I love to travel, write, and work in film and TV. My thoughts about how technology is changing people mixed with love for the Mojave Desert drives the story in my first novel, Edna in the Desert. Most of the desert has cell phone service but you can still lose it for stretches. Occasionally, there's a house in the middle of one of these expanses, and I always wondered what a teen living there would do without the usual modern distractions.
By Maddy Lederman
Can Edna survive a summer without her phone?
Edna is a trouble-maker at school. Her therapist advocates medication, but her parents come up with an alternative cure: Edna will spend the summer in the desert with her grandparents. Their remote cabin is cut off from cell phone signals and cable service. Edna can’t imagine a summer without WIFI. She’s determined to rebel, but she meets an older local boy and falls in love for the first time. How can she get to know him from the edge of nowhere?
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By Jon Krakauer
The unraveling of what people long for in the wild, and what they’re willing to endure to find it, is as compelling as going to the places on these pages. I was afraid of the sadness defining this book, but McCandless and seekers like him, including the writer, push us to contemplate a deeper relationship with nature and ways of being more fully alive.
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By J.D. Salinger
In this quintessential coming of age story, Holden realizes that the rules governing society may be more aspirational than he was led to believe, and that adults can be unreliable and phony. I read this book when I was around his age, I also found these truths hard. We're still young and uncertain if we can trust our ability to decipher it all. It’s a tough time.
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By Jane Austen
I love a comedy about a young woman who becomes a better person and realizes her boyfriend is the cute guy who’s always hanging around. Emma thinks she knows what everyone else needs to do, but (spoiler) she needs to figure herself out first. Her surprising inner shift makes this one of my favorite Jane Austen novels.
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By L.M. Montgomery
I admire Anne’s ability to entertain herself, her tendency towards joy, and her rambling imagination, but she has issues with impulse control and reading people. In this way, the character from my book, Edna, is like her. As with many older books, there’s outdated thinking about being female in this one, but contemporary girls are also working out gender roles and obsessing about their looks. It's another classic story about becoming a better person, and to a lesser degree, about the possibilities with a nearby boy.
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By Wendell White
The title appeals to me, and the list of books I love is overwhelming. I’m rounding out my recs with this out-of-print, self-help book published in 1939 that I came across it in a second-hand bookstore. You can open the guide to almost any page and find something simple and deep, or if not, old phraseology like, Preventing Unwholesome Behavior Due to Tedium, is amusing. Technology may be changing the way people meet and how we process information, but we have most of the same emotional needs as before.
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