Young adult author and former Washington Post journalist Sabaa Tahir describes what’s on her bedside table.
For a while, gently bumping into my nightstand meant a pile of 50 books clattering onto my head and the floor. After the 10th time this happened, I moved most of the books to a shelf in the spare room. Now, my nightstand is sort of like a bookish country club. And not all books get in. My rules:
1. No more than 8 books at a time. (It was 7, but that wasn’t enough.)
2. Only two books that are “hopefuls”: meaning, I want to start reading them but haven’t yet.
3. Everything else on the stand has to have at least been peeked at in the last week or it will be instantly banished.
Extreme measures, perhaps. But necessary if I wish to avoid Death by Book.
The book I read last night was The Beckoning Silence by Joe Simpson. Though I have never climbed a mountain of note (nor do I plan to), I grew up in a valley ringed by the Sierra Nevada range. I’ve loved mountains since I was a girl and when I discovered mountaineering fiction after college, I was hooked. Simpson’s harrowing tales, which take the reader from the Alps to Eiger, is my latest indulgence.
Only recently have I started listening to audiobooks, but When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanathi is a good example of why I still prefer a physical book. There were so many passages I wanted to underline and dissect while listening that I had to buy a physical copy – now heavily defaced.
Sometimes, the books on my bedside table are ones I’ve stolen from my husband – and Deadwood by Pete Dexler, is my most recent theft. Dexler’s gripping, gritty tale of the gunman Wild Bill is one of the reasons I’ve been hitting the snooze button so much in the mornings.
The book at the very bottom of the stack is The News: Poems by Jeffrey Brown. I snagged this at the National Book Festival last year and read a little of it every day, even if it’s just one stanza of a poem. There hasn’t been a single one I haven’t liked.
What is a nightstand without Mindy Kaling? I dip into her Why Not Me? when I’ve had a particularly rough day. Her hilarious observations and anecdotes never fail to cheer me up.
The thin blue book you see at the top of the stack is another “soother” book. (Sort of like a pacifier…but for grown ups!) Yosemite Meditations is a hokey-looking “quote” book that you’d usually see on sale at a National Park gift shop. Which is exactly where I got it. No shame! With the immortal words of John Muir gracing many of its pages, I find myself flipping through this little volume daily, searching for meaning when it seems like the world has gone a crazy.
The last two books on my shelf are my hopefuls – I hope I will get to them in the next few weeks. Both are by fellow 2015 debut authors. The first is Kids of Appetite by David Arnold. I loved his debut book Mosquitoland and am excited about this next one, which I’ve seen compared to The Outsiders. The last book, Fonda Lee’s Exo is a science fiction adventure that I can’t wait to start. Her last book, Zeroboxer was one of my favorite sci-fi books last year.
Tahir’s A Torch Against the Night, sequel to her bestselling An Ember in the Ashes, will be published by Razorbill on August 30.
