Lisa Papademetriou has written or adapted over thirty books for young readers, including Sixth-Grade Glommers, Norks, and Me; The Wizard, the Witch, and Two Girls from Jersey; How to Be a Girly Girl in Just Ten Days, and the New York Times bestselling Disney Fairies novel, Rani in the Mermaid Lagoon.Her latest novel is Siren's Storm.
Papademetriou's reply to my recent query about what she was reading:
I'm currently 92% of the way through the Collected Works of Edith Wharton. I'm reading them on a Kindle, which is why I know what percentage I've completed, but now how many pages I have left to read. There are thirty-one books in this collection, and I actually skipped two that didn't interest me (both nonfiction). The rest have been wonderful reads. Her books are thoughtful in the most literal sense, consisting mostly of the internal musings of her characters fleshed out with vivid, beautiful descriptions. As a writer, I tend to focus a great deal on plot, which is why the Wharton books have been so interesting to read. In almost all, the plots play aVisit Lisa Papademetriou's website.secondary role to the motivations of the characters. She has an incredible ability to empathize with all sorts of people--one gets the sense that she would have been a very intuitive, compassionate person. At the same time, her writing offers a scathing critique of social norms, and she wrote a few things (Summer, for example, and Bunner Sisters) that must have been very shocking for their time. In addition, she wrote a number of short stories, a few of which are delightfully eerie ghost stories.
I have always been someone who tends to read author by author, rather than book by book. If I like an author, I tend to read all I can by that person. Two years ago, I read all of Jane Austen. The summer before, it was all Dickens. Now that I have a Kindle, it's even easier to get my hands on books, which is the thing I love best about the digital format. I do wish that I could tell how many pages I have left, though.
--Marshal Zeringue
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