Reading middle-grade, YA books for pleasure
In “Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom,” Ilyon Woo traces the near impossible story of how Ellen and William Craft escaped slavery in the South. Woo’s book landed on a number of best books of 2023 lists, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR. She is also the author of “The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, The Shakers, and Her Times.” Woo will discuss “Master Slave Husband Wife” at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 27, as part of the annual Newburyport Literary Festival. The free festival features 72 authors and poets over three days at locations around town.
BOOKS: What are you reading?
WOO: I just finished reading “The Lightning Thief,” the first book in Rick Riordan’s middle grade series “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.” I’m also rereading for the umpteenth time Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics,” which I love. It’s about how comics work but it helps me figure out what literature and storytelling is all about. It’s super nerdy in the best possible way but you can also just read it for the images and story. I just read the historian David Blight’s “Yale and Slavery.” That was a mixture of pain and pleasure because it’s a difficult history to read about. That was for a Yale webinar. That wasn’t on my nightstand. The books I read for pleasure are almost always novels.
BOOKS: What do you have on your nightstand?
WOO: I’m on a middle-grade and YA book kick. I’m in the middle of Alan Gratz’s “Heroes.” I also have Korean books in translation. I just finished Anne Berest’s terrific novel “The Postcard.” I’m finally getting around to Tommy Orange’s “There There.” I’m forbidding myself to buy any more books until I go through this pile. I’ve got multiple accounts open with every independent bookstore within 50 miles of my home.
BOOKS: What did you think of “There There”?
WOO: It’s incredible. I totally understand why people are so pulled in. I have a slight bias against debut novels but this book and Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing” broke me of that bias.
‘I’m on a weird streak now of taking [book] recommendations from my children.’
BOOKS: What is your bias?
WOO: My friends say I’m being a snob but it feels like there is a lot of throatclearing in first books, and they are almost always written in the first person. I prefer an omniscient narrator. Here’s another debut book I loved: Honorée Fanonne Jeffries’s “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.” She is a goddess taking us through so many times and lands.
BOOKS: How do you pick books to read?
WOO: I’m on a weird streak now of taking recommendations from my children. I’m also in four book clubs. My favorite one is run by a teenager. She has picked so many interesting books. The last book we read was Angie Thomas’s “The Hate U Give.” Next we are reading Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s “Four Treasures of the Sky,” another YA read.
BOOKS: How did you start reading YA? WOO: The Harry Potter books didn’t grab me the way they did everybody else but Philip Pullman’s “The Golden Compass” series knocked my socks off, especially with the first book. I’ve always been interested in that age range of reading. I have such strong memories of reading in middle school.
BOOKS: What experiences still stick with you?
WOO: I was a skinny outsider of a middle-schooler and had just moved to a new place when I found “Anne of Green Gables.” I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. There weren’t kids in books that looked like me but there were books about outsiders like Anne.
BOOKS: When did you start finding books about Asians or Asian Americans?
WOO: I remember that vividly because I subscribed to Seventeen magazine, and I remember the page with the story that Amy Tan was coming out with “The Joy Luck Club.” I was of a generation that, when an Asian person was on TV, everyone would crowd around to look. To imagine that there would be a book not just about Asians but about Asian Americans. I was the first in line to get that book. I have a weakness for books with Asian girls on the cover because I didn’t have that growing up. My daughter makes fun of me and has developed this skepticism about those books. It’s such a delightful luxury that she feels that way.
Follow us on Facebook or Twitter @GlobeBiblio. Amy Sutherland can be reached at amysutherland@mac.com.