What is Jaclyn Moriarty reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jaclyn Moriarty, author of The Cracks in the Kingdom: Book 2 of The Colors of Madeleine.

Her entry begins:

I am in the middle of a reading experiment. There’s been a lot of talk around, lately, about whether enough attention is paid to novels written by women. There’s also been talk about whether adults should be reading books written for young adults. All this talk has made me realise that, mostly, and without meaning to, all I seem to read are novels by women or YA fiction.

So I’ve decided that, for one year, every second book I read will be an adult novel by a male author. I’m a few months into the experiment. Some of the authors I’ve read as my alternates include Tim Gautreaux, James Joyce, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami. Here are my initial observations:

1. When I’m reading one of my usual choice of book, I smile whenever I think about it. All day, I look forward to reading. But when I’m reading one of the alternates, I tend to get a neutral expression on my face when I think about it. (When I was reading Joyce, I got a grim yet resolute expression.) In fact, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all of the alternates––I found them brilliant, intriguing and rewarding––they just (mostly) haven’t shouted at me to drop everything, put my child in front of the TV, get a cup of tea, and read. This is what my usual choices do.
2. But some did shout at me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and Nabokov’s Pnin are examples. They both had the irony and inventiveness that I admired in some of the other alternates, but...[read on]

About The Cracks in the Kingdom, from the publisher:

The second in Jaclyn Moriarty's brilliant, acclaimed fantasy trilogy, The Colors of Madeleine!

Picking up where A CORNER OF WHITE left off, Elliot is more determined to find his father than ever, now that he knows he's still alive. But first he must help Princess Ko find her own missing family, as the secret search for the royals of Cello begins. As part of the Royal Youth Alliance, Elliot will travel all over the Kingdom of Cello looking for any clue or detail or spell that could bring them (and maybe his own father) home. But once he learns that the royal family has been trapped in the World all this time, with no memory of their former lives, his real value to the Alliance becomes clear: He's the only one with a connection to the World, through Madeleine.

Together, through notes, letters, and late nights, Elliot and Madeleine must find a way to travel across worlds and bring missing loved ones home. The stakes are high, the writing both hilarious and heart-poundingly suspenseful, and the experience of reading it, sheer pleasure.

Visit Jaclyn Moriarty's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Cracks in the Kingdom.

Writers Read: Jaclyn Moriarty.

--Marshal Zeringue