciting, it’s practical and useful. I really like our new couch, it’s a lot more comfortable than our old couch and I like being comfortable. Still a couch is a very grown-up gift. And I liked it. I’m ready to be a grown-up.

As anyone who follows this blog knows, I read A LOT. A lot of the books I read are Young Adult. I write YA, and don’t feel grown-up enough to deviate from the teen protagonist in my writing. I enjoy reading YA, and have a long list of titles I want to read in the coming year. But I also want to try and read more “adult books” next year. I want to expand this grown-up attitude beyond my furniture.

LITTLE BEE by Chris Cleave was the best book I read last year (out of more than 160 titles). I bought it for my sister-in-law for Christmas and then decided to read it before wrapping it. If it hadn’t been for my need to buy gifts for adults, I never would have read it. So that’s my resolution. In 2011, in addition to reading the big ground breaking YA titles and continuing to work towards breaking into the YA market with my own writing. I’m also going to attempt to read some of the big ground breaking OA (old adult) titles. If I can love getting a new couch for Christmas, surely I can handle giving in and finally reading THE HELP.

Best December Read

This week’s Road Trip Wednesday over at YA Highway is asking, what’s the best novel you read in December. So far I’ve read twelve books this month, so I have quite a few choices. This month I’ve read:

Boys, Bears, and a Serious Pair of Hiking Boots by Abby McDonald – YA
The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore – Paranormal Comedy
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Dystopia’ish
Little Bee by Chris Cleave – Woman’s Fiction
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson – Non-Fiction
Youth in Revolt by C. Payne – YA
Sorta Like a Rock Star by Matthew Quick – YA
Practical Demonkeeping by Christopher Moore – Paranormal Comedy
Matched by Ally Condie – YA/Dystopia
Happyface by Stephen Emond – YA
How to Ditch Your Fairy by Justine Larbalestier – YA/Paranormal
The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie – Mystery

Without question the best of these books is Little Bee by Chris Cleaves. Little Bee is the best book I’ve read this year and if not the best book I’ve ever read, definitely in the all time top five. This book isn’t YA, but I would still recommend it to teens. Basically, I think every human being over the age of 12 on the entire planet should read this book. It’s seriously good.

Out of the six YA books I read this month, I liked Matched the best. It reminded me a lot of The Giver by Lois Lowry. Basically it’s YA/Dystopia that isn’t quite as depressing as Hunger Games – thought provoking without causing nightmares.

What about you? What’s the best book you read in December?

BBC Booklist

This list has been floating around on Facebook for a while. Recently, I’ve seen it pop up on a few people’s blogs. I didn’t have anything planned to blog about today, so I decided to jump on the bandwagon and post the BBC Booklist. According to the BBC, the average person has read 6 of these books. I’ve read 50. How many have you read?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - Too Many Cooks
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (I started this but couldn’t get into it)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I own 3 copies of it, but I’ve only read about half his plays)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I’ve seen the movie, but I know that doesn’t count)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (I’ve seen the movie but know that doesn’t count)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I’ve seen the movie and play and I started the book once but gave up, it’s uber-long)

Ghost Map

For my day job, I’m a civil engineer. We civil engineers like to boast that we save more lives than doctors—isn’t clean drinking water a miraculous thing. Since I’m an engineer, I’ve heard of the great cholera outbreak of 1854. It’s my job to make sure it never happens again. Actually, right now it’s my job to make sure you don’t die of lead poisoning, but same difference.

I’ve seen pictures of the Ghost Map that tracked the deaths in London and eventually tied them all to the Broad Street Pump. What I didn’t know was that a local cleric working in the neighborhood observed the deaths of his parishioners, joined forces with a local doctor and cartographer, and eventual convinced the London Public Health officials that cholera is a water born pathogen—not an air born pathogen as it was believed prior to 1854.

THE GHOST MAP by Steven Johnson is a non-fiction account of the London cholera outbreak of 1854. In many places, the book reads like a text book. The true story accounts of local Londoners, most notably the day to day life of Cleric Henry Whitehead and Doctor John Snow help add a human face to this important medical development.

If you aren’t an engineer or an epidemiologist, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about cholera. But the next time you grab a glass of clean drinking water, you should raise your glass to Whitehead and Snow. If you’re interested in learning more about Whitehead, Snow, and the joys of modern sewers, I recommend reading THE GHOST MAP.

YA Reading List

Yesterday, I posted my top 10%. This was a list of the best 16 books I read this year (out of the total 160 books I read this year). When selecting titles for this list, I tried to choose books from a variety of genres. Even so, half of the books on my list were young adult. That’s because of the 160 books I’ve read this year, 64 were young adult and 41 were middle grade. I write YA and last spring I tried to write MG. So in the name of market research I read 105 books this year that were written for children or teenagers. I also read 52 YA or MG books in 2009.

This means I know the YA market pretty darn well. And there are a lot of really good YA books that didn’t make my list yesterday. So today I’m posting a new list. If there is a teen on your Christmas list this year and you want to get them a good book try one of these titles.

Top 25 YA Books

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson (plus all other books by this author)
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Evolution, Me, and Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande
Going Bovine by Libba Brey
Vladimir Todd Series by Heather Brewer
Avalon High by Meg Cabot
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You by Peter Cameron
Naomi and Eli’s No Kiss List by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
The Hunger Games Series by Suzanne Collins
Along for the Ride by Sara Dessen (plus all other books by this author)
If I Stay by Gayle Forman
Paper Towns by John Green (plus all other books by this author)
The Duff by Kody Keplinger
Sleeping Freshman Never Lie by David Lubar
Wake Series by Lisa McMann
King Dork by Frank Portman
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
Shiver Series by Maggie Stiefvater
Spanking Shakespeare by Jake Wizner
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr (plus all other books by this author)
Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin
How to Not Be Popular by Jennifer Ziegler
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Technically it’s MG, so I didn’t include it in my list, but The Percy Jackson Series by Rich Riordan is another obvious must read.

Recommended Reading

So far in 2010, I have read 155 books. Assuming I continue reading at the same rate, I’ll probably round out the year at about 160 titles. I considered doing a year end reading review where I listed all the books I read this year. Except lets be honest, a list of 160 titles means nothing. It’s just a long list of titles. And when you read 160 books a year, not all of the books are ground breaking. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend every book I read this year to every reader. A long list of titles does nothing to highlight the truly amazing books. So instead, I’m going to give you a list of 16 titles. The top 10% of all the books I read in 2010. Each of the books listed below comes highly recommended. So in 2011, if you don’t have time to read 160 books, you can start with these 16.

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson – Young Adult
Orex and Crake by Margret Atwood – Science Fiction
In the Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson – Travel/Memoir
Soulless by Gail Carriger – Steam Punk
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christy – Classic/Mystery
Little Bee by Chris Cleave – Woman’s Fiction
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – Young Adult/Dystopia
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell – Non-fiction
Paper Towns by John Green – Young Adult
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen – Historical Fiction
The Duff by Kody Keplinger – Young Adult
A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore – Paranormal Comedy
Heart of a Sheppard by Rosanne Parry – Middle Grade
The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare – Middle Grade/Historical Fiction
Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater – Young Adult/Paranormal Romance
Spanking Shakespeare by Jake Wizner – Young Adult

Little Bee

The description on the book jacket of LITTLE BEE reads: “We don’t want to tell you WHAT HAPPENS in this book. It is a truly SPECIAL STORY and we don’t want to spoil it. NEVERTHELESS, you need to know enough to buy it, so we will just say this:

This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice, the kind of choice we hope you never have to face. Two years later, they meet again—the story starts there…

Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens. The magic is in how the story unfolds.”

I am going to follow the request on the back of this book, and not tell you want this amazing book is about. Instead I will say this. Some books entertain. Other books educate. A few books open their readers eyes and fundamentally change the way the reader sees the world. LITTLE BEE does all three. Reading LITTLE BEE has changed my perception of the world. I am very glad that I read this book. I hope that you will read it too.

I hope that enough people will read this book that it will not only change the way I see the world, but that it will actually change the world. Because I know that books can be very powerful. And I know that little bees may be small, but they can also be powerful.

The Christmas Zombie

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was reading THE STUPIDEST ANGEL by Christopher Moore. Now that I’ve finished it, I feel like it needs an entire post to itself. Christopher Moore is great. He writes really funny tongue in cheek type paranormal. One of his vampire books is called BITE ME.

Since it’s Christmas, I decided to read Christopher Moore’s Christmas story, THE STUPIDEST ANGEL. It is about a Christmas angel who travels to Earth to grant a special Christmas Miracle to one lucky kid. The kid he chooses witnessed a drunk guy in a Santa suit die. So his wish is for Santa to come back to life.

What does this stupid angel do? Turn Santa into a Zombie of course. The book is really funny, and not very scary. I just think it’s such a great idea. We’ve had Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. So why not Santa and Zombies. If you are looking for a fun holiday read this year, I have to recommend THE STUPIDEST ANGEL.

Please note, this book is not written for children. And many young children may be traumatized by the idea of a zombie Santa. So I wouldn’t recommend this book for anyone under 12.

Why YA?

I write Young Adult fiction. I’ve attempted to write adult fiction in the past, and I’ve attempted to write middle grade fiction. I suck at both. I’m a YA writer. My voice lends itself well to YA. And I’m sort of immature, so it’s easy for me to live in a teen mind.

Back when I was a teen, YA wasn’t the colossal genre that it is today. At the time, I read stuff for adults. I poured through all the classics, and got recommendations from my parents and their voracious reading friends. A good story is a good story, so the age of the characters never seemed like a big deal.

Now that I’m an “adult”, I really don’t like adult literature all that much. YA has a much faster snappier pace that I enjoy. Anything “literary” bores the crap out of me. I read tons of YA, partly to be familiar with the genre that I write in, but more because I really enjoy reading YA books. A good story is still a good story. And as an adult, I never mind reading well written novels about teenagers. High school is a tumultuous time. A lot of shit happens in those four years. So there are a lot of things for YA writers to write about, and it’s almost never boring.

I once heard someone say that the age of the characters doesn’t define a book as YA. Instead, a book has to have “the YA voice”. There are “adult books” about teens, that don’t have the YA voice, and are thus not considered YA. Oddly, pretty much all my favorite “adult novels” do have the YA voice.

Since it’s Christmas time, I’m currently reading “The Stupidest Angel” by Christopher Moore. I <3 Christopher Moore. His books are so funny, and his pacing is awesome. Christopher Moore and Nick Honrby are probably my two favorite “adult fiction writers”. And if either of them made their characters a couple years younger, they’d fit right in on the YA shelf. They have the voice. They have the pacing.

The characters in “The Stupidest Angel” are adults. And I found the book in the contemporary fiction section of the bookstore. But most of the teens I know would probably love this book. And if you’re an adult that loves Christopher Moore, you’d probably love most of the stuff in the YA section too. ‘Cause the age of the characters really doesn’t matter all that much. A good story is a good story. And YA is a genre not because it’s characters are all in high school. YA is a genre because YA books require a specific voice and pacing.

Comp Titles

Every writer knows that comp titles are important. Publishers and booksellers want to know what type of readers will enjoy your book, and the easiest way to answer that question is to say, “It’s sort of Harry Potter meets the Davinci Code.” Except of course, unless your name is JK Rowling or Dan Brown, you should never compare yourself to either of those titles. Finding good comp titles can be really hard.

EXIT STAGE LEFT is about a bunch of teenagers at a summer camp. In addition to swimming, rock climbing, and horseback riding, they also put on a production of ROMEO AND JULIET. I often describe the book as a loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set at summer camp. But LOOSE is the key word in that sentence. The characters are doing the play, and thus know all the lines, so they regularly quote Shakespeare off stage. And there are several major similarities between the events that happen on stage and off. But I like to tell myself kids today are smarter than 16th century teens, so nobody dies at the end of EXIT STAGE LEFT. I even have dialog where my MC says, “I’m not Juliet.” I did not write WESTSIDE STORY, and I didn’t try to write WESTSIDE STORY. So what are the comp titles to EXIT STAGE LEFT?

DRAMARAMA by E. Lockhart and CASTRATION CELEBRATION by Jake Wizner are the best comp titles I’d found. Both feature teens at summer theater programs. A lot of the characters in my book would probably get along with the characters in those books, and I expect similar readers would enjoy all three stories.

But yesterday, I read a new perfect comp title. BOYS, BEARS, AND A SERIOUS PAIR OF HIKING BOOTS by Abby McDonald is a perfect comp title to EXIT STAGE LEFT. The title and cover were enough to make me eager to read it, expecting it to be similar to my own writing. There are a lot of differences. It doesn’t have any theater or theater related themes. It doesn’t even take place at a summer camp. Instead, it’s about a teen from New Jersey who spends the summer in British Columbia with her aunt. But there are lots of weird parallels in how the characters act and react to things.

I finally have an answer to the comp title question. EXIT STAGE LEFT is DRAMARAMA meets BOYS, BEARS, AND A SERIOUS PAIR OF HIKING BOOTS with a twist of ROMEO AND JULIET parody.

What about you? What are the comp titles for you WIP?

Just Watch the Movie—Or Not

Ten years ago, I was a huge Harry Potter fan. I was one of the millions of people who eagerly anticipated the release of each new book in the series. I’d wait in line at the bookstore at midnight then stay up all night reading. JK Rowling is an insanely good writer, and I still love pretty much all things Hogwarts. But I haven’t gotten around to watching the latest movie yet. I plan on seeing it eventually, but since I’ve already read all the books, I’m not anxious or curious about the movie.

One of my co-workers, who hasn’t read any of the books, recently saw the movie. During our lunch break, he peppered me with questions about the series trying to fill in all the holes in the plot that got cut from the film. Since it’s been more than three years since I read any of the books, I’ve forgotten some of the minor plot points. Oddly, this isn’t making me more eager to run out and watch the movie. It’s making me feel like I should re-read all seven books.

That’s the way I always am. Anytime a book is made into a movie, I find myself more eager to read the book, and less eager to see the movie. The book is ALWAYS better than the movie. So why waist $9 on a movie ticket, I’ve got a library card and that’s free. The result is that I’m a very unusual American. I read an average of about 150 books per year. And I watch an average of about 15 movies per year. Who reads ten times as many books as they see movies, well besides me?

Back when I was a kid, I used to really like movies. I’d regularly trek out to various art-house theaters and watch the latest indi-film. There were some neat movies being made back then, and I’m sure there are still neat movies being made now. But I never see them. Instead, I spend my free time curled up on the couch book in hand. I feel like there is only so much time available to consume media, and I like books better, so I’ve just sort of written off all things Hollywood.

Shelling out my $9 and watching the newest Harry Potter flick is the logical thing for me to do. I’ve heard nothing but good things about the film. But I do have all seven books on my shelf back home. I could sit down and read them instead. It would be cheaper, and a whole lot more time consuming.