Book Blogger Hop: What Are You Reading Now?

This week's question at the Book Blogger Hop, sponsored each week by Crazy For Books, what book(s) are you currently reading and why?  

I'm in various stages of a few different books right now.  I'm about halfway through an ARC of The Borrower, by Rebecca Makkai, which I'm reading for fun.  It's the story of a librarian who rescues/liberates/kidnaps (depending on your point of view) a child whose parents are trying to pray the gayness right out of him and who only let him read books that have "the breath of God."  It's a fun book that my Penguin sales rep, Karl Krueger, sent to me a few weeks ago that I'm just now getting around to.  This book will be published in June.  

And as I mentioned in a previous post this week, I'm still working on the ARC of The Tiger's Wife, which I'm mostly reading for work.  Our store is interested in booking her for an author reading once her book debuts in March. 

I also just started reading the new/forthcoming memoir from Andre Dubus III called Townie.  I wasn't such a big fan of The Garden of Last Days, but I think his book The House of Sand and Fog comes about as close to Greek tragedy as modern literature can get.  His new book proves him to be a wordsmith of the highest order, and just in the first chapter he's left me suckerpunched.  The book doesn't come out for another month, so I'm reading the ARC from David Goldberg, my Norton sales rep.  Dubus will be reading at my store next month, and I have to say, if you've never had the pleasure of hearing him speak, do yourself a favor and attend one of his readings while he's on tour.  He's handsome and engaging, yes, but he is also so erudite that he peppers his talks with so many literary quotations that he's a walking-talking Bartlett's.  And what's more, he's got that intense charisma so that when he's signing your book and speaking just to you, he absolutely makes you believe that in all the universe there's nothing he would rather be doing at that moment.  

Teaser Tuesdays: The Tiger's Wife

This is the first time that I've participated in the Teaser Tuesday meme, sponsored by Should Be Reading each week.  Usually by the time I get home from work on Tuesdays, eat dinner, clean up, head upstairs and get on my laptop, it's too late to think about blogging.  But today's blizzard is a mixed blessing; work closed early, and now I'm home early enough (and with enough energy!) to participate.

Today's tease comes from a forthcoming book from Random House called The Tiger's Wife by debut novelist Tea Obreht, whom I got to meet recently at Winter Institute.  The book releases in early March and is getting lots of buzz, mostly because young Tea was recently named to The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list.  From the opening paragraph on p. 7:

"The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death. That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river.  The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past...and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. " 

NB: Usually when I do a Google Image search for a dust jacket image, it's the first thing that pops up in a search.  Not this time.  First several pages' worth were images of Tiger Woods's ex-wife. I guess it's a sad fact of life that so many more people care about her than about this wondrous new literary novel!