Reading with... Madison Gaines

Madison Gaines is the publishing assistant at Shelf Awareness and a former bookseller at Third Place Books. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington Bothell.

On your nightstand now:

I just finished reading Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes, and I absolutely loved it. The atmosphere (or should I say lack thereof?) was delightfully uncomfortable. Next up for me in the horror scene is The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling.

I'm reading two books on rotation right now: Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur and Black Bone: 25 Years of Affrilachian Poets edited by Bianca Lynne Spriggs and Jeremy Paden.

I recently took a break from romance books, so I'll probably reread The Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love by India Holton to ease myself back into it. It's a guaranteed laugh, every time.

Favorite book when you were a child:

My first ever favorite book was Savvy by Ingrid Law, but I don't often tell people how it came to be.

In Maryland, there's a student choice award called the Black-Eyed Susan Book Award. Students who've read at least three books from the reading list (determined by the Maryland Association of School Librarians) may cast one vote. But my elementary school librarian was like, super cool and made a deal with my third grade class: read all the nominated books, and you could take one book from the list home.

Needless to say, I read all the nominated books and chose to take my library's only copy of Savvy. The copy still sits on my desk, battered from 15 years of rereading.

Your top five authors:

Eve L. Ewing, Warsan Shire, and Naomi Novik were easy choices.

Since the first three are adult writers, I felt the need to reserve the last two for children's writers. I had to sit down and examine my bookshelf for quite some time before I could decide, but I love too many children's authors to narrow it down. Here's a list of children's authors I love, in no particular order: Axie Oh, Julia Golding, Sabaa Tahir, Keah Brown, Ally Carter, Amélie Wen Zhao, Heidi Lang and Kati Bartkowski (co-authors), and Tamora Pierce.

Book you've faked reading:

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. It's the only book I've ever faked reading, and I could still give you pretty convincing plot summary.

Anyway... don't fake reading books, kids. It's bad for your shelf.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Tannery Bay by Steven Dunn and Katie Jean Shinkle! Tannery Bay reckons with the cyclical nature of exploitation and greed­­. (Literally. The characters are trapped in an eternal loop.) Dunn and Shinkle masterfully weave their perspectives together to explore Black joy and queer joy as unifying forces of change, and the result is propelling.

I took a class with Steven Dunn in 2022, and I have so much respect for him. Mostly because his passion for life and love is evident in his writing, but also because he refers to himself as Uncle Velvet Disco, which entertains me to no end.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Vengeance Road by Erin Bowman and the companion novel, Retribution Rails. Gorgeous, western-style black-and-white illustrated covers with yellow and orange accents. The only reason I didn't spend more time staring at those book covers was because I was too busy reading the darn book.

Book you hid from your parents:

When my oldest sister went off to college, she let me sleep in her room so long as I didn't mess with her things. (Translation: I could mess with her things if I put them back before she came home.) She didn't have as many books as I did, and the ones she did have were tucked in the bottom of her closet. One of those books was Just Listen by Sarah Dessen.

It wasn't that I thought I'd get in trouble for reading it--I was so disinterested in "girlhood" that my mom encouraged any and all engagement with the concept. But Just Listen wasn't just about the tragedies and traumas of girlhood. It was about vulnerability. It was about honesty.

To an 11-year-old, those were intimidating concepts. I saw the similarities between the Greene sisters and the Gaines sisters, but I was nowhere near ready to talk about it. So, I returned the book to the bottom of my sister's closet and never spoke of it. My sister came back home, I stopped sleeping in her room, and then it was my turn to grow up and go to college.

But I took the book with me. (Sorry, Banana.)

Book that changed your life:

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I read it in an undergraduate Black Literature class, and it stuck with me in ways I don't think I can verbalize. It was surreal and uncomfortable and I'm not even sure I actually enjoyed reading it, but I was captivated. In the months that followed, I referenced it constantly--in other classes, in conversation, in my writing.

Of course, there have been books that have changed me since then. But I believe Invisible Man prepared me for change and, more than that, for challenge.

Favorite line from a book:

"You can't choose blindness when it suits you. Not anymore." --Black Tom, right after cutting off a cop's eyelids.
From The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle.

Five Six books you'll never part with:

Banana [      ] / we pilot the blood by Paul Hlava Ceballos and Quentin Baker
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir by Zoë Bossiere
Professional Crocodile by Giovanna Zoboli, illustrated by Mariachiara Di Giorgio
Little Witch Hazel by Phoebe Wahl
The Garden Witch by Kyle Beaudette

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. If you've read it, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't, then this is your sign.

Shoutout to my best friends (booksellers, obviously) who got me to read it. 10/10, would befriend you again.

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