maggie stiefvater

2020 Reads

/ Lisa Asanuma / Leave a comment

2020 was a hard reading year for many people. For me, though, the only thing keeping me sane was audiobooks. I devoured audiobooks this year. Many, I’ll admit, rereads of things I knew felt like magic to me, like Maggie Steifvater’s Raven Cycle, or Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. I also returned to other forms of comfort, like Percy Jackson and a reread of The Hunger Games as narrated by the incredibly talented Tatiana Maslany.

2020 was also the year I finally finished The Wheel of Time. It isn’t and never will be a favorite of mine, but Brandon Sanderson ended it well, and that’s what I was hoping for. My favorite new reads of the year were the first book I finished, The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis, Darius the Great is Not Okay/Deserves Better by Adib Khorram, which both made me sob like a baby, and the hilarious, insane trip that is Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. It was also the first time I read Jurassic Park and The Lost World, or any Crichton at all, to be honest.

This was a really great year for reading for me, but I’m grateful I’m a person who can listen to audiobooks, because while this is the most books I managed in a year almost ever (53), it also would have been utterly impossible without audiobooks, as the only one I managed all the way through in book-form was Maggie Stiefvater’s Call Down the Hawk, and even that took me ages.

Five Things I Love about The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater

/ Lisa Asanuma / 2 Comments

The_Scorpio_RacesRemember how I said that I was going to read books by my favorites this year? Well my first go at that was The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. I have long loved Stiefvater’s work. I adored Shiver, then was entranced with Linger, was almost disbelieving when I loved Ballad more, and thought the rounding out of the Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy was wholly satisfying and beautifully written, to boot.

And while I was moving half a dozen times and spent a year or so while jobless and dirt poor, not to mention as I said in my last post, guilting myself into reading books I’d had longer but wanted to read less first (that’s a mouthful!)… Maggie wrote two books that I hadn’t read. Actually, that’s a bit of a lie. She wrote four. I didn’t read Linger or Forever until after both books were published. In any case, I was still playing catch up. So finally, despite the fact that I was already reading half a dozen books according to Goodreads… I just picked up Scorpio Races. And I ran through it. Here are the things I loved most:

1) The setting is 100% solid. Thisby felt like a real place. A place you could charter a boat to, and find it not much changed from when the book was set… which is not entirely clear, but hardly needs to be.

2) The horses. I was never one of those girls who drew horses and read horse books and wanted a horse for my birthday when I was a little girl… I wanted a unicorn. But seriously, while I would have relished the chance to learn to ride or spend time with horses, that just wasn’t in my life or something my family could afford, so it wasn’t something I thought about much. But it wasn’t the fact that there were horses in the book that impressed me. It was how they were written. I had a professor who said once that the hardest characters to write well are babies and animals, and that is something I’ve always believed, too. The horses in The Scorpio Races rang true.

3) The small-town feminists. Oh Peg Gratton and Dory Maud, I enjoyed every word out of you two. These are women who lead men around by the nose by pretending to be part of their game, and they had their eye out for young, eager, gender-role-challenging Puck. I loved how, rather than taking Puck under their wing exactly, they pointed her in the right direction and pushed her forward.

4) The family relationships. Puck’s relationship with her brothers, more to the point. Finn reminded me of my own little brother, not in his character, but in the feelings he evoked in me—protective, parental feelings, where you are sometimes surprised at the ingenuity and different person-ness of someone you helped raised. And Gabe. While I spent a good majority of the book being angry towards Gabe, I ended up empathizing with and even sort of loving him. It was so easy to understand, his desperation to leave. To have a life that wasn’t constant work and challenge and monotony and death. I can understand that.

5) The love story. This was exactly what I want out of a love story. Which is to say, nothing like most young adult romances (or adult, for that matter, as to the few I’ve read) are like. It is not about physical attraction or even romantic tension. Instead it is about finding someone who is so in tune with how you see the world that they become a part of you without you ever meaning for them to be. It is about respect and mutual understanding and being driven in just the same way. It was so, so satisfying.

These are not all the reasons to read The Scorpio Races, but they are what I loved best.

And since you’ve probably read it well before me, what did you think?

My Year of Favorite Authors

/ Lisa Asanuma / Leave a comment

bleedys-icons-dockjpgI have a terrible habit.

I’m not talking about anything dark or sinister… just something that is self-frustrating. On the surface, it doesn’t even sound so bad, really. It is this: I like to save the best for last.

This is something I learned at a young age, as a dessert loving foodie. If you save the best bit until last, you don’t have the memory of that taste marred by something lesser.

Unfortunately, though, I don’t always leave this philosophy to food, and it makes much less sense in most other forms. For example: books. Every book lover knows that as readers, we work on a sort of hierarchy  and that hierarchy looks more or less something like the following:

  • Books I have to read right now
  • Books I want to read
  • Books I should want to read
  • Books I want to want to read (You know what I’m talking about. “Why don’t I want to read this?”)
  • Books I have to read (Okay, maybe this is just in school)
  • Books I don’t particularly care to read but that everyone else are reading that I don’t want to be behind on

You all have a hierarchy something like that, yes? Is that just me?

Anyhow. I have, many times, kept books from my favorite series or by my favorite authors in reserve after books of a lower order, as a sort of “treat.” In fact, this started out in school when I had to read books. I would read a “fun” book alongside it and allow myself the pleasure of something I wanted out of the fiction world after reading a chapter or two of what I was supposed to be reading. Somewhere along the path, it morphed into me reading something I sort of wanted to read alongside the book that I really wanted to read, so that I got both books done.

And then it flipped into something I can’t really explain… me keeping books by beloved authors beholden in some sort of guilty way, because I had so many other books that I hadn’t read yet, so I felt as if I didn’t deserve to read the newer books that I really wanted to read. Yes, I became a reader weighed down by her (unspeakably huge) to be read shelf. I was getting to the point where I was barely reading anything. The last handful of years I have read fewer books than ever before in a year, just passing twenty last year.

Just recently I decided this sort of practice was, in a word, ridiculous. It has led to me both being behind the times on books and authors I care about, and has dragged down the enjoyment of reading anything less than stellar. Not even that. Anything that had less than a stellar expectation point for me. Meaning I was stopping myself from discovering new book and author loves that really were stellar.

Last year, my goal was to read something more challenging. I picked up Bleak House by Charles Dickens, but I am a faithless lover when it comes to books, so I also picked up Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Suzanne Clarke, and The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky… and I overwhelmed myself. I’m pressing pause on two of the three, because I am still, yes STILL in the middle of all three of them. I’m some three-fifths done with Bleak House and honestly enjoying it, I just cannot read Dickens fast and enjoy it.

So this year I am going through my books and I am reading first and foremost the unread books I have by authors that I love, like Maggie Stiefvater and Jasper Fforde and series that I really enjoyed the beginning of like Colleen Houck’s Tiger’s Curse, and anything else that I’ve been eyeing. I will still keep Dickens by my side for glances when I feel like it, but I’m not pressuring myself when it comes to reading things I don’t particularly care to this year. Maybe next year I will feel differently, but that is to remain to be seen. For now, I’ve finished one book I’d been dying to read for an age (The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater, more on that later), and am looking forward to more.

Do your reading habits change? Do you ever find yourself resenting the book you’re reading, because you want to be reading something else?

Why the Hunger Games is More than Short Sentences.

/ Lisa Asanuma / 9 Comments

This morning I read an article by Jeff Goins entitled “Why The Hunger Games is the Future of Writing.” His first argument is that it caters to an easily-distracted audience with a big font and short sentences, and that if you are an author looking to get published, you should do this too.

I have to say that I disagree, however.

There are those who, in the comments of Goins’ article argue that Suzanne Collins’ writing is just plain bad, and that it’s the story, not the writing itself that sold these books. Again, I can’t quite agree with that either.

Yes, Suzanne Collins’ prose is short, quick, and to the point. And yes, some of the sentences are poorly constructed. I had a slightly different look at reading this, because I was reading it out loud so that The Mr. and I could enjoy it together. (We’re still reading, almost halfway through Catching Fire.) Reading the book aloud, it is almost impossible to deny that some of the sentences are garbled and confusing. I’ve stumbled over a good many of them.

All of these arguments are missing the point as to what is really going on here. And what is going on here is pacing.

The pacing in The Hunger Games is superb. It is probably the best case of pacing I have seen anywhere. The end of each and every chapter has a punch-you-in-the-gut “Did-that-just-really-happen?” moment.

A moment that makes you want to race on to find out why or what or how something just occurred.

The pacing in The Hunger Games is so good, you don’t really care that the sentences possibly could have been edited a little more. To be honest, I think they could have. I think this is a case where the editors were so drawn in by the writing that some things slipped by. It happens.

The series is a sprint. It takes off running, hits hard and keeps going, because the characters don’t have the choice of stopping, so neither does the reader. Short sentences may make an impact stylistically, but we’ve always known concision is the key to good writing. Some of Goins’ commenters lamented that short-sentences would lead to a world without Shakespeare, but Shakespeare himself wrote that “brevity is the soul of wit,” and was possibly the first master of pacing with his scenes of comic relief in intense plays.

In any case, I don’t think that short sentences is the answer. The answer is precision, and pacing. If simple sentences were the only key to a bestseller, how do you explain Maggie Stiefvater, author of the New York Times bestselling Wolves of Mercy Falls series and the critically acclaimed Scorpio Races? Stiefvater’s writing is lyrical and complex, with—I dare say—much more attention to the value of each and every word. Her books are doing just as well as Collins’ did before the movie hype, and there is a lot of promise of movie hype headed her way.

But you know what Collins’ and Stiefvater’s works have in common? Impeccable pacing. End of chapter punches to the gut.

Don’t shorten your sentences just to write like Suzanne Collins. Pay attention to the ends of your chapters, though. Make things happen there. Make your readers want more, each and every time. That’s the future of writing.

Linger by Maggie Steifvater

/ Lisa Asanuma / 2 Comments

Sometimes life gets in the way of even the books you want to read most. That’s what happened for me for Linger. Between getting married, getting used to being married,  moving three times, and general life? Well, I didn’t finish many books at all in the past year and a half.

But anyhow.

As a start, here’s my review of Shiver, the first novel in the Wolves of Mercy Falls series.

I loved Shiver, and reread it before starting this. What’s really fabulous about these books is the voice and the fact that Sam’s is so poetic, while Grace’s is very fact for fact—just like the characters themselves.

I have to admit, I was less enthralled both by my reread of Shiver and by a lot of Linger than I was the first time I read Shiver. But I blame this more on the timing of my reading it (I’d been reading a lot of whiny YA, and while Stiefvater’s angst is, as I said, much more poetic than the usual fare, it is still teenage angst).

A lot of what made this book slower than the first is that there is a lot of waiting in this book. The characters are waiting for a chance to be together because they’re separated by Grace’s suddenly-proactive parents, and a sudden sickness.

Meanwhile, we’re being thrown into the heads of Isabel and a new character Cole, and neither head is a particularly friendly place. Of course, I knew that going in… and I already loved Isabel, unlike some. From what I knew about Cole (read: that he had a massive fanbase) I knew he’d probably win me over… but oh, he takes some time.

This really is two stories woven into one by circumstance—Sam and Grace’s story, and Cole’s story, with Isabel commentating on both.

The end of this book makes everything worth it, though. The whole thing slips together beautifully—and Cole’s turning a new leaf of the redemption flavor is just as winning as it should be, mainly because it’s clearly the just the beginning of something.

Glad to say I already have Forever waiting in the wings. Hoping it’s a strong ending. With Maggie Stiefvater, I’m not too worried.

 

Friday Five: Five Authors I Stalk

/ Lisa Asanuma / 2 Comments

And by stalk, I mean that I follow them on their blogs, their twitter, their Goodreads page… pretty much anywhere I can find them online. Not half so creepy or crazy, right? Right? Well… ahem.

So, here we go, along with links so that you can follow them too, if you so choose:

1) Maggie Stiefvater, author of the Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy and her faerie earlier duo, Lament and Ballad.

Website :: Blog :: Twitter :: Goodreads

Merry Sisters of Fate (where she takes turns writing stories with Tessa Gratton, Brenna Yovanoff, and guest authors)

I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Maggie, and that includes her rambliest of blog posts. She’s written some very helpful advice for writers, too, which has been enlightening. I find insights particularly interesting since she’s an artist and a musician, which gives her writing a lyricism and aesthetic that’s hard to find, especially in YA ficiton. I’ve branched into following her two CP’s also, and especially enjoy Tessa Gratton’s blog.

2) Shannon Hale, author of the Books of Bayern, Book of a Thousand Days, etc.

Website :: Blog :: Twitter :: Goodreads

I really try to keep up with Shannon Hale’s announcements and things, mainly because I just love, love, love her books. Some of her characters are absolute loves of mine, so I like to know what’s going on in her bookish world as soon as I can.

3) Jackson Pearce, author of Sisters Red, Sweetly, etc.

Website :: Blog :: Twitter :: Goodreads :: Tumblr :: Youtube

Okay, really her website is her blog again, and her blog is almost exclusively vlogs from her youtube channel, but I’ve linked all so you have options of where you want to follow what. I started watching Jackson’s youtube videos before I ever started reading her books. I stuck around, and actually picked up her novel Sisters Red because I found her to be so witty and fun on her vlogs. Be warned, though, she does have some very strong opinions on some things, and isn’t afraid to offend people with what she says. She errs on the side of snark a little much sometimes, I think, but most of the time she’s very fun to pay attention to, and if nothing else, a great example of how to maximize your use of social media.

4) Beth Revis, author of Across the Universe and A Million Suns

Website :: Blog :: Twitter :: Goodreads :: Tumblr

I also followed Beth Revis before reading her book (I’m reading Across the Universe now, if you remember). I found her on Twitter, then Tumblr, and finally really started reading her blog recently, and I’ve enjoyed them all immensely. I had wanted to read her book before I found her online—it was getting amazing reviews—but I enjoyed getting to know a bit about her personality online before diving in.

5) Jasper Fforde, author of the Thursday Next and Nursery Crime series.

Website :: Blog :: Twitter :: Goodreads

Okay, actually it’s difficult to get updates from Jasper… he’d rather be writing, and I’m A-OK with that. He is one of my absolute favorite authors, though, so I have to include his links. I can’t wait to read his newest novel which is for a youth audience and is about dragon tamers and rediscovering magic. I’m in love with it already.

Booking Through Thursday – Replay

/ Lisa Asanuma / 4 Comments

btt button

Have you ever finished a book and loved it so much you went right back and started re-reading it again?

I can’t say that I’ve ever done this. There certainly are a few times when I’ve wanted to, but I’ve always had so many books in my TBR pile that I can’t justify it to myself. Here are a few books that almost got me to do it, though.

Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception by Maggie Stiefvater

Hoo-boy did I love this book. Lyrical, lovely, with faeries that I loved and that terrified me at the same time. I didn’t reread it because there was a companion-book/sequel, so I chose to start that instead. And I ended up loving the sequel more.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

My absolute favorite Austen book. I could probably read it end to end to end if I didn’t restrain myself. This last time I read it I was particularly inclined to start it over again, but I was moving and getting rid of books, so I passed it on to a friend. Of course now I miss it like mad.

The Life Murder of Bindy Mackenzie by Jaclyn Moriarty

Jaclyn Moriarty is a master of the epistolary novel—and she’s a master at tricking you, too. Every single one of her books has had me shocked at the twists she employs at the end of her books, usually making you see a character in a totally different light than you had throughout the rest of the book, and Bindy is her best, I think. All her books are interconnected, too, which makes for a LOT of fun.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I really love this book. I don’t know what it is about it, exactly. It’s not that I over-sympathize with Raskalnikov—he’s a murderer with a Napoleon complex—but Dostoevsky so deftly navigates the depths of the human experience in this book, and every small character has such a beautiful part to play, that I really just love reading the novel. I’ve read it three times, and each time I’ve wanted to turn it over again and start from the beginning.

There’s also the obligatory nod to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, my absolute favorite novel, that one I just from beginning to end—yes, I even love childhood Jane and blind Rochester. But that I’ve talked about at length before, so I’ll just let it go at that.

So, that’s me. What about you?

Something Expansive

/ Lisa Asanuma / 13 Comments

What author set off that spark of inspiration for your current Work in Progress?

I don’t know that there’s one particular author who set off the inspiration for my WIP. I’d been reading a lot of young adult and middle grade fantasy of various types, and really what drove me to work on this story was the wish to write something expansive. Not “epic” necessarily… but definitely expansive.

If I had to point fingers, though… I think I’d have to single out Shannon Hale.

Despite what I just said, I’m really not much of a reader of fantasy. There is very little of it out there that doesn’t give me the urge to roll my eyes… especially high fantasy. Unless you’re J.R.R. Tolkein or Brandon Mull, you can keep your dragons to  yourself, thanks. And fairies? There was the occasional brilliant book (Lament and Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater) but mostly they seemed like a thinly veiled analogy for teen angst, which I didn’t care for. And unless it’s Harry Potter, don’t even talk about wizards.

But Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl reminded me of the fantasy that I loved—had always loved. Fairy tale magic. Subtle, natural magic. Magic like the whispering of words on the wind, or later on in the series, of the language of fire and water. The Goose Girl also had this wide, sweeping landscape and crossed whole nations. It had castles and communities and class-action suits. Okay, not exactly that last one, but close enough—a group of people who were fighting for equal standing, for recognition.

Shannon Hale’s world was so real that I felt like I’d been there, maybe in a dream. I wanted to create something like that. A dream-memory-worthy world. That sure sounded expansive to me. I didn’t want to retell a fairy tale, though. Too many people were doing that… or just about to do that. I wanted to write my own fairy tale. It’s one I’ve fallen dearly in love with, with elements from many of my favorite stories throughout folklore, but I’d like to think with my own special twist.

Other inspirations for my WIP include things like Willow, The Princess Bride, and The Polar Bear King, a movie that I loved to death when I was a kid. I wanted my world to stand alongside worlds like these… quietly magical, wonderfully alive fantasy. Even Robin Hood has had its influence here and there.

Another thing all these worlds have in common? The hero in the story isn’t quite what you’d expect. Sad girl, pirate, misfit… There’s a lesson in a lot of these stories that strength can come to anybody who stands up and fights for it. That’s something I wanted to write about, too. About extreme conditions, extreme need making even an outcast into a hero.

Wish me luck with it.

K is for Killer Instinct

/ Lisa Asanuma / 14 Comments

I’ve been trying to wrap a lot of my blogfest entries around to writing, and it took me a while to think of something that I could write about the letter K, but then it hit me.

You see, I have a secret fear when it comes to my writing… that fear being that I just don’t have the killer instinct required to be great. Villains are hard for me to write, because they involve motives that don’t always make sense to me (in an emotional way, not in a logical way). And then my other characters, my non-villains? Well… I like them. I like them too much, maybe. A part of me worries that I’ll always pull punches—that I’ll never put my toys away and play with the big girls.

This is, I think, Stephenie Meyer’s great fault. One of the Cullen clan ought to have kicked it by the end of the series. I was betting on Rosalie being killed off in Breaking Dawn. It would have packed enough of a punch, and torn Emmett to shreds—a depth of character possibly well beyond him with Meyer as his creator.

Good writers—great writers—don’t pull punches. Great writers make you feel every inch of indecision, or hurt, or loss that the character does, and lets the worst of things happen to their characters. My latest favorite author, Maggie Stiefvater, has torn my heart to pieces on more than one occasion, and by goodness do I love her for it.

I worry, though, if I’m capable of that. If I can really destroy a character I love, for the sake of good fiction. It takes a lot to take or destroy a life, even a fictional one.

I want to be able to do that, though. I’m seeing some hope in my future, as lately in plotting I’ve come across ideas that both horrified and excited me—and I think that must be the way it starts.