Writer of YA Novels

Top Ten Tuesday: Settings

written by Leslie January 26, 2016

It’s Tuesday, also known as Monday Two. So it’s time for Top Ten Tuesday, brought to you by The Broke and the Bookish. Click here to learn more about this and to see upcoming topics.

Today is a freeeeeeeebie! I was so excited when I saw this on the schedule. I hate being tied down to required topics. I loathe being told what to do. I have so much creativity…set me free to use it! Yipee! And then I proceeded to struggle for days to think of a topic. Ugh. Why couldn’t they just provide one for me?

Well, I’ve decided to focus today on setting. Not the settings in the stories, but the settings in which the stories are read. Sometimes I think where I read a book is as memorable as the book itself. So, I present to you a list of all the strange and not-so-strange places I’ve read memorable books…

TOP TEN MEMORABLE BOOKS READ IN MEMORABLE PLACES

I came to this party late. I don’t like bandwagons. So on a trip to Hawaii for spring break I brought the final two books in order to catch up. On the flight I read the entire book. I couldn’t stop reading. Literally. I shoved peanut M&Ms into my mouth with one hand and turned the pages with the other. This left me Mockingjay for the beach. Not the best beach read.

Keeping with the airport theme, I read this book on a layover on my way back from Indiana. I’d been visiting a friend who got the flu and then I had it one day before I was set to leave. By the grace of God, I was flu-free for the trip back, only to have it return that night. This was my first Susane Colasanti book. I read it in a bit less than three hours in the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport. I was happy to find a new Sarah Dessen. And not to be throwing up.

For two summers in a row, I spent the entire time outside at my family’s pool and read all day long. One summer it was Sarah Dessen. All the books I could get. The next summer it was Graham Greene. An odd combination. I wonder, did something dark happen to me in between?

Once upon a time, there was a coffeehouse near me that was not commercialized. It was like reading in a little old lady’s living room. Oriental rugs, bookshelves, and an eclectic assortment of fabric-covered furniture. I always sat in the giant pink armchair. And this is where I read Love in the Time of Cholera. Which for me, is really titled Love in the Time of Cholera in a Giant Pink Chair.

UCLA was the place that introduced adult-me to young adult literature. I took a Childrens’s Literature course. The Bell Jar was one of the titles, and strangely enough I had not read it yet. I read the entire book in the dark, musty wood halls of Kerckhoff Hall. Yes, literally I read it in the halls, on the floor before class began. And also in the coffeehouse. And I fell in love. It also made me hungry for sandwiches.

Staying with the UCLA theme. Later when I took a summer writer’s workshop there, I read Summer by Edith Wharton on a cement stage near the Bruin bear. I had nothing to do while I waited for a friend, so I chose this book at the bookstore. Not sure if I chose it because it was “considered Wharton’s finest work” or because it was about a “young woman’s sexual awakening”. haha.

Years ago, I fell out of love with reading. That was the same year that I was also trapped at a miniature golf and arcade center on a school field trip for the boys’ basketball team. A colleague had this book and I was so bored I started reading it at a table in the arcade. I finished it in the same seat. I can’t even count the number of pages I dog-eared. I ended up buying the book from him. I’ve kept it and it was the start of a wonderful road back into reading.

I lived in the Bay Area for a year after college. Pat Conroy signed books at a local bookstore. I love reading and authors, but hadn’t read much of his specific work. I still went and got his latest book signed. I read it and loved it. So I proceeded to read all his books that year. Pat Conroy=San Francisco to me.