Oh dear “What We’re Reading” fans and friends, it’s been a woefully long time since we last posted. And by “we” I mean moi! So many excuses for the delay: regime change at LJ and School Library Journal; departures; promotions; “chh-ch-changes,” as David Bowie sang. And then David Bowie died, and that was a big deal. I had just asked everybody about their favorite reads of 2015 and whether they kept track of their books in some fashion. But after the sad news about Bowie, SLJ editor Daryl Grabarek suggested I ask my colleagues at LJ/SLJ/Junior Library Guild if they had any “Bowie books” to share. A few of the WWR team did indeed have Bowie-tinged recommended reads, see below. So even though it has been a few weeks since he died, we’re still feeling it here in the land of WWR. That and a touch of nostalgia for some of our favorites in 2015. Don’t worry, fans and fiends, we will enter 2016 next time!
Mahnaz Dar, Assistant Managing Editor, LJ/SLJ Reviews
I don’t log my reading each year, but looking back over 2015, I realize that I came across some great books. Of course, I read plenty of great children’s books and YA novels. The dark and gritty Dime (Atheneum) the first new novel from E.R. Frank since 2007, was one of my favorites, as was Neal Shusterman’s Challenger Deep (HarperCollins).
Proving that education doesn’t end when we leave the schoolyard, I gave myself a few history lessons. I discovered author Charles C. Mann, whose 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (both Knopf) revolutionized my thinking about the history of the Americas and led me to another seminal work, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (Norton). Speaking of the classics, I also finally got into Jane Austen. Last year I read Emma for the first time and reread Pride and Prejudice; currently I’m making my way through Sense and Sensibility. I can definitely say that these novels rock sans zombies.
I dabbled in the international arena, too. I made a new find: “Assassination Classroom,” a manga series about an alien who comes down to Earth to teach a class of misfits, telling them they must kill him or he’ll destroy the planet. I also revisited a favorite Japanese writer, Keigo Higashino, whose Detective Kaga is sure to join the ranks of Sherlock Holmes, Reginald Wexford, Adam Dalgliesh, and Hercule Poirot. (I fervently hope that 2016 will bring more translations of Higashino’s extant work.)
Hopping aboard the “everybody’s reading it!” train (see what I did there?), I also read (or should I say inhaled) a certain work by Paula Hawkins. Flawed? Yes. But darned if I didn’t enjoy the ride! (See what I did again?).
I’m not sure what 2016 will bring, but I can’t wait! So far I’m reading more Austen, finishing Margaret Atwood’s “MaddAddam” trilogy, and planning to immerse myself in Patti Smith’s Just Kids (Ecco: HarperCollins).
Kate DiGirolomo, SELF-e Community Coordinator
I admit I’ve been a bit behind in my reading ever since the intense weeks that were dedicated to Best Books. However, V.E. Schwab has got my full attention with A Gathering of Shadows (Tor), the second outing in her “Darker Shade of Magic” series. I have been tearing through my advance copy since it fell into my eager little hands, happy to be back in the magical world of Red London. I’d say I’m about halfway through at this point, and powerful magician Kell and thief-turned-pirate Lila (the story’s leads, who went their separate ways at the end of the last book, A Darker Shade of Magic) are finally on common soil again for the Element Games, an international magic competition. But they just keep missing each other, and I am desperate to get to the point where they are face to face again. That’s not to say that the journey there hasn’t been a complete joy. Schwab has expanded on characters I adore, most notably Rhy, the once cocky and fun-loving prince now forced to deal with the aftermath of his near-death experience, while also giving me new ones to consider. Much like my knowledge the first time around, I have no idea if this is the last book set in this universe, but if so, I’m already sad to leave it for good.
Liz French, Senior Editor, LJ Reviews
I can’t stand that David Bowie continues to be dead. My eloquent colleague Lisa shares some great memories of her Bowie years below and damned if I didn’t read John Brunner, too! I particularly liked Stand on Zanzibar, and I recall reading a lot of sf along the same lines (Robert Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin). But mostly I danced and dragged and dawdled through those golden years (wop-wop-wop) and thought they’d never end. I was reading Elizabeth Hand’s excellent third “Cass Neary” novel, Hard Light (Minotaur: St. Martin’s) when the news came over the transom about Bowie’s death, and I couldn’t help comparing and contrasting Hand’s fictional protagonist, punk photographer Cass, with the ever-changing and evolving Bowie personas. It’s a chameleon/dinosaur stand-off, basically. The thing about Cass is, she’s the last punk standing, a proud Luddite who still shoots on film and doesn’t own a cell phone. As for Bowie, well we all know how many transformations he went through (my favorites were the Thin White Duke, Ziggy Stardust, and whatever down-and-outer he was portraying in his “Berlin trilogy” days). But even dinosaurs evolve: at several points in Hard Light, Cass plays with and actually uses a smart phone.
Molly Hone, Editorial Assistant, JLG
I am a wee bit obsessed with tracking my reading—I keep a list of everything I read in a year, minus picture books and readings for library school. Since I started working at JLG, the goal I set in 2014—to read 100 books every year—has been easy to meet. In 2015 I reached a personal best: 135. Most of the books were for work, but two of my personal reads really stood out:
Stephen King’s short story “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” from the collection Different Seasons (Viking). I listened to this—my first King book—on the way home from my vacation in Nashville. I loved it, though it wasn’t what I had been expecting—I thought much of the book would follow the protagonist, Andy’s, prison break, but it was more a character-driven, slice-of-life story instead. It was compelling anyway, and I loved how the prison library, and Andy’s role as librarian, was featured so prominently.
I was expecting more humor from Amy Poehler’s memoir, Yes, Please (Dey Street: HarperCollins), but it ended up being a thought-provoking read, full of advice with a feminist bent and meaningful anecdotes. I still think about much of the wisdom Poehler offers on relationships and work, but perhaps the most lasting passage is the one in which she completely owns up to a past mistake and analyzes why she put off apologizing for so long. Her belated email to the person she hurt, and that person’s response, are included, and it’s beyond heartwarming.
Lisa Peet, Associate Editor, News & Features, LJ
I was fortunate to be young at a time when youth culture really popped—I was a teenager at the end of the 1970s, and an East Village art school reprobate in the early 1980s. So much great music, literature, film, and I was also lucky to have a circle of like-minded friends. Looking back through what are probably some very rose-colored shades, it seems like we spent inordinate amounts of time consuming culture and then sitting around talking about it—we didn’t have money to do much else, I guess. We saw as much live music as we could, snuck into St. Mark’s Cinema on a regular basis, and passed around beat-up, waterlogged paperbacks. I don’t remember anyone having a TV. And we listened to music constantly, on LPs and cassette tape, as background but also in an active way that I just don’t do anymore: two people or a group doing nothing else but listening, often singing along. David Bowie was a major soundtrack to my life in those years, his music always there, part of our reference points and everyday conversation. I loved Bowie; we all did. A surprise bright spot on the day after his death was connecting with a bunch of my old crew on Facebook and reminiscing—I’d completely forgotten, for instance, about the row of shampoo bottles drawn in Sharpie marker along my bathroom wall on E. 13th St., embellished with a banner of lyrics to our goofy parody of Bowie’s “Heroes,” which included references to Princess Grace and Mr. Bubble.
I’ve been thinking a lot these days about one of the authors I discovered back then: John Brunner, a British novelist who wrote dystopian sf in the Sixties and Seventies. He was an early explorer of what would eventually be cyberpunk—the hero of his The Shockwave Rider (Harper & Row) hacked into government computers using public telephones (published in 1975, which meant dial phones—you don’t get more punk than that); and Stand on Zanzibar (Doubleday, 1968), which took on overpopulation, eugenics, and the class divide. That was edgy stuff, and we traded those old mass-market paperbacks until they fell apart. But it’s The Sheep Look Up (Harper & Row, 1972) that’s been on my mind recently, with its puppet president called Prexy who spouts dumbed-down koans while an urbanized United States self-destructs. A recent edition of the book compared Prexy to George W. Bush, but in this deeply weird lead-up to the next presidential election, I can’t help worrying that we’re about to see an even weirder, scarier iteration, and I wonder if we might not all be stuck in a Brunner novel of our own making. I guess it’s good to read dystopian fiction when you’re young, in preparation for the real thing… at least we had all that good music to comfort us. And it did. RIP, David Bowie. You were a big deal to a lot of us.
And in a really lousy postscript, one of the dear friends I was reminiscing with over Bowie’s departure—the guy who remembered the parody song lyrics and made me laugh that afternoon, sitting in front of my computer—died suddenly and unexpectedly over the weekend. He was a big part of my late teens and early 20s, a brilliant mind, great cultural influence, long-ago sometimes boyfriend, and all around bright and shining fellow. He was also only a couple of years older than I am, so I’m both a little bereft and feeling my mortality particularly hard. We’re all fragile vessels. Don’t forget to reach out, reminisce, and remind one another about those dumb song lyrics.
Henrietta Verma, WWR emerita
My David Bowie years were the 1980s, though it’s a stretch to say I had such years, as really I just liked the song “Let’s Dance.” At that time I was a teenager and I wasn’t reading much outside of school assignments, unfortunately, though I did read the Judy Blume that was surreptitiously passed around at school. Now it seems so tame, the same I suppose as some of Bowie’s younger-day antics, which look kind of quaint (and sometimes a little creepy). One of Bowie’s quotes stayed with me over the years, however. When he was asked where he and Iman would live, as presumably each had several homes around the world, he answered, “primarily, in each others’ consciousness.” I could never figure out if that meant that famous people loved much more deeply or were just way more pretentious. Still working on it.
I’ve long since moved on from Blume and am now reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (Europa Editions). I heard so much of Ferrante in 2015 that I made it my first book of the year. So far, I’m not getting what the hype is about, though maybe that’s a result of new job exhaustion.