thank god. Now we don't have to be bombarded with this stuff any more:

just came in via email:

breaking news from the New York Times :

"Amazon and Hachette announced Thursday morning that they have resolved their differences and signed a new multiyear contract, bringing to an official end one of the most bitter publishing conflicts in recent years."

Seriously - there are so many other huge problems in the world, I haven't even paid attention to this one. But at least everyone can move on now and I don't have to keep reading the anti-Amazon columns in Shelf Awareness any more.  

A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki

9780670026630
Viking, 2013
418 pp


I'll admit that I was not even considering  reading A Tale for the Time Being when it first came out, but it got my notice when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year. I remember thinking "a hello kitty lunchbox" smacks of YA and that I just do not do.  That year I'd also decided to quit trying to kill myself reading longlists and shortlists, but I bought the longlisted books anyway thinking I'd get to them someday.  There it sat on my shelf until I got together with a group of three other women to read it and then I was angry at myself that I'd let it go so long. The three other women weren't so crazy about it, but then again, two of them had left it for the day before we were supposed to talk about it before finishing it, so well, you know. Unlike them, I found this book to be very different from the norm, I was intrigued by the metaphysical aspects of the book and the magical realism, and I got very caught up in how past, present and future all come together here.

Ruth Ozeki goes meta here, as the story begins with a novelist named Ruth who lives on an island off the coast of British Columbia. She has been trying to write a memoir about her mother and is suffering from writer's block. Out walking one day, something catches her eye underneath a "massive tangle of bull kelp" which turns out to be a Hello Kitty lunchbox.  She brings it home, prepared to throw it out, but her husband Oliver  discovers that it's definitely not trash. They pull out a stack of Japanese letters, an old watch and a  book, which turns out to be Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, or In Search of Lost Time, a title that takes on more significance as the story progresses.  Opening the book, they find that it's not Proust at all, but rather the diary of a teenager named Nao.  Ruth believes it may have been a part of the debris from the 2011 tsunami, and becomes intrigued.  She decides to read the book the way it was written -- meaning that rather than sit down and read it cover to cover, she'll read each of Nao's entries separately each day.  The first thing she reads is Nao's introduction:

"Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you. 

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be. As for me, right now I am sitting in a French maid cafe in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to a sad chanson that is playing somewhere in your past, which is also my present, writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future. And if you're reading this, then maybe by now you're wondering about me, too."

As Ruth reads, she learns that this diary is not one that's "filled with pink fantasies and nasty fetishes," but rather Nao's purpose is to relate the "fascinating life story" of her great-grandmother, her Jiko, who is 104, a Buddhist nun, Taisho-era novelist, anarchist and feminist. As Ruth has been having problems writing the memoir of her mother, the life-story aspect strikes a chord, but when she learns that Nao has decided to end her own life, to "drop out of time...Exit my existence,"  Ruth slowly begins to become obsessed with knowing what may have happened to this girl.  As it turns out, she learns  much more in the process of reading the diary.

The novel plays out across space and time, going back and forth between past and present, connecting all of the items found in Nao's lunchbox and becoming a sort of dialogue between Nao and Ruth. There are a number of striking parallels in this novel, which I can't really discuss without giving away much of the show, and there are a number of ideas that pass through the pages -- environmental concerns, ethical dilemmas, the possibilities of different outcomes stemming from one choice or one act, the connections between our pasts, presents and futures, the pain, evil and suffering that exists in the world, and the idea that we need to live for the now.   But it's also a book about writing, reading,  -- and maybe most importantly along these lines, it's about a writer's hopes in finding just the right reader.

I'm the first to admit that I'm not very talented in the writing area, so it is really difficult for me to express how very much caught up in this book I became. I'm no literary expert, so I have trouble waxing on about all of things literary experts wax on about. I'm just a reader person, honest with no pretensions at all,  and I don't read to dissect, but rather to learn, to appreciate, and to find something that actually speaks to me.  Reading this book  wasn't simply about wanting to know what happened to Nao and to everyone else involved in this novel even though I did;  it wasn't that there is so much here philosophically that I think I could read it three or four more times and still come up with something new each time, even though there is.   There was just something about the examination of parallel lives across time and space and the connections between them that in Ozeki's very gifted hands, closed down the real world for me and took me into the world(s) that existed in this novel. That may sound stupid, but it's the only way I can really articulate how intensely I lost myself in these pages. If I were a writer, my guess is that I would appreciate that someone lost him or herself in a world I'd created; as a fiction reader, I can only say that it's my highest compliment to a writer.  I loved this book. Bottom line.

part two in this year's "best of books" lists -- Amazon.com

Just over an hour ago, CBS news published Amazon.com's list of top 10 books of 2014.  There is always an ongoing "best books of the year so far" kind of thing at Amazon, but according to the news article, the editorial team at Amazon chose the top 100 out of 480, and decided that these books were top-ten worthy. Here's the list:

Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeanette, by Hampton Sides*

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League, by Jeff Hobbs

Redeployment, by Phil Klay

Revival, by Stephen King

Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, by Carl Hoffman

The Book of Unknown Americans, by Cristina Henríquez

Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

There's only one book that repeats from the Hudson Booksellers' list, and that is All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. 

I would love to join the editorial team at Amazon -- getting paid to read? What a great concept! Can I telecommute? 

stay tuned...I'm sure there will be many more "best of 2014" lists to come.

*Take that, Amy Poehler!   Hampton Sides' book is absolutely stunning and deserves a spot on every "best of"  list that comes out this year. 

This Dark Road to Mercy, by Wiley Cash

9780062088260
Wm Morrow, 2014
242 pp

paperback

my copy from the publisher, thanks!

The premise of this novel  is a really good one. Two little girls, Easter, twelve and Ruby, six, are taken into foster care at a place described as a facility for youth at risk when their mother dies. Their dad, ex-minor league baseball player Wade, is long out of the picture, having earlier signed away his parental rights. Now he's back again and he wants his children back. He tries to do things above board, but of course, that doesn't work, so he feels his only recourse is to take them.  But he's got a huge problem: while he's on the run with the girls, trying to keep them together as a family and to be a dad,  someone with a financial motive who also wants revenge is hot on Wade's trail, and so is the girls' guardian-ad-litem, an ex-cop whose past continues to haunt him. Yet, even with such a good premise behind this story, there was so much potential for depth here that just wasn't brought out in the telling.

My main issue with this novel is that  I think the author did his readers a disservice by shifting points of view among three different characters. The most poignant voice of the three is Easter, coming across realistically as a twelve year-old girl trying to make sense out of a world that's been upended for her and her little sister more than once. It is really her story -- left without a mom, she's now in the hands of a dad she really doesn't know, and on top of that, she's got her little sister to think of.  Through her voice it becomes obvious that Wade has no clue about how to raise children -- that he wants them because they're his and in his mind, family should be together.  The author's really done a good job with her -- so why move from viewpoint to viewpoint? The story would have been much more powerful, and the theme of the "emotional pull of family" as described on the back cover would have come across so much more powerfully if we saw this story through Easter's eyes.  Brady, the guardian-ad-litem, has his own past issues, and despite his breakup with his wife who got custody of their daughter, he's a good, attentive dad with a kid who has had a happy childhood. The third perspective, that of Pruitt who's after Wade for a combination of personal and monetary reasons, just takes the reader through a long and violent journey that keeps Wade and the girls on the run.  I get that the reader needs the backstory, but still ... I was so taken with Easter that I couldn't wait to get back to her chapters.

I went into this book without any expectations, but in my opinion, there's a lot missing here. As just one example, the reader is introduced to the girls' mom Corinne pretty much just as she's dying from an apparent drug overdose.  We learn later that she met Wade in Alaska, they fell for each other, and ended up in Gastonia, North Carolina, where Wade played minor-league baseball. There's no mention of how she got to such a low point that Easter is reluctant to even call 911:

"I knew how people would think of us when they came inside in a few hours to get Mom and take us away to wherever we'd be going. they'd see that we didn't have any furniture except for a plastic deck chair and two folding chairs that you might take to the beach. And they'd see that me and Ruby didn't have beds but just slept on mattresses on the floor that had mismatched sheets on them. They'd know that I' called them from the corner store because we didn't have a phone, and they'd see that even if we'd had food we didn't have no clean plates to eat from."

Basically, we have no idea what's happened -- and it might have made a difference in whether or not I would have  rooted  for Wade to succeed. Was she a bad mom? Would the girls have been better off with their father?  We don't know.  For that matter, we know very little about Wade,  except that he grew up in North Charleston, played baseball for a while, then got involved in some shady doings.  We know that he's back for another chance at being a dad. That's pretty much it.

Finally, although Wade ultimately steps up to the plate (pardon the pun) and shows how much he cares for his girls, there just isn't enough emotional tug that develops from him  to have made me cheer or clap or say "hey, way to go - now there's a great dad."  Frankly, I had zero sympathy for him at all -- I wasn't, to use the stock phrase, all that much invested in his character.

However, let me say that while this book just wasn't a good fit for this reader, it's getting screaming good reviews everywhere -- people are loving it. There I go swimming upstream again --  I just wanted more depth where I felt there wasn't very much.  I will say, however, that his A Land More Kind Than Home looks really intriguing, so I am definitely planning on picking up a copy.

**********

I read this book for the lovely people at tlc book tours, and I seem to be the last stop on this tour. However, if you want to check out what other people said about this book, you can click here. 

the first read of the month: Charles Palliser's Rustication

A very nice take on those old Sensation novels, Rustication is written by Charles Palliser, author of The Quincunx,  my launching point into the world of  Victorian sensation writers such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.  Just FYI, the term "sensation novel" refers to works of that period that deal in a very large way with family scandals, crimes, sex and all sorts of lurid things not spoken of in polite society. Palliser has in  many ways has recreated the same sort of atmospheric creepiness here in Rustication with the isolated, gloomy house filled with secrets, a few characters who are more or less prone to delusions, the undercurrent of sexual and other tensions that run through day-to-day village life, the portrayal of women jockeying for position among their own and the higher classes, and poisoned pen letters that would make a Victorian maiden blush in deep scarlet.  It may not be great literature, but it's fun and quite satisfying.   

... and so they begin - the "best of" book lists of 2014 -- Part One: Hudson Booksellers

Amazing how these "best of"  lists start in November, you know, right in time to buy that someone special something on the list before the holidays.  What -- no books are being released in November?? 

In my morning-coffee internet session today, Shelf Awareness supplied me with Hudson Booksellers' best of 2014 list, "selected through a nominated shortlist and voting process by a panel of Hudson's booksellers across the country. Books were selected for "achievements ranging from literary style and innovation, entertainment value and readability, to timeliness and treatment of subjects and themes." 

I'm sure there will be plenty more, but let's just call this part one of an ongoing exploration into what various  people think were the best books of 2014. In this case (Hudson),  I'm not including a couple of categories, Best Young Readers and Best Business Interests.

Hudson's best book of the year? All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Here's the list, direct from today's edition of Shelf Awareness Pro.  

Best Fiction:

Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness

Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

The Martian by Andy Weir

Best Nonfiction:

The Human Age by Diane Ackerman

New Life, No Instructions by Gail Caldwell

Empires Crossroads by Carrie Gibson

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs

Internal Medicine by Terrence Holt

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart

Deep Down Dark by Héctor Tobar

Hmmm. All I will say here is this: Amy Poehler? Seriously? 

November: mood reading

http://www.bombardierslounge.com/

The plan this month is to read whatever I'm in the mood for at the moment. Obscure, popular, contemporary, whatever ... this month I'm letting mood dictate my choices.  

This should be fun.