Genevieve Iverson is the sales and marketing assistant at Shelf Awareness. (Do you follow us on Instagram yet?) Before joining Shelf, Genevieve worked for several Pacific Northwest magazines and interned at Sasquatch Books. She lives in Seattle.On your nightstand now:
My nightstand always has: a book I haven't read, one I'm in the middle of reading and one recently finished that is still cooling off. Following that organization: A Reaper at the Gates by Sabaa Tahir, Lab Girl by Hope Jahren and My Ex-Life by Stephen McCauley.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry kept me up at night.
Book you've faked reading:
A wide variety of literature assigned in required college classes I never wanted to take in the first place.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Red Rising by Pierce Brown. I love finding the right people to give this book to because most are completely blindsided by how obsessed it makes them. Plus, he wrote it in Seattle.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I'm a sucker for the covers coming out of Riverhead Books (Emma Straub's Modern Lovers cover/matching dress combo, anyone? And The Mothers by Brit Bennett). Also, I'm still smitten over the artwork on Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal. All these books happen to be fantastic, as well.
Book you hid from your parents:
When I was in the sixth grade, I went through a phase of obsessively bonding with books to the point where I would read the same one three or more times in a row. My mother would encourage me to branch out, so I got around that one by taking the dust jackets off other books and putting them on my current one to hide the fact that I was reading, say, The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke, for the 10th time. I was never caught.
Book that changed your life:
Many, many books have changed my life in incremental yet meaningful ways, but honestly the end of Holes by Louis Sachar blew my mind. I have no idea how old I was when I read it, but it changed my entire approach to reading novels.
Favorite line from a book:
"These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone." -- from Matilda by Roald Dahl
Five books you'll never part with:
1. My first copy of The Prisoner of Azkaban (technically it was a Christmas present to my brother, as evidenced by the handwritten note from a grandparent on the inside cover... but he's not going to read this so he'll never know I have it).
2. The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins, stolen off my mother's bookshelf.
3. Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag (I quote this book to this day and no one ever gets the reference).
4. Middlemarch by George Eliot (It's a gorgeous version of the book gifted to me by a special person a decade ago... and it will follow me around until I actually read it).
5. All my signed copies. If I lend a book out, I encourage it to never come back (Be free! Have an adventure!), but I continue to hold onto the signed books.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
All my favorites from the pre-teen era. Everything was so fresh and new and delicious, I'm never able to immerse myself as deeply into anything now as I did when I was 11. Ah, the emotion.