Credit...Rebecca Clarke

By the Book

Leigh Bardugo Is Wary of Imposing Limits on Young Readers

“I think they actually have a pretty good barometer of what they can handle,” says the fantasy novelist, whose new book is “Hell Bent,” “and will happily set a book aside when it starts to go places they don’t want to go.”

“The Cheese and the Worms,” by Carlo Ginzburg. It’s historically adjacent to the new book I’m writing so it’s both a good read and a research read. “Bestiary: Poems,” by Donika Kelly — I always read poetry when I’m working on something new, makes for a more interesting language diet. “The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living With Less,” by Christine Platt. Now, let me be clear: I recently acquired a vintage taxidermy rabbit with its own scrying ball. Christine’s good sense will never get me to part with my nonsense. But she has helped me rethink my relationship to beautiful objects and the way I buy clothes.

I’m lucky enough to be reading Kelly Link’s first novel, “The Book of Love,” before it goes to print. I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t know if I’m allowed to describe it. The best I can offer is that it’s like an eldritch “Our Town.” It’s spectacularly weird and heartbreaking and funny, and it contains some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever encountered.

I’m not going to litigate what “great” means here. I think I’ll just opt for memorable. I think a book can be badly written but still very readable, maybe even very powerful for a lot of readers. But I’m not sure it will be memorable, not in the long term. Unless it’s exceptionally badly written.

I read a quote by C.S. Lewis the other day on cliché, and he essentially says that it operates as shorthand for readers who may otherwise feel alienated by more inventive or unorthodox or, yes, demanding prose. Some people just want to read a book that speaks to emotion in a way they understand and that they can consume with equal emotional fervor. I also think there’s a radical difference between workmanlike prose and bad prose. Bad prose is hard to parse. And truly bad prose crosses over from cliché or generic into a kind of lazy larceny. It isn’t just familiar or pat — it’s stale. Like someone didn’t even bother to lift the good stuff. They stole the day-old bread. So a twisty plot or a delicious trope can overcome cliché writing, but maybe not properly bad writing.

All that said, I try hard not to sneer at anyone’s taste. I picked up a book recently and it was conversational to the point that it didn’t even seem like a book to me. It was as if the author had dictated it on a long walk and then transcribed it. But people love that book! Maybe they love feeling like a friend is just telling them a long story over the phone.

The problem arises when someone takes the popularity of a thing and uses it as some kind of cudgel to beat us all with. Suddenly everyone starts writing hot takes and screaming about the death of culture. I think I’m particularly sensitive to this because I write adult fantasy (escapist drivel!) and young adult (the infantilizing of the American mind!). It’s a bizarre way of looking at books in particular. People seem to understand that there is art people buy at Ikea and art that hangs in museums and plenty in between, but when it comes to books, it’s: “Clutch your pearls and batten the hatches, Candace. The Philistines have taken over.”

I’m going to reframe these questions. Because of course you won’t understand a book the same way as a child as you do when you’re an adult, but that’s such an important dissonance to experience. I read Forster in my early teens because I’d fallen in love with the film adaptation of “A Room With a View,” and I was so ungenerous with his writing. I didn’t get him at all until I’d read more widely and lived more — well, more. But I still remember those first attempts and knowing that, even if I couldn’t find my way into those books, I was brushing up against a different kind of style and experience. And then there’s a book like “Howl’s Moving Castle” that I call the shape-shifter book because its meaning and emotional impact change so much depending on your age when you read it. Maybe that’s the book everyone should read before they’re 21 and then reread after 40.

Absolutely nothing. OK, that’s not quite fair. I want to say “nothing” because I have never met someone who reads only from one shelf. I don’t think young people read that way and I am always wary of what people may deem “too much” for younger readers because I think they actually have a pretty good barometer of what they can handle and will happily set a book aside when it starts to go places they don’t want to go. That said, “young adult” is a marketing category. It sets a certain expectation in terms of the pace of the plot and how graphic a work might be, in terms of both sex and violence. But I think you could argue that “Dune” is young adult (chosen one with a messiah complex meets the very prettiest girl on his path to a grand destiny, etc.). And I certainly think there are Y.A. books — Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “The Summer Prince,” for example — that would be right at home on adult shelves. I suppose when I’m writing adult, I feel a little freer to take my time with the world and the lore, and to dig more deeply into the grotesque. I also swear more.

That in Renaissance Spain, women of the upper classes weren’t allowed to leave their homes without male chaperones. There were cases of women leaning so far out of their windows to get a glimpse of the world they toppled to their deaths. It makes me feel guilty for not leaving the house more.

I think it might just be the pleasure of the unexpected. The more we build narratives, the better we get at guessing at the moves they’ll make, so I’m always thrilled when I don’t see a twist coming. And that twist is not necessarily an unexpected turn in the plot. It can be surprising language or an unanticipated choice by a character. I remember reading Rachel Cusk’s “The Country Life” on a plane and shouting “ha!” when I got to a particular line. It was so funny and vulgar and unexpected that it literally startled sound out of me. “Interior Chinatown” was like constantly being buffeted by emotional shifts, all the shame and sadness and longing of the relationships we have with our parents, the way we push against and embrace our own cultures, and then oh, I’m laughing at this absurd and maybe impossible fight scene. Sometimes it can just be a set of words. Kelly Link describes something as “keyhole black,” and I felt the most wonderful little jolt when I read that. So I guess that’s what moves me. Fresh, deliberate language.

When I was a little girl, “Bunnicula,” by James and Deborah Howe. I wrote to him and he wrote back on this very thin onionskin paper. It was like a letter from some enchanted land. “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” and “Dune” were both massive for me, and they both live comfortably between science fiction and fantasy. I think any time you can remember where you were when you read a book for the first time (“Dune” — tiny motel room on a miserable family trip, “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” on the white shag carpet in my grandparents’ back room) that means something. Louise Erdrich’s short story “Fleur” was my first exposure to magical realism and it completely changed the way I understood fiction. It was also the first time I encountered a story about sexual assault that didn’t feel like a weepy after-school special or a cautionary tale. So I guess it changed the way I saw myself too. There was a grubby paperback copy of “Night Shift,” by Stephen King, that passed through every pair of hands in my fifth-grade class. It had that red movie-tie-in cover from “Children of the Corn.” I’d never read horror. I didn’t understand what it could do, that it could stick in your head and keep you up night after night. The power of that never faded.

When I’m asked about fantasy worlds, I always encourage new writers to pay attention to world-building in books that have nothing to do with magic. Every book is fantasy of one kind or another. A political thriller set in D.C. A murder mystery set in Savannah. What do these have to do with the lives we know and live? But for us to enjoy these stories and immerse ourselves in them, we need a clear sense of power and a clear sense of place. Magic is just another kind of power — no different from political or economic or social influence. If the book is written well, we see the way all of those kinds of power impact the setting and the characters, and how the characters impact their world and the flow of power in turn. I will say that one thing I’m always very conscious of in fantasy is what I call “the sure and steady hand.” I have to feel that the author is thoroughly familiar with this world I’m just getting to know, that nothing is being invented for the sake of convenience or expediency. If I feel that confidence in the author, I’ll follow a book just about anywhere.

I’d like to compile a collection of the worst writing advice and the silliest takes on publishing I’ve ever encountered. We’d start with “you must write 1,500 words per day every day” (no, you mustn’t) and end with “you have to be on social media” (no, you don’t).

I don’t know if people would be surprised, but I like to read comics and graphic novels when I’m on deadline. I love a cozy mystery. My all-time favorite is “The Thirteen Problems,” a collection of Miss Marple short stories by Agatha Christie. And I barely cook but I love cookbooks. It’s very soothing to flip through them and imagine a life of flour-strewn woodblocks and bubbling stews that I don’t have to clean up.

I used to love reading romance, but I can’t seem to enjoy it anymore and that feels like a huge loss to me. I’ll still revisit Sherry Thomas’s books though. No one writes pining the way she does. I read a lot more science fiction when I was younger and I would stick with a book or a series no matter how frustrating or repetitive it got. Now I’ll give a book until the midpoint; that’s the last opportunity an author has to give me a reason to stay before I give up.

I’d say Joan Didion but I’m not sure how good a time we’d have. Stephen King so I can thank him for blurbing “Ninth House” with a nice crostata. No, I’ve changed my mind. You left this beautiful loophole open, so I’m going to invite my grandfather. He wasn’t an author, but he certainly wrote things in his life, and if you want to quibble, well, you should have thought of that before you gave me necromantic powers. He loved Hemingway and Steinbeck, so they can come too, because what a hoot to make it back from the dead and find yourself surrounded by your hard-drinking literary heroes. I’m sure it would be a disaster, and they’d all get wasted, and spill booze on my carpet, and steal a boat, and try to sail it to Catalina before they were called back to the other side, but I’d get to see Mel Seder again, and that would be well worth it.

A correction was made on 
Jan. 8, 2023

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misattributed the quote “keyhole black.” It comes from the fiction writer Kelly Link, not from the poet Donika Kelly.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 7 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Leigh Bardugo. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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