Nina George

Nina George works as a journalist, writer, and storytelling teacher. She is the award winning author of 26 books, and also writes feature articles, short stories, and columns. Her novel The Little Paris Bookshop spent over a year on bestseller lists in Germany, and was a bestseller in Italy, Poland, and the Netherlands.

Recently I asked George about what she was reading. Her reply:

Preamble I: I need reading as others need air or G&Ts before noon or a room on their own. Meaning: I used to read a lot, simultaneously and totally different stuff; and all this in a very vivid way. I am a type of book-eater. So: what I read this week will be a total different sneak peak inside my daily reading as it was a few weeks ago (The Shock of the Fall, or Passage from Connie Willis or Winston, a book for children from Frauke Scheunemann about a girl exchanging bodies with a tomcat).

Preamble II: I learned everything from books: being brave, how to love, and that dying is democratic. Books are my best friends in any manner, and I am totally with my protagonist Jean Perdu, who said: "What you read is more important in the long term than the man you marry." (Except if your husband is a writer. Like mine).

For it is from books that humans learn to be human. They learn courage, love and compassion, and about other cultures. They learn to get angry, to behave themselves and to fight; they learn to think for themselves. Readers are the saviors of the world; they make it warm, loving, understanding, tolerant and complex. On the contrary, TV people, video gamers and non-readers make the world grey, poor, dull, simple, dumb and indifferent.

Preamble III: My mother tongue is German and my writing English is very jolly.

Answer: The nights I spend with the horclings from Peter V. Brett's High-Fantasy-Epic Das Lied der Dunkelheit / The Warded Man, because I need to feed my inner child. In the ladies room I like to be surrounded by ladies, too – at the moment with Sara Gran and Dope. Gran's ultrarealistic writing is steely and dangerous like a boner knife. In the living room is my Karte der Wildnis waiting for me to discover the last savage places in our digitalized and surveyed world. The wording is different to Gran's vodka-clearness – it is palatable, poetic, pétillant.

My all-time-talisman-books – every writer has some of them, writing goddesses and door-openers to the inner writing room – is every novel from Mister metaphors-never-read-before Jon Kalman Stefansson, from Mister simple speech, high emotions Stephen King, and the Ensemble-Buildings of Mrs Anna Gavalda. I do not know how anybody can survive without reading them.

Visit Nina George's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Little Paris Bookshop.

The Page 69 Test: The Little Paris Bookshop.

--Marshal Zeringue