As I write this on the third anniversary of the Book Pages (remember the first and the second?), I’m looking back at the books, Q&As and conversations of 2024, and I’m once again surprised by how much there was to share with you.
We’re wrapping up a year filled with bookstore news – including our own map of more than 80 stores, 100 book recs from 22 local shops and the personal story behind Chevalier’s prison book drive. I wrote about shops that opened like Black Cat Fables, Lost Bookstore Studio City, and DYM as well as sharing stories about bookstores having a harder time, such as the shuttering of The Book Rack and Vroman’s Hasting Ranch, the struggles of LibroMobile and the challenges, and triumphs, of Underdog Bookstore.
This year we had features and interviews with National Book Award winners, “James” author Percival Everett for fiction and “Soldiers and Kings” author Jason De León for nonfiction. We talked to International Booker Award winner Jenny Erpenbeck, U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón and award winners Rachel Kushner, Danzy Senna, Sheila Heti, Alex Espinoza and Kathryn Scanlan among many others such as Kazu Kibuishi, Attica Locke, Adrian Tomine, Kevin Barry, Jacqueline Winspear and more.
We even got to share the mystery of iconic book designer Janet Halverson and help solve it.
I’m also grateful for contributions and input in the book coverage from colleagues and contributors Emily St. Martin, Jeff Miller, Peter Larsen, Michael Schaub, Diya Chacko, Stuart Miller, Liz Ohanesian, Allyson Vergara, Samantha Dunn, Larry Wilson, Marla Jo Fisher, Richard Guzman, Charlie Vargas, David Comfort, Judy Sanfield and more – not to mention all the booksellers, librarians, publishing folks and publicists who talked to me and helped me stay informed.
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So please read on and know that this is just a portion of the interviews and conversations we published this year, and it was difficult to include just a few. I try to put together the weekly Book Pages so that you’ll always have intelligent and moving conversations and must-read book recommendations to explore whenever you have the opportunity to check it out.
So thanks again for reading this in 2024, whether you’ve been here from the start or are one of the many welcome readers we’ve added since then. I wish you a happy, healthy and peaceful new year, and much good reading to come.
Los Angeles-based Eilish Quin published her debut novel, “Medea,” and spoke with contributor Diya Chacko about the book.
Q. What are you reading now?
I do this thing where instead of New Year’s resolutions, I have New Year’s fixations. Right now, it’s chivalric romances and Arthurian legends. I’ve been reading a lot of Tolkien translations and Arthurian retellings. I just started “Morgan is My Name,” by Sophie Keetch.
I’ve also been on this chaotic, messy, sapphic kick, so reading “Big Swiss” by Jen Beagin, “Exalted” by Anna Dorn and “Killingly” by Katharine Beutner. And I always love to be reading an Agatha Christie at any given time. So “Dead Man’s Folly” is what I’ve been reading right now.
Read the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/02/16/the-book-pages-remembering-an-authors-act-of-kindness/
United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón discussed “In Praise of Mystery,” her poem that blasted off on NASA’s Europa Clipper for a 1.8 billion-mile journey to Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa. If that’s not convenient, you can buy a copy with illustrations by Peter Sís.
Q. Do you have a favorite bookstore or bookstore experience?
I worked at a bookstore in my hometown of Sonoma, California, on and off from ages 15-21. It’s an independent bookstore called Readers’ Books. It’s still my favorite bookstore. I love everyone who works there! That’s where I learned to read poetry by myself and with an honest hunger for finding poems I loved. I still remember the feeling of opening up each poetry book and feeling like I’d finally found a language that made sense to me, the language of poetry.
Read the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/10/11/nasas-europa-clipper-is-launching-ada-limons-poem-on-a-2-billion-mile-journey/
Percival Everett has won the National Book Award for fiction for his novel “James,” a reimagining of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the point of view of the enslaved character Jim. On the eve of the publication, he spoke with Erik Pedersen about the novel and a book he regularly rereads.
Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life?
My father did, just because there were no restrictions as far as what I could pull from the library. And there was, and I don’t remember her name, a librarian – this would have been when I was a teenager – at the University of South Carolina McKissick Library. I shouldn’t have been in that library at all, but she would let me go into the stacks and I would just hang out up there for hours looking through books. I’m sure she’s dead now, but I would love to have had an opportunity to thank her.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/11/20/percival-everett-2024-national-book-award-winner-rereads-one-book-often/
Katherine Rundell is the author of “Impossible Creatures,” “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne” and “Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures.”
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
One of the scenes in “Impossible Creatures” is stolen from a moment when, as research for a book, I took lessons in the flying trapeze. I saw a very talented acrobat land badly, and bend her little finger all the way back to the wrist. She was absolutely fine later, and cheerfully casual about it in the way that trapeze artists are. But I stole that fleeting moment for my book, when Mal is learning how to fly with her flying coat; she bends her little finger all the way back to the wrist. Novelists are alarmingly like magpies: always stealing snippets, pieces that shine, from the world around them.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/10/04/an-impossible-book-that-u-s-readers-can-now-read/
“Terminal Island: Lost Communities on America’s Edge” co-authors Geraldine Knatz and Naomi Hirahara talked to correspondent Liz Ohanesian about the newly reissued book and shared some reading recommendations.
Q. Is there a book that you always recommend to others?
NH: Kyoko Mori‘s memoir, “Dream of Water.” The reason is very specific and personal: I find it illuminating the way the author, a Japanese immigrant, begins to see the value of female friendship among Japanese women after living in America.
GK: I keep records of all the books I read so I can recommend to others depending on what they like.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/04/19/inside-author-kathryn-scanlans-award-winning-week/
Martha Wells is the author of science-fiction and fantasy novels and series, including the Murderbot Diaries. Wells talked to Erik Pedersen in 2021 about how she felt about her future, prior to the success of Murderbot. “I was kind of at that point in my career where, you know, women writers my age were supposed to quietly fade away,” she said. “I could not sell another book.” She’s since sold lots of books – and recommended more.
Q. What’s a memorable book experience you’re willing to share?
I read Nnedi Okorafor’s novella “Remote Control” during the snow and ice storms that caused the massive failure of the Texas power grid in February of 2021. Our house at the time was built in 1967 and had very little insulation, so without heat, it was in the low 30s to high 20s inside. We were going for 12-hour stretches without power, and we were in danger of hypothermia. That book was a lifeline for me. It gave me time I could mentally step out of the situation I was in, which is the best thing a book can do for you. I also love her other work, particularly the “Akata Witch” books.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/02/09/murderbot-diaries-author-martha-wells-says-a-book-was-lifeline-during-ice-storm
Hesse Phillips is the author of the debut novel, “Lightborne,” about the final days of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe.
Q. What are you reading now?
My friends are probably getting tired of my relentless evangelizing for Julia Armfield, whose first book, “Our Wives Under the Sea,” ruined all other books for me for a good long while. I recently finished her follow-up “Private Rites” and am now suffering from another book hangover that just won’t quit. Her prose is so weird, so unsettling, and yet so beautifully constructed. She’s a master at creating vast worlds within claustrophobic spaces, such as a submarine trapped in an abyss, or a city succumbing to rising sea-levels. Armfield is one of those writers who is not at all afraid to lean into her own strangeness, which is exactly what makes her so damn good.
Get the full Q&A: https://www.ocregister.com/2024/11/15/how-lightborne-explores-the-mystery-of-christopher-marlowes-murder/
Late-night talk show host and podcaster Seth Meyers talked to Erik Pedersen about “Saturday Night Live,” hosting a show and the books he loves.
Q. Who has made the biggest impact on your reading life?
It was 100 percent my mom. My mom reads probably 100 books a year, even today, she’s a huge reader. And I will say, though, there was a great combination. My dad read a lot of spy stuff, a lot of cop stuff – Ed McBain, I don’t know if you ever knew those 87th Precinct books? My dad had those, and so it was this really nice combo of the two of them. My dad was a paperback guy, and I would carve through his stuff – like he loved Sherlock Holmes, which I then started to read.
And then my mom loved literature, and to this day, we just read a lot of the same stuff and talk about what we read. It’s the best.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/08/23/seth-meyers-recommends-his-favorite-books-and-authors
Nilanjana S. Roy’s “Black River” is both a gripping mystery and a deeply moving book about the people who live in and around the Indian city of Delhi.
Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?
My father grew up in small-town Odisha, collected local ghost stories, raided the library, and passed that passion for books on to me and my siblings. He died three years ago, but he brought the world via Naguib Mahfouz, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Wole Soyinka into our home, took us to bookstores in Delhi and Calcutta, and gave me the best advice: when you visit a new city, go to its markets and bookshops if you want to understand its soul.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/12/06/black-river-author-nilanjana-s-roy-reveals-the-mysteries-of-her-reading-life/
Claire Oshetsky is a former science journalist. They published “Poor Deer” and spoke with Michael Schaub about the novel.
Q: Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?
“The Wind in the Willows.” It’s the best story I’ve ever read about friendship. It rewards multiple rereadings. People don’t seem to know it isn’t for children. And we can all use a reminder, now and then, that “there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
Author and translator Laura Marris published her debut essay collection, “The Age of Loneliness.”
Q. In “The Age of Loneliness” you include lists of birds. Can you talk about those?
I first learned about birds from my father. He was a birdwatcher who participated in community science projects like the Christmas Bird Count. After he died when I was 19, I found a few of his bird lists in the back of a folder, and they surprised me, because some of the species he was seeing had become harder to find, just over the course of my lifetime. And it made me realize the importance of community science projects, where people go out and count birds, or bats, or horseshoe crabs, or plants. These volunteers check on the health of their local ecosystems in vital ways, and many find lifelong human friendships, too. With the bird lists, I wanted to honor their work, as well as my father’s.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/08/16/5-must-read-books-in-translation-chosen-by-jennifer-croft
Elise Bryant is the Long Beach-based author of YA novels and her first novel for adults, “It’s Elementary.”
Q: Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?
Mrs. Tennison, my third-grade teacher at Cerritos Elementary, made me fall in love with reading, constantly supplying me with stacks of books that met my every curiosity. I remember she used to decorate her classroom based on the book we were reading – a barn for “Charlotte’s Web” – and it made it such a magical, immersive experience. She’s also the first person who made me feel like a writer. She would “publish” my work, binding all my stories and poems into books and sharing them with the class. It’s where my dream of becoming an author began.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/07/09/long-beach-author-elise-bryant-goes-from-ya-to-the-pta-with-its-elementary/
Kaliane Bradley is the author of “The Ministry of Time,” the best-selling debut novel that was chosen for Good Morning America Book Club.
Q: What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?
The language. There’s no particular style that I prefer, but I most admire style that feels deliberate and crafted, that’s serving a particular purpose. I also like it when you can see the writer just doing gymnastics at sentence level. That’s very fun. I know that, e.g., Sheena Patel, Francis Spufford, Julia Armfield, Bryan Washington, Ben Marcus, Raven Leilani and A.K. Blakemore are all doing extremely different things – but I think they’re all being deliberate and also brilliant. This is also why I think translators are so important, and why it’s always worth naming the translator of a book; their creative and stylistic choices will change the way you read a work in translation.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/06/30/the-ministry-of-time-author-talks-graham-greene-james-bond-and-kissing-barbies/
Sara B. Franklin is the author of “The Editor” about the life of publishing legend Judith Jones, whose career began when she urged her boss to publish Anne Frank’s diary.
Q. What’s a memorable book experience you’re willing to share?
Finding my mother’s notations in her books of poetry– mostly Mary Oliver and May Sarton – right after she died in 2008. My mom was a very wise but private woman, difficult to love and be loved by and hard to read, too. Finding those notes gave me access to pieces of her she’d kept to herself and has helped me know and understand her better over time.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/06/14/the-book-pages-the-woman-who-got-anne-franks-diary-into-print/
Lilliam Rivera, a YA and children’s author based in Los Angeles, published “Tiny Threads,” her first book for adults and spoke with Diya Chacko about the novel.
Q: What was a book that made an impression on you?
One book that made an impression on me was Esmeralda Santiago’s “When I Was Puerto Rican.” I was in college when I read that book. She really captured things that I didn’t know about my parents or they would never talk about – their childhood on the island, and then eventually moving to New York. I just took for granted that they left the island and created this family in the Bronx, and I never imagined what their experiences might have been like, you know? So reading her book really kind of opened my mind to that.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/09/27/tiny-threads-author-lilliam-rivera-reveals-the-book-shes-obsessed-with/
Julia Hannafin’s novel “Cascade” was published by independent press Great Place Books.
Q: What’s something – a fact, a bit of dialogue or something else – that stayed with you from a recent reading?
I’m thinking about what Hanif Abdurraqib said in a recent interview, how in a desire to love someone in a big way, we can rush to love the imagined person, not the actual. Also, from Maya Binyam’s “Hangman”: “I tried to go home — home was inside of me.” And from Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” “If you can’t fix it you got a stand it. … I been looking at people on the street. This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?”
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/05/24/new-information-about-the-mystery-of-janet-halverson-book-design-icon-surfaces/
Edwin Frank, editorial director of the iconic New York Review Books and founder of its NYRB Classics series, is the author of a new book, “Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.”
Q. What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?
Oh, the language for sure. The energy of it, which may be at the level of the sentence but also a matter of paragraph, which is to say both. A paragraph is a wonderfully mysterious thing. There is also the lovely enigmatic space between authorial voice and the voice of the book, which can take on a character of its own, and the voice of its characters. In fiction’s great characters language walks out the door to make its way in the world.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/11/29/nyrbs-edwin-frank-says-one-fantasy-classic-hooked-him-on-heroic-losers/
Maria Hummel’s novel “Goldenseal” involves two female friends who meet up at a Los Angeles luxury hotel in 1990. Her two previous novels, “Still Lives” and “Lesson In Red,” are set in the L.A. art and museum worlds.
Q. What’s a memorable book experience – good or bad – you’re willing to share?
The summer I worked at an A&P, I kept a Robertson Davies novel in the coupon drawer. I was 16, in cheap mary janes and thrift store jeans. Every time I opened the drawer, the cover flashed at me: You will get out of here one day. Some people don’t realize that for small-town kids, books can feel like the only escape. This is still true now. That’s why book banning is so especially awful.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/02/23/the-book-pages-books-books-books/
The author of more than a dozen novels, Trisha R. Thomas published her latest, “The Secret Keeper of Main Street,” this year.
Q: Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?
The first book that had an impact on me was when I was about six years old. My mother used to drop me off at the library for free babysitting (Sorry, mom!). I loved that library. It’s still there, remodeled, in San Diego. I did a signing there for my very first published book, “Nappily Ever After.” I couldn’t wait to tell the librarians how much time I spent there as a little girl. I just loved “Little Witch” by Anna Bennett. It was a big book for me at that age. Because I didn’t have a library card, I had to keep reading it there. I’d hide it so only I could find it.
Get the Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/06/09/trisha-r-thomas-secret-keeper-of-main-street-on-the-books-she-loves/
Kate Brody is the author of the debut novel, “Rabbit Hole,” and she spoke with Michael Schaub.
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
I sold the book while I was in labor. I was in the hospital, having massive complications, really struggling, when I got two emails from my agent with offers from different editors. Wildest day of my life. Everything ended happily, with one little boy and one little book.
Get the full Q&A: www.ocregister.com/2024/01/05/the-book-pages-reading-goals-for-2024-dont-count-on-it/