Reading With... V.E. Schwab

photo: Jenna Maurice

Victoria (V.E.) Schwab is the author of the Shades of Magic series, as well as a number of middle-grade and YA novels, including City of Ghosts. Schwab has a master's degree in art history from the University of Edinburgh. Her next release is Vengeful, a super-powered battle of genius, cruelty and the lengths one will go for vengeance--the sequel to her adult debut, Vicious.

 

 

Oh, man, it's amazing my nightstand hasn't collapsed from the weight. But a few of my most anticipated right now are Hank Green's An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Rebecca Schaeffer's Not Even Bones and Rena Rossner's The Sisters of the Winter Wood.

 

 

So I didn't come to reading very early--I was proficient, but didn't fall in love with the act until I found Harry Potter when I was 11. But I do vividly remember jumping from Boxcar Children to Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne books!

 

It's an ever-changing/expanding list, but my auto-buy, auto-follow, auto-everything authors are Neil Gaiman, Holly Black, Alexander Chee, Jenny Lawson and Leigh Bardugo.

 

 

The Lord of the Rings. I finally admitted to never having read it in a speech I gave at Oxford on, you guessed it, Tolkien.

 

 

There's a nonfiction book called Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, a strange, extraordinary musing on botany and sanity and nature and life, and I have bought so many copies for so many people. It's a book I wish everyone would read.

 

 

Sooooo many. I admit to being a visual creature. Most recently The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley and An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard, but in my defense, I'd already purchased both as e-books for the content, I simply couldn't resist the hardcovers.

 

 

Probably the Robert Ludlum books. They were pretty violent, and I was pretty young--but I don't think my parents would have minded.

 

 

I know it sounds trite, but it's true--I was 11 when Harry Potter came out, and I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to discover a love of reading if I hadn't found those books. But I owe as much to Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends and Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things.

 

There is no possible way I could choose.

 

Five books you'll never part with:

 

I never re-read, but if I could go back and read one again for the first time, it would be Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.