Books I Read in 2013

The Third Son by Julie Wu

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Don't Ever Grow Old by Daniel Friedman

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Familiar by J. Robert Lennon

The Hobbit (read-aloud)

A Wrinkle in Time (read-aloud)

A Wind in the Door (read-aloud)

A Swiftly Tilting Planet (read-aloud)

River of Dust by Virginia Pye

Fantay Freaks and Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf

The Hive by Gill Hornby

Fuse by Julianna Baggott

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan 

Hemingway's Girl by Erika Robuck

Let the Water Hold Me Down by Michael Spurgeon

The Wife, The Maid and The Mistress by Ariel Lawhon

Heaven Should Fall by Rebecca Coleman

The Golden Age by John C. Wright

The Phoenix Exultant by John C. Wright

The Golden Transcendence by John C. Wright

Wash by Margaret Wrinkle

The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets by Diana Wagman

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Small Blessings by Martha Woodruff

Red Moon by Benjamin Percy

The Last Enchantments by Charles Finch

The Rook by Daniel O'Malley

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Room by Emma Donoghue

The In-Between Hour by Barbara Claypole White

Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler

Fightsong by Joshua Mohr

The Art of Floating by Kristin Bair O'Keeffe

Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye

A Marker To Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik

How to Be an American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

Alva and Irva by Edward Carey

The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken

Seven For a Secret by Lyndsay Faye

The Animals by Christian Kiefer

Run, Don't Walk by Adele Levine

Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Untold Damage by Robert K. Lewis

Heap House by Edward Carey

The Deepest Secret by Carla Buckley

YOU by Austin Grossman

The Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller

The Future for Curious People by Gregory Sherl

Golden State by Michelle Richmond

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis

Budapest by Jessica Keener

World War Z by Max Brooks 

An Explanation for Everything by Lauren Grodstein

Cascade by Maryanne O'Hara

Field Guide for Lost Girls by Amy Franklin Willis

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 

Don't Ever Look Back by Daniel Friedman

A Highly Unlikely Scenario by Rachel Cantor

Still In Progress as of December 28:

The Moment of Everything by Shelly King

Where I Am Born by Michele Young-Stone

Melville Biography by Herschel Parker

Stupid Children Lenore Zion

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

The Story of Britain by Rachel Frasier

Guess the Story

On Christmas Day, the Richmond Times Dispatch will publish an original short story "Right Before Christmas." This is the illustration they created to go along with the story. If you can be the first to accurately guess the plot of the scene depicted here, I'll send you your choice of prize: a signed copy of the story printed in the newspaper, or a signed paperback of Shine Shine Shine. I'll pick one winner from my Facebook page and one winner here.

Girl's Eye by Sadie Netzer, Age 9

My daughter handed me this poem in an offhand manner yesterday. She'd written it with a large green marker in a sparkly notebook, in her bed with a flashlight after lights out. She's nine. I'm pretty sure I'm done as a novelist, because I don't know if I could ever match "sneeky and brave." But that's okay. 

Girl's Eye
by Sadie Netzer

From a girl's eye things
Must be pretty or perfect,
But some say okay and
Go on with their lives.

So some are princesses
And some are ninjas
And some just go on.

They all think differently but the
Eye of a girl is all the same.

The girl's eye is pretty and perfect and
Bright and so sneeky and brave.

We know what is right and
wrong, we know if something
is bad, we all see the same
and know the same.

So the girl's eye is
Amazing in so many ways,
But it never gets old.

How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky Cover

Believe me when I say: "I love this cover." 

How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky is a story of star-crossed lovers for the 21st century. Two astronomers meet and fall in love, only to find out that their mothers knew each other as children, planned for them to be soulmates, raised them to be perfect for each other, and then orchestrated their meeting. The book is about fate and determinism, science and faith, and asks the question: what is love?

Can't wait for you to read it.

A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik: A Master Class in Craft

I picked up this novel with no expectations and no idea what it was about. By the time I got to the bottom of the first page, the book had me  by the throat and I finished it on the same day. I wish you could have the same experience, so if you trust me to recommend books, I'd say go and get it, read it, and then come back to read my interview with author Alexander Maksik, below.

Sometimes when I finish a novel that has really lit up my brain, I am restless with questions for the author. Why did you make that choice? What was going on here? This is exactly the type of novel I want to dissect, as if I can get to the bottom of it, find out what makes it so successful. A Marker to Measure Drift has some excellent lessons for writers.

Lesson #1: Everything is Personal. 

Maksik's main character is a young black woman from Liberia, and when the novel opens she is starving to death near a beach on a resort island in Greece. Maksik himself is a man, an American, and lives in New York. Yet one of the most arresting things about this book is how immediate and real Jacqueline's experience is, how unfalteringly close the prose brings us to her, physically and mentally, so I asked him...

LN: Your main character is a 24 year old African woman, and your novel is an antidote for that poisonous advice: "Write what you know." Your voice never felt contrived, Jacqueline's voice never felt artificial, and the relationship between her and her mother seemed to me to be particularly authentic. Did anyone ever tell you to write what you know, or imply that you couldn't properly write this character because you're a man?

AM: I don’t think there’s a writer alive who hasn’t heard that adage. The problem is that it’s often misunderstood as law, as a kind of strict limitation: you must only write about your immediate experience. It’s an absurd idea and it goes counter to the whole idea of fiction, the point of which is to fabricate, invent and imagine. On the other hand, what I know about relationships, about sorrow, about joy, about love, about lust, about loneliness, I know from experience. How can I not use what I know when I’m writing about these things? The adage should provide writers a sense of freedom rather than restriction. Writing fiction should be an act of deep empathy, a way to inhabit lives outside of our own, to imagine the experiences of others.

As for the rest, I believe strongly that it is the writing that must be evaluated. Not the writer.

Yes. Just because you're not in the demographic of the character doesn't mean you're not writing something sharply personal, something you "know" intimately, something from your own life.

Lesson #2: Memories Aren't Tidy

I'm always interested in the structure of novels and how these structures emerge -- whether they spring up fully formed in a first draft or whether they're the result of revision, rearranging. This book stays very tight to a short timeline, with flashbacks to earlier memories and scenes. However, the flashbacks aren't tidy and informative as flashbacks can sometimes be -- arriving just in time to provide a piece of information to a reader. The way Maksik handles his flashbacks, they're more glimpses or really "flashes" and the scattered way they came through seemed to mimic real memory and how haphazard and uncontrolled it can be. As a result, we don't really get "the whole story" wrapped up neatly, but we do get the whole story that's important to the character in the present. And I never felt like "Ah, I'm being filled in on the backstory."

LN: I found your choices regarding timeline fascinating -- there is a lot of the story that's left out, and yet we know enough, as readers, to follow the emotional arc of the character if not every little detail of her life. Did you write this book longer, and then cut? Or did you always know that this little piece of her story, with the past bleeding in in fragments, would be enough?

AM: I knew early on that this would be a short novel, and that it would be focused very precisely and intensely on Jacqueline’s immediate life. And I wanted as little separation as possible between Jacqueline and the reader, who would know only as much as she does. I like the idea of coming to understand a character through fragments, as you say. That’s the way we come to know people in life, isn’t it?

Whether or not it would be enough to be successful is another question entirely. I hoped so, but I certainly wasn’t sure. I’m still not.

Lesson #3: Follow Your Instinct, Not Your Rulebook. 

Another rule that Maksik violates, without drawing much attention to it at all, is the directive we've all heard to keep verb tense consistent within a novel. The end of the book moves to present tense. Switching verb tense is something close to my brain, since I've just finished going through revisions on a novel with some present tense sections, and it was a point of debate, whether that should be allowed to stand. When I asked Maksik about it, he didn't explain his choice or defend his scheme -- it seems he had no scheme and feels no explanation is necessary. He's just letting the material dictate how it needs to be told, and there's a narrative instinct at work there that he doesn't question. This answer was enormously satisfying for me to read, especially when he brought up another paragraph in present tense that I hadn't even noticed. I almost wanted to ask: "And your editor let you do that?" But the point is he knew it was there, and while it wasn't intentional it also wasn't an oversight. Somewhere between intention and oversight -- this must be where instinct lives.

LN: You switch to present tense in the final section. I feel it torques up the tension beautifully and almost invisibly draws us closer to Jacqueline as the book peaks. At what point in your process did you decide to do this, and why? Did you write other bits in present tense, and change?

AM: With that kind of thing, I really go by feel, by instinct. It wasn’t a conscious consideration, but I didn’t hesitate to do it. There’s another brief passage (p. 92) in the present tense. A single paragraph. I can’t say exactly why I made that choice. It hardly feels like a choice, really. It has something to do with that moment being a significant turning point in the novel. I could go on about it being a moment of tremendous relief for her, of change, of deep engagement. But that would suggest some serious intention and consideration, which if I’m to be honest really isn’t the case.

A Marker to Measure Drift is dense, foreign, and beautiful, but ultimately it is a very simple book. Here is a human, detached from humanity, in pain and need. The world swirls around, the past lingers, but this human is at the center, small and yet deep. Maksik's prose brilliantly delivers -- I think he has fully realized what this story could be, and has told it in the best way possible. An amazing accomplishment. Of course you should read this book, if you are a reader who is looking for a great story. But especially if you are a writer, this is one you should not miss.

(Find Alexander Maksik on Facebook and Twitter and you can preorder a signed edition here.)