An Essay By V. E. Schwab

I’ll probably end up buried by books. They perch in stacks around my house, some piles neat, and others precarious, and all of them out of control. I swear they are multiplying, breeding to fill each and every bit of table and shelf and even a few of the chairs. I will never read them all, and that is a tragedy I find myself musing on daily, but it doesn’t stop me from buying them. My eyes have always been bigger than my time. 
 
I own so many because I’ve learned that it’s not only about finding the time to read, but about finding the right book to fill that time. What I find myself craving on a summer afternoon differs from what I want on a rainy morning. Some nights I crave memoir. Some mornings at the gym I want a thriller. Books are like clothes in that way, reflecting not only the seasons, but also our own personal taste, changing as it is, and I’ve found it’s better to have a closet full of options than a short stack of shirts into which I have to fit myself, regardless of my mood. 
 
Right now, to consult only the stack nearest my computer, I have comics, newly acquired from SDCC (Paper Girls, Redlands, Ice Cream Man), a handful of debuts (from Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing to Jenn Lyons’ The Ruin of Kings), a middle grade (Jessica Townsend’s Nevermoor), a mass market fantasy (Kevin Hearne’s A Plague of Giants), and dark YA fairy tale (Rena Rossner’s The Sisters of the Winter Wood), a short story and essay collection (Ashleigh Young’s Can You Tolerate This?), and Stephen King’s The Stand. 
 
As I said, I’ve always preferred a full and varied closet. 

Meet V. E. Schwab at Books Inc. in Berkeley on September 26