Guest Post - Author Book Picks - Dark Souls

GUEST POST

AUTHOR BOOK PICKS

DARK SOULS

What’s better than a creepy and mysterious ghost story? One that’s set in present AND historical York, England of course. Dark Souls by Paula Morris is that book. I like reading books like this when the weather starts cooling off and the holiday season approaches. I asked Paula about some of her own book picks and this is what she had to say.

Like lots of people, I often have too many books in my must-read-immediately pile. The books on and around my bedside table fall into the following categories:

1. Books everyone else has read (possibly years ago), and I may as well read them too: Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; One Day by David Nicholls.

2. Books that I really, really want to read, but they look so very, very long: Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life; David Lodge’s A Man of Parts (which is about H.G. Wells).

3. Books I’ve been saving up as a treat for so long, the moment may have passed: Daughters-in-Law by Joanna Trollope.

4. Books I’m reading as research for a novel: Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans by Thomas David Brothers (for the sequel to RUINED).

5. Books that I think I should read because they might be useful in the creative writing classes I teach, even though they look a bit dull: um, I won’t list those titles …

6. Books I’ve read before and therefore SHOULD NOT be reading again under any circumstances, given the number of other books to get on with: numerous novels by P. G. Wodehouse; Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.

7. Books that are nominated for a prize, so I tell myself I have to read them ASAP, to make the whole award-ceremony thing more exciting: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize).

8. The book I’m actually reading, which is taking far longer than I thought it would (though I’m enjoying it a lot) because I go to bed too late and can’t keep awake long enough to read more than a chapter: Some Hope by Edward St. Aubyn.

9. Books that my husband has stacked on his bedside table and I want to nab: Open City by Teju Cole.

10. Books I recently read and haven’t filed away yet: the very funny Bossypants by Tina Fey; The Cat’s Table by the brilliant Michael Ondaatje.

Actually, there’s one novel I need to read that’s not on this list. That book is DARK SOULS, my own YA novel. I finished work on it about a year ago, so now it’s been published, and people are asking me questions about it, I have to strain to remember specific details. Of course, because I’m working on a sequel to RUINED right now, I’m thinking about New Orleans in the spring, rather than York in the winter – the setting for DARK SOULS. It’s strange the way something takes over your imagination for a period of months, even years, but is supplanted by whatever new project you take up next. Soon you can’t even remember writing it, in a way. All the hard work that went into it, the memory of sweating over particular sentences – everything fades.

I picked up DARK SOULS again today and started reading. Can’t spend too long on it, though. So many other books to read …

That last book was a surprise! Thank you to Paula for sharing her list. Looks like she’s got some reading to do.