Rooster Ten! The Tournament of Books is Back!

It's time! It's time! The Morning News's Tournament of Books Shortlist has been released!

Here it is:

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Hill William by Scott McClanahan

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid

Long Division by Kiese Laymon

The Dinner by Herman Koch

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Son by Philipp Meyer

The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto

Play-In Round:

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel

As all my loyal readers know, I've read six of these. (My non-loyal readers can figure it out by seeing that six of these have links to my reviews on this site.) (I don't have disloyal readers.) Of the six I've read, I'm delighted that each of them is in the tournament, as I very much liked them all, and found a lot 'discussable' about each. Hopefully the trend will continue as I delve into the other titles.

The first thing I did? Lots of chatter back and forth with my Goodreads group "The Rooster!", because oh, have we ever been awaiting this list. (The internet really does have every kind of community you could wish for, eh?) (Interested? - I will totally approve your request to join us.)

Second, I of course hit the search boxes on my library websites. Luckily, I was able to find most of the ones I hadn't read, so I will be powering through them in anticipation of the brackets coming out for this March-madness-style book tournament.

And third would be the reading. All the lovely, lovely reading. I'm so looking forward to it. Next up is Meyer's novel, which I've heard a million great things about. Could I possibly love it more than the Rowell or the Lahiri? Stay tuned, my friends. I'm sure to let you know.

A Tale for the Time Being

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
(Viking, 2013)
Format: paper via library

From Goodreads: " '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.'

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.

Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home."

Nao! Wonderful, complicated, smart, bullied, depressed, buoyant, philosophical, super Nao. She's a treasure of a character, and her tale is the definition of engrossing. I wanted to devour it in one setting, but Ruth wouldn't let me. (Ruth the character, not Ruth the novelist.) Ruth makes it all about her, possessive of Nao even with her husband. And possession gradually gives way to obsession, which is a whole delightful journey of its own, no matter how often I wanted to shake Ruth (the character) and force her to let me get back to the next installment of Nao's journal. (Okay, maybe in those cases it was Ruth the author I wanted to shake. But then she would grant me some wonderful moment with Ruth the character, and I had to restrain myself.)

This is the first of the 2013 Booker Shortlist books I've read, and based on this, I'm excited to get to the rest of the list.