10. The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff: If you’ve encountered me in the past year, you might have heard me rave about this book. I got to read an advanced copy, and as soon as I was finished, I was desperate for the book to publish so I could talk about it with the rest of the world. It’s chilling and lovely and weird and not like any book I’ve read before. I’ll be Brenna’s fan for life.

9. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins: I’m hesitant to add this book to this list because I’m sure so many of you have already read it, and also because I had such a complicated with reading this book. I fell hard for the Hunger Games, and harder still for Catching Fire. But I struggled with Mockingjay. I had so many questions about the choices that Collins made. I wanted it to be different. By the time I finished the book, I was satisfied with the way the series ended, but frustrated with a big part of the journey in the third book. Mockingjay goes on my list because it was still an important book for me this year and because it made me think a lot about the expectations readers have at the end of a series.

8. The Glory of Angels by Edward Lucie-Smith: this is an art book that explores artistic depictions of angels across history, religious, and cultures. It’s more a coffee table-stunner than a curl-up-and-read kind of thing, but it is so beautiful and such a great reference that I’m throwing it on the list. I bought it last month in the gift shop of the oldest cathedral in Santa Fe and just know I will be pouring over it when I sit down to write Rapture in a few months. If you’re all about angels, you will surely dig this book.

7. Delirium by Lauren Oliver: Like many of you, I adored Before I Fall and was eagerly awaiting Lauren’s next book. It delivers. It’s unabashed, sharp, and provocative and gives us so much to look forward to in the series. I love how much it reaches for and how elegant the prose it. Plus, Lauren Oliver is just cool. Be sure to check out Delirium when it hits stores next month!

6. True Grit by Charles Portis: Maybe you have seen the amazing Coen brothers movie, but did you know that Charles Portis wrote the killer YA-esque book on which the film is based? I love this book, it’s the first book I read in 2010 and is just one of many hilarious Charles Portis novels. Read them all! Bonus: I think the movie is one of the rare cases where a film adaptation is as good as the book.

5. A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg: I love cooking. I love cookbooks and food blogs and grocery stores and farms. When I grow up, I want to be a chef. This book is part memoir/part cookbook and it made me cry at least twenty times. Seriously, I read it while I was touring in the UK and if I showed up at most of my signings with red, puffy eyes it’s because I was reading this book on the way there. (There is a lesson in there somewhere?) It’s beautifully written and (obviously) poignant and full of recipes I can attest are tres delicieux.

4. The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens: This is a pal plug, but I am not just recommending The Emerald Atlas because I happen to like John a lot—his book is a remarkably special one. The first book in the Books of Beginning, the Emerald Atlas is pretty much everything you want out of a series opener: fresh characters, big bold storytelling, humor on every single page. I love sibling stories and I love how brave this book is. I can’t wait to read the rest.

3. Tender Morsels by Margot Lanagan: Like the Replacement, this is another wonderfully peculiar read that dips in an out of worlds so deftly and depicts love with such alarming beauty that I as I was reading it, I made a list of all the friends I wanted to send copies to when I finished. My supercool publicist in the UK (also named Lauren Kate!) recommended this one to me and I’m so grateful. It’s the kind of book you read and rave about.

2. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov: I read this modernist Russian novel as part of some research I was doing for Passion (you’ll soon see why). I wanted to get a concept of the city of Moscow in the first half of the 20th century…but I had no idea how much this book would amaze me. It is brilliant. Imagine a juggler throwing about fifty balls into the air over the course of a novel and catching every single one of them in the final pages of the book. That’s what Bulgacov does with his plotting. So enviable. And so so funny. This is the kind of book I’ll read again and again over the years.

1. His Dark Materials (the entire trilogy) by Philip Pullman: I realize now that I was compelled to write this list mostly so that I could get to this point right here. I just finished listening to The Amber Spyglass on audio book on New Years Day and I must tell you that I haven’t had a reading/listening experience this fulfilling probably since my father read me Matilda before bed when I was a kid. I can’t heap enough praise on these three books to do them justice. I’ll just say I’ve been inspired again and again in my own writing and that if you have not read these books, you must. Or listen to the brilliant audio books if you happen to be lucky enough to be driving across the country with the one you love.

I’ve been hard at work on the first draft of Passion. It’s third book in the Fallen series, and a prequel to everything that occurs in Fallen and in Torment. In its conception, this book felt like an impossible project to me: It covers a span of 5000 plus years, dips into a new setting, a new country, and usually, a new century with each new chapter. And it aims to explain just about every important moment that ever passed between Luce and Daniel. Definitely the biggest narrative challenge I’ve ever given myself.

I was nervous before I started writing it. I’d had such a great, fun, charmed experience writing Torment, but I know this book was going to be much more complicated, much more taxing. Just as I did when I started writing Fallen, I turned to books for help. Only this time, in addition to the theological research books I used for Fallen, I also got to look at some of my favorite novels for help with period and setting. Recognize any of these?

Everything a writer reads, loves, and is inspired by eventually sneaks its way into his or her own work, but it isn’t so often that a writer gets to say the books truly become a part of the story. I turned to North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, and A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway. I read books about horse racing, books about the Globe Theater in London, books about the Mayan ball court at Chitzen Itza. If this sounds crazy and disjointed, believe me, there were moments when I felt precisely the same way. But the cool thing about this book, I think, is that Luce and Daniel’s story stays clear and solid across time, place, and history. It’s a survivor.

I still have a long way to go with this book. The first draft is a skeleton compared to all that will be fleshed out by the time the second and third and, cringe, sometimes even fourth drafts are completed. But the book has a shape and a backbone now, thanks in big part to all these texts I had so much fun weaving in.

My computer and I are going to take a break from each other. Just for a little while. This weekend, I’m running a half-marathon in memory of my grandfather. I’m running with a group called Team in Training to support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. (To those of you who took part in my auction: you helped raise over $2300!)

After that, I’m heading to Berlin for a week for my publisher’s 175th Anniversary Gala. And then—the moment we’ve all been waiting for—Torment comes out on 9/28!!! And I start touring across the US and the UK. Those of you who live near one of the cities I’ll be visiting, I hope you’ll come out and say hello!

Yes, the monster list, taped on the back of our closet door, is taller than both of us and took three photographs to capture. But Jason still managed to slay it. See all the little check marks?

For the past five months he’s been preparing for his oral exam, which he takes this Friday (!!!). For three hours, three professors will grill him on any/all of these books, asking questions like “How would you teach this text in an introduction to Shakespeare class?” And this is just the first of two monster tests he has to pass before he writes his dissertation. Hear that, all you future English PhD’s out there? Are you scared? (I’m scared.)

So around here, it’s been one book a day, every day, for five straight months. He wakes up in the morning, he reads. I take the dog for a hike, he reads. I fool around online for seven hours, he continues to read. Because these are major doorstops of books. Tomes. Like on Tuesday: he sat down and read the Bible. The whole thing! Another day he tackled the very thrilling Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Sounds like a real page turner, huh? Today he’s reading Paradise Lost. He’s got serious speed-reading skillz.

I marvel at his reading stamina and am feeling very proud that he’s made it through this list. As if it wasn’t already before, his brain is certainly a goldmine now.

So good luck on Friday, Jason, and thank you for always flagging the angel references for me. xx

When I was ten months old, my mother made an appointment with our ear doctor because she thought I was deaf. Hearing the story told for the first time to my husband recently, I was impressed by my mom’s verve as she relayed the family lore. Her eyes lit up telling of the placid way I’d stare into space when she tried to reason with me, how often I ignored my name being called.

A half-hour doctor’s visit revealed perfectly sound hearing in both my ears, and left only one explanation: at less than a year old, I was already selectively hearing my mother. (This is when my dad chimes in: “smart kid.”)

When people invoke the term “selective memory” or when my mother refers to my lifelong “selective hearing,” they’re referring to a way of tuning out what, for whatever reason, we don’t want to retain. Those terms get a bad rap, but I’d like to make a case for selective reading—tuning out or tuning up certain moments in a narrative—as a key to reading fiction.

When readers and reviewers talk about the “worlds” within my novels, I often have a hard time taking credit for them. Descriptive passages are some of the most challenging for me to write. Scenes that exist in vivid, specific detail in my mind often have to be teased out of me by my editor and agent. I’d like to say this isn’t laziness, but a desire to leave enough to the imagination of my readers.

One of the things I love most about reading is sharing in the author’s effort to create the world of a story. The books I open again and again always require active participation on my end; they insist that I split the creative load fifty-fifty with the author.

For example, I know that the light across the bay at Daisy’s house is green, but Fitzgerald leaves it up to me to imagine Gatsby’s nightly posture as he stares at it, how dim his own great house is behind him, and the precise angle at which Nick watches him doing this. No one else will ever read Gatsby in just the same way I read it, no one will picture the characters in just the same way I do. To share in the invention of a world is to do something powerful. It allows for an important intimacy between a reader and a book.

I get a lot of questions from parents of teenagers asking whether Fallen, my book about the earthly affairs of fallen angels, is appropriate for their daughter. Yesofcourse, bellows my publisher’s voice inside of me, but the truth is, I have no idea. I don’t know who you are, what your kid is like or wants to be like, whether a love scene might strike you as too illicit and your daughter as too tepid—or vice versa.

The most honest answer I can give invokes selective reading. Being in control of half of the story allows us readers to make a sex scene just as racy or just as comfortable as we want. To make monsters or murderers only as terrifying as we want them to be. This imaginative freedom and control is what makes many of us prefer books to their movie versions. It’s what allows a story—one that might be worlds away from anything we’ll ever experience—not just to speak to us, but to fill in gaps in our own lives. It’s what causes the same reader to have vastly different experiences reading a book at eighteen and again at sixty-eight. And maybe what gives mothers and daughters opposite—yet equally satisfying—reading experiences when they crack open a paranormal teen romance.

Speaking of mothers and daughters, I’ve been listening to mine more and more. But I supposed in other areas, I haven’t changed so much from the stubborn kid tuning her out: today, when I crack open a book, I bring my own constantly changing expectations and desires. I read selectively to bring myself closest to the world inside that book, and to bring the book closest to my world beyond the page.