- I think I read this when I was 15.
- This is not okay.
I read about this book.
- Did you really?
- Did your parents know you were reading this?
- No.
- Oh hello, it's you again.
I'm Joel Stein, and I've noticed that a common theme
in dystopias is that they suppress information
by taking your books, which is why we're in such a hurry
to film our show, where we talk to authors
and look at their bookshelves.
Welcome to Show Your Shelf.
Today's guest is Marie Lu.
She's the author of young adult novels
such as the "Legend" trilogy
and "Sky Hunter", her newest book.
Marie grew up just blocks from Tiananmen Square
and her parents fled shortly after the protests,
so she knows a lot about what it's like to live
in an authoritarian regime.
I can't wait to meet Marie and see her bookshelf,
which I'm sure is gonna be fantastical and rebellious
and anti-authoritarian, and maybe teach me some lessons
about how to protect myself and my bookshelf.
♪ Show your shelf ♪
♪ Show some spine ♪
♪ Dust off your tiny jackets ♪
♪ Show me yours, I'll show you mine ♪
♪ We're delighted to have you with us ♪
♪ Perhaps we appear pretentious ♪
♪ But we're sincerely here to share the wealth ♪
♪ So show your shelf, show your shelf, show your shelf ♪
Marie Lu, thank you so much for coming on Show Your Shelf
and wearing one of the most amazing shirts
I've ever seen in my whole life.
- Thank you Joel.
- Matching your shirt almost in its modernity
is that bookshelf.
There's clearly some kind of organizing principle there.
- It is definitely color.
I've wanted to do a color shelf for a long time.
- Did you take the jackets off some of those books?
- I did, most of them are missing their jackets.
I really like how books look
when they're just stripped of their jackets.
It kinda gives it, to me, that old library feel
to new books that I own.
- And you threw them away, the jackets, right?
You don't store them somewhere?
- It kinda hurts my heart to throw them away.
I've got a box in my closet of book jackets.
- So there's a box in your closet,
in case the books have to go out
on some kind of formal occasion and put their jackets on?
So I'm looking at that bookshelf,
is the blank space intentional?
- Blank space is kind of intentional.
I just wanted to make something pretty,
and that meant kind of spacing things
a little bit differently,
and it's only been in existence for a year or so
and it's already kind of starting to fill up.
- Those pink books, did you buy those books
because they were pink or those books you had?
- I owned, these two books are by Maureen Goo,
who is a fantastic contemporary YA writer.
"I Believe In A Thing Called Love"
and "Somewhere Only We Know".
The thing is, pink books are really hard to find
so these were the only three that I had.
- Those other pink books that are stacked,
those are just books you bought 'cause they were pink?
They're not books you would read?
- They are books that I would read,
but they had the added bonus of being pink.
This is Ali Wong's "Dear Girls"
and it happened to be this beautiful baby pink,
and so I saw that and I was like, "I have to get this."
- Oh that's interesting.
So it helps to almost randomize your reading
and exposes you to stuff you wouldn't otherwise read.
- A little bit, yeah.
This is one of my favorite recent non-fiction reads.
It's called "Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths
"of History's Greatest Buildings",
and it's by James Crawford.
It covers everything from the Tower of Babel
all the way up to the Twin Towers actually.
- Do you take notes in books when you read them?
- I don't.
I sometimes will take notes on my phone.
I just, I don't like marking in my books.
I'm usually very careful with the way that I open them
and I'm just kind of, I'm that person, you know?
- If a friend borrows a book and breaks the spine
or spills something on it, will you re-buy that book?
- Oh I will totally re-buy that book,
and then maybe hold just the tiniest grudge.
- You have the most impressive thing I've seen on a book.
You have a new book, "Sky Hunter".
- [Marie] Yeah.
- Did this!
- This was my editor's idea.
She was my acquiring editor for my first book, "Legend",
and she, for that book, had also come up
with a really cool visual.
"Legend" has two points of view in the book
and it goes back and forth between those points of view
and she said, "Wouldn't it be cool
"if one of the points of view
"was printed in a different color?"
So in "Legend", Day, one of the narrators,
all of his chapters are printed in gold.
- I could be totally wrong,
but I think when Faulkner gave his editor
"The Sound and The Fury", he wanted four different colors
for each of the characters.
- I didn't know that.
- And they told him it was just too expensive
and they wouldn't do it, but they did it for you.
- I got something that William Faulkner
wanted and couldn't get.
- [Joel] You picked three books that have influenced you.
- Yeah.
This one is "Mattimeo".
This is one of the books in Brian Jacques' "Redwall" series,
a fantasy series about a place called Redwall Abbey
where there was a bunch of mice and squirrels and moles
that are protecting this place
from roving bands of pirate cats.
It's the first fantasy story that I ever read in my life.
I credit this book
with getting me into fantasy and science fiction,
and then ultimately writing science fiction fantasies.
I read this book when I was 11.
One day I was walking by my school library
and I saw this book on display,
and it had this image of a mouse warrior holding a sword,
wearing this robe, and it just looked
like a super epic cover.
I walked by a bunch of times, and then finally I stopped
and I was like, "I'm just gonna have to check this out
"because I can't stop staring at this cover."
- This is like a love story.
- It's exactly that.
I didn't know that you could write a story like this.
It blew my young mind.
- Go back to where you were when you were 11.
How long had you been in Houston?
How was your English?
You grew up in China.
- Yeah, I was born in 1984, living in Beijing
for the early years of my life.
My parents were, they were working,
and so I was being shuttled around,
and so I was living for a while with my aunt.
We had a public outhouse
and we didn't have a running private bathroom
or a running shower or anything like that,
but I have fun memories of growing up there.
- You lived right near Tiananmen Square, right?
- Yes, a few minutes away from where we lived,
and we left a few months after Tiananmen Square happened.
The first half of that year,
there were hundreds of thousands
of protestors in the square,
students protesting for democracy,
and I remember the day of the actual shootings,
I remember seeing the tanks out in the streets
and they were blocking the entrances and exits
of the square, just kinda waiting for orders on what to do,
and my aunt had said to me that day,
"We should go home early today.
"I don't think this is a good day to be out in the square."
And the next day, I remember kindergarten being canceled.
I had no idea it was a historical moment.
- What's the second book you picked?
- This is the one that I shouldn't have read
at the age that I was.
I think I read this when I was 15.
This is called "Kushiel's Dart"
and it's by Jacqueline Carey.
- Okay, this is not okay.
I read about this book.
- [Marie] Did you really?
- Did your parents know you were reading this?
- No.
- How'd you hear about this book?
- I basically lived at the library when I was a kid
and eventually, I was like,
"I'm gonna go check out
"the adult science fiction and fantasy section
"and see what I can find there."
This was one of the first ones that I picked off the shelf
because the paperback version
had a really cool cover, again.
I'm very drawn to covers.
It's a very sexy book, but it's also very political.
It's about this young girl who grows up in a fantasy world
that is kind of dominated by a series of courtesan houses
and she is a courtesan and grows up to become
one of the greatest courtesans of her time,
and in doing that,
becomes embroiled in a lot of the politics
that are happening in this kingdom.
She was the first female science fiction and fantasy writer
that I had ever read, and this is also one of those books
where you get a completely different experience
if you read it in your late 20s.
And I went back and I read it again later on and I was like,
"I would never let my 15 year old read this."
- When I was about that age, my mom's a therapist
and she had a book by Nancy Friday
called "My Secret Garden", which was a collection
of women about their fantasies,
and I used to take that book at night, read it,
and then put it back before, as if she'd check
the books in her bookshelf before she woke up.
It gave me excited but guilty feelings.
Did you have any of those feelings when you read this book?
- Oh, totally.
I didn't know really what I was reading,
but I also knew that I didn't want my parents
to know what I was reading.
- What'd you learn from her as a writer?
- I learned about how to write women,
and that's weird to say because I'm a woman,
but all of the fantasy novels that I had read at that point
were written from a male perspective
and that was how I knew to write fantasy.
And so, when I was a teenager,
I wrote my earliest drafts of fantasy stories
and they were about straight white boys
because I thought that's what you wrote
when you wrote fantasy.
This was a book that reminded me of who I am,
of what kind of stories I wanted to tell.
- How is it different to write from a female perspective
than from a male perspective?
- The main difference is that I feel
like I'm reading about a real woman.
I'm sure that if I went back to some of the earlier stories
that I read, a lot of the female characters,
while interesting, they feel like caricatures.
There are certain tropes in fantasy about women.
You know, they're the enchantress or the romantic interest,
and they're just not centered, the story is not about them.
So the third book is called
"The Fifth Season" by NK Jemisin,
and this is the first book in her trilogy.
I read it some years ago and it just is, again,
is one of those books in the genre
that completely changed how I see world building.
So her story is set on a planet where this planet is dying.
There are earthquakes constantly
and there are people who have powers too who can control
when these things happen,
and you see how people have adapted to living
during the end of days.
It's also told from kinda a marginalized perspective.
The author is Black, the main characters are Black
and in the same way that Jacqueline Carey's stories
had changed how I saw what could be done in fantasy,
so did NK Jemisin's series.
Truly one of the best fantasy series I have ever read.
- And you did not read that as a kid,
you read that as an adult author.
- I read this as an adult.
I think that's why I'm talking about it differently.
- What if you'd read that at 14?
- I think I would have gotten
to where I needed to go quicker.
- I got you a gift.
You may have noticed that it's a book.
We've never met before, so I had to guess what book
I thought most, I get nervous just thinking about it,
what book most encapsulates you as a person.
- Aww, that's really sweet.
- And an author and a reader.
Well, I hope it's sweet.
Okay, so I'll explain to you what it is after you open it
and you maybe hopefully don't hang up on me.
- Ooh, I'm excited and I wanna see what this book is.
Ha!
It's like you knew, it's like you knew.
"1984".
- Well I did not get you that
because that's the year of your birth.
I bought you that because you remind me of George Orwell.
You seem so civilized, everything's perfectly organized,
you play piano, you wear that shirt.
- Thank you.
- He was born in a different country,
then he eventually moved too at a young age.
- Yes that's true.
- He was born in India and then moved to England,
and he writes this incredible,
he writes books about dystopia like you do,
in the hopes of living in a better world.
So I thought you guys had a lot in common.
Have you read this?
- Oh, of course, yes.
- All right.
- Definitely one of the first dystopian,
I think the first dystopian sci-fi I ever read
and haunted me, as it should.
This is an amazing choice, Joel.
Thank you!
- Is it already on that shelf?
- I don't have it here.
I have one in my office in downtown,
so this is perfect because I don't have a paperback version
of this book and I also don't have one on my shelf here.
So this is perfect, thank you.
- It's not perfect 'cause I'm realizing the spine is black
and it's too easy to get black books, right?
- I could put it like this,
and then you get to see the red right there.
- Thank you Marie Lu for doing Show Your Shelf.
We will never see a bookshelf this beautiful again.
- Thank you, you were wonderful.
This was really fun.
Thank you Joel.