Call Me Ish: A Tale of Kazuo Ishiguro and His New Book

I read Kazuo Ishiguro's most recent novel, The Buried Giant, a few months ago. I'm not a completist when it comes to Ishiguro, but I know enough to admire him greatly for being a different writer out of the gate, every time. I read When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go, and I've seen the film adaptation of The Remains of the Day, three radically different kinds of works. Thus, I was pretty excited to read his new book to see what he would do next.

The Buried Giant has a very different narrative style, which is fitting, considering that he's tackling the interrelated philosophies of memory and forgiveness, but placing them in an early medieval context.  His is a world peopled with Angles and Saxons and Britons (oh, my!), one generation after the death of King Arthur. With the exception of very few individuals who seem immune to it, there's a fog over the land that obscures memory.  When we meet Axl and Beatrice, our two older adventurers in this book, they have been struggling to remember their son. They have the feeling that something went terribly wrong, some time ago, without quite remembering what led to their estrangement, and they would like to travel to his village to see him one last time before they die.

On their journey, they encounter some amazing and mysterious and creepy things, including a village that is harboring more than one dark secret, a soldier-warrior on a quest, and the last of King Arthur's Knights of the Roundtable, who, doddering though he may be, is in dogged pursuit of the last task that his liege had set for him many decades ago.

There were many points during the reading where I was strongly reminded of both Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings (with hints of humor that occasionally pointed to Monty Python), but that quite possibly points at my own deficiencies as a reader, as much as anything. I read medieval literature in grad school, but I'm not  particularly well versed in contemporary fiction where dragons and quests cohabitate with knights and monsters, so there may be more appropriate comps out there.

More than anything else, though, this novel is working on many levels, both literal and allegorical.  I enjoyed Ishiguro's book, but I'm not sure that I understood it, precisely.  I tend to be a bit too literal a reader to grasp nuance on the fable level, and as I turned the last page, I wasn't quite sure what I had read.  But these months later, there are still images and passages and ideas in this book that haunt me. I feel that Ishiguro is a giant among his peers, and I'd vote for him as Most Likely To Be Read In 100 Years.

Here is what 300+ copies of the same book looks like

Which is why it was such a great pleasure to spend some time in his company this past weekend. My co-worker, Nancy, and I drove to Boston with a carload of more than 300 copies of The Buried Giant to get signed for our store's First Editions Club.  Mr Ishiguro was there with his wife, Lorna, and they were both so lovely.  Almost in one voice, as Nancy and I introduced ourselves, they exclaimed, "Call me [him] Ish." Biting back an urge to add "-mael, " I did as they requested.

Some readers like to be on a first name basis with writers.  Not me.  I think I prefer to be on a monosyllabic basis.

Here's Nancy passing books to Ish

Anyway, we spent our time passing books to Ish to sign, and packing them back up in their boxes, all the while chatting about his tour, the rise of the importance of social media, "power readers" vs casual readers, the Oscars, and whatever other tidbits of conversation came up. They were so gracious and charming that I was sad when Ish signed the last book so soon.

Here are a few photos of the signing and of the book itself, which vies for most beautiful trade book produced this season (Aquarium by David Vann, published by Grove Atlantic, is the other).

Nancy, Ish, and me

L-R: Me, Ish, Lynne (their media escort) and Lorna

The beautiful map endpapers are very Tolkienesque

Only the first printings have all of the edges black.

Beautiful 1/4 binding with marbled paper overlay

NB: This book was published by Knopf in the US a few weeks ago, and I read an advance reading copy that was provided upon my request by my wonderful sales rep.

Around the Bookstore: THE BATHROOM and other things

Because I'm not sure I have the stamina to write a second book review today, I'm instead going to write a post about my bookstore and some of the goings-on there.  Mostly I'm going to write about our staff bathroom, but before then, I want to share a photo I snapped in our essays section a couple of weeks ago:

This triumvirate of ladies with pink & white books caught my eye for various reasons, not least for the color scheme.  I also happen to have read all three collections of essays (well, with the case of Roxane Gay, I'm actually still making my way through), with varying degrees of appreciation.  But what I really love is how they look on the shelf together and how all three of these women have hit the indie bestseller list (concurrently, even).  I mean, it's unusual enough that female authors hit the bestseller lists for nonfiction, but for all three to be feminists, and for one book to even declare it proudly, makes me a little bit misty-eyed.  America is facing lots of problems right now, but the readers who put these books on the best seller list make me feel better about it.

And now for something completely different...

Many, many years ago, Anne Rice did a signing at my bookstore, the momentousness of which was marked with a small, shiny gold plaque on the wall:

And then that rascally writer Ben Fountain, author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, visited the store a few years ago and started something amazing when he wrote that Anne Peed Rice Here. We didn't know right away that he had done this, but we knew something was up when he walked out of the bathroom with a shit-eating grin on his face. (Pun absolutely intended.)

Since that first desecration of our staff bathroom wall, it has become a badge of honor for authors and illustrators to sign more than just their books when they're here on tour. It's unquestionably now one of the greatest bookstore bathrooms in the US.  My only concern is what's going to happen when we run out of space--I shudder at the thought of painting over all of our great signatures on the wall.  Maybe we'll hang shelf paper and just keep peeling it off...

Anyway, we've had both big names and small writ large on our bathroom stall.  Here are a few that I snapped photos of to share with you:

Multiple cookbook author Virginia Willis shows her skill with more
than one kind of cast iron skillet

Some, like Chrysler Szarlan, class it up with a bit
of poetry. This is from Tennyson and a reference
to our crack'd mirror on the bathroom wall.

Garrison Keillor told us that "[we] look good enough. Back to work"
You can see the crack'd mirror here, too.

The children's picture book authors really set the bar
pretty high when they started adding illustrations, too.

Emily St John Mandel wasn't daunted, though,
and she added her own sweet penguin to the mix. 

Who doesn't love a good nar-wall/narwhal pun?  And Gregory Maguire
didn't disappoint when he left a sketch of one of his Wicked witches.

Naturally Mo Willems added his own brand of humor by drawing on the
actual toilet. He forgot to write "DO let the pigeon flush the toilet," though.

Now the first thing I do every morning after an author event is head to the bathroom to see how quickly I can spy the latest additions.  

That's that for now.  I'm totally amazed at how much easier this post was to write than a book review.  I clearly need to take this way out more often, because now I have so much more time to curl with a book and READ!

Book Review: The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black

Let me say this first: Holly Black's new novel, The Darkest Part of the Forest, is the first YA fantasy that I've read in a few years that I loved.  (Quite possibly since she published The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, which I liked a lot, but didn't love quite as much as I love this book.)

Hazel Evans and her brother Ben have grown up in Fairfold, a town that is to the faerie world what Sunnydale, California, is to the vampire world. People occasionally disappear, and if they happen to be outsiders, well, then there doesn't need to be too much fuss.  The people of Fairfold know the rules and raise their children to know them, too. They've reach an uneasy détente with the Fair Folk.

In the woods just outside of town, there's a glass coffin with a boy inside -- a heartbreakingly beautiful boy with horns, locked in an enchanted sleep. It just so happens that Hazel and Ben are both in love with the boy, pouring out their secrets and desires to him as the years go by.  The others kids in Fairfold like to party 'round (and on top of) the coffin, but occasionally one of them goes too far, with unfortunate consequences.  The glass itself is unbreakable, or so they all think, since the glass coffin endures through generations of drunk kids doing their best to shatter it.

Then one day, the glass coffin lies in shards, the boy inside gone missing. That same morning, Hazel wakes up with bits of the forest covering her and her bedclothes, and she doesn't know how they got there.  Oh, and maaaaaybe there's a sword. And maaaaaybe she's been losing time and blacking out about certain things.  And did I mention that in her youth, Hazel made a rash bargain with the Faerie King and that for days she's been receiving mysteriously ominous messages regarding her promise?

In the mean time, strange things are beginning to happen in Fairfold.  The balance between the townspeople and the faerie world tips and the people need a scapegoat.  Perhaps they've found it in Jack, who is Ben's best friend and who also happens to be changeling.  Sorry, should have mentioned that bit earlier!

Here are some other bits that might be important to know: Ben has a magically-bestowed gift of music! And as a child, Hazel plays at being a brave knight while her brother sings, and together they drive off the dark spirits of the forest! But then Hazel kisses the boy her brother loves, or rather, maybe that boy kisses her (aside: Hazel kisses a lot of boys.  It's kind of her thing.). But from that day onward, Hazel and Ben's relationship changes.

Really, there is so much going on here.  Holly Black plays with standard tropes, standing many on their heads and letting a few run the expected course, which constantly kept me guessing.  Which ones would she keep intact? Which ones would turn off at a 90 degree angle? And which ones would she invert altogether? Holly's writing is good and solid, never taking the reader out of the story, and she hits just the right blend of plot, character and pacing, overlaying it all with a cloak whose warp is humor and whose woof is darkness, so you can never really separate one from the other.  It's a coming of age tale, it's love and romance, it's a high quest adventure, and at the end of the day, it's also a story of loyalty and family.  It's brilliant.

My bookstore was lucky enough to host the book launch for Holly earlier this week.  Some fellow booksellers from Brookline Booksmith made the trek to our store for the launch, and we went all-out for it, dressing up in costume, serving faerie wine (drink it if you dare!), and even creating our own glass coffin so that attendees could use it for selfie photo ops. We had a grand and glorious time!  Standing room only, and a room full of fans, friends, and other great authors.

Holly, signing stock in the back.  This is
where the magic happens!

Showing a fellow bookseller how to
create my custom spiral display

Beware the faerie wine, ladies!

Here I am in the glass coffin

My amazing coworker, Hannah, who planned the
event and co-created the coffin

Holly trapped in a device of her own making
(photo courtesy of Hannah Moushabeck)

You can see authors Sarah Rees Brennan
and Cassandra Clare in the audience here. Not
pictured, but in also attendance, were Kelly Link,
Gavin Grant, and Deborah Noyes

How many booksellers can you fit into
 a glass coffin with Holly Black?

NB: Little, Brown published this book in the US on Tuesday, 13 January, and I read an advance reading copy provided by the publisher at my request several months ago. This book qualifies for my "diversify your life" label because there is one main character who is gay and a secondary character who is bi-sexual, at least by human standards.  My guess is that the fair folk don't gauge sexuality the same way we do.

Bookish Things: Authors (David Mitchell) and Monsters (Minotaur) and Food (smoked chocolate cake), OH MY

Hannah is ready to host the MONSTER party!   

So it's been another busy week at the bookstore.  My coworker, Hannah, hosted some pretty kick-ass YA events, we had a Monster Party complete with a blood fountain, AND I got to spend some quality time with author David Mitchell.  NBD.  All in a day's work!

The blood fountain

My coworker, Chrysler (about whom, more anon when she does a guest blog post later this week), and I drove from western Massachusetts to Cambridge to meet David Mitchell and get some books signed.  And by "some," I mean more than thirty cartons of books, of which each carton weighed more than 25 pounds.  You see, his new novel, The Bone Clocks, is the September selection of our store's signed First Editions Club. Usually we prefer for the author to come to the store to sign books  (for obvious reasons), but if the mountain won't go to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain, and so we made the trek across the state to spend an hour or two in David Mitchell's company.*

David Mitchell, doing his hand thing in my book
with RH rep, Ron Koltnow, standing up in back

I'm delighted to report that David Mitchell is perfectly lovely and soft spoken and gracious and intelligent and I could probably go on, but I won't.  It's always gratifying when an author in whom we've invested so much time and energy turns out not to be asshole.  The only way the day could have been better is if the B&B where we were getting the books signed had a little modern convenience I like to call a handicapped ramp.  Because you know what?  There were stairs up (and later, down) which we had to schlep the 800+ pounds of books.  Extra rounds of thanks go to Ron, who did nearly all of the schlepping back down at the end.

L-R: Chrysler, woman from the B&B, David Mitchell, me

 After all of that schlepping, and in order to avoid getting stuck in the worst of rush hour, Chrysler and I grabbed a cocktail and a little food at a place called Alden and Harlow.  I love tapas bars, and we shared four small plates, plus dessert, between us.  The food was more or less good, but there was one standout dish: pistachio crusted halloumi, with roasted cherry tomatoes and warm bread.

The dessert was more interesting than delicious, at least for me: smoked chocolate bread pudding with salted vanilla ice cream.  I think somebody was a tad heavy-handed with the liquid smoke.  A little less of it, and it would have improved it tremendously.  Chrysler said it reminded her a little bit of eating a burnt S'more.

On the way home, we had a fun discussion about human impulses and the exploration of our Slytherin sides.  And books.  Always the books.

Here then, in parting, I share a photo of my David Mitchell books.  It's not at all excessive to have an advance reading copy of the US edition, paperback and hardcover copies of the UK edition, and regular AND slipcased copy of the US edition.  Anybody who says otherwise simply must be jealous.

This is the "hand thing" I was referring to
in that other photo, above

Not pictured: my regular and slipcased copies
 of the US edition. Still, not at all excessive.

My blog will be a bit quieter than usual in the upcoming weeks, as I have trips to make to Providence, RI, for a New England Independent Booksellers Association, and to Memphis, TN, for some important  trip planning, and I have author introductions to perform (Lauren Oliver tonight and Katy Simpson Smith in two nights' time), and ghost photo booths to plan, and book reviews to write, and, generally, miles to go before I sleep.  But my friend and coworker, Chrysler, will be stepping in to write a guest blog post soon and I will be back when I can.

Hope y'all are having a good weekend.  Let me know what bookish things you've been up to!

*This is not, I hasten to add, because Mr Mitchell thought that coming to South Hadley was beneath him. But with his busy international tour, his publisher couldn't work out a way to get him to us, and we decided that we couldn't do without his book.

Three Mini Reviews: Literary Fiction

Well, I had three lovely mini-reviews all written out to my satisfaction.  I had them saved and ready to post on Monday morning. And now they're all gone.  I am supremely unhappy with Blogger and Google. To say that I am feeling quite put out would be to engage in careless understatement.  But I will try to retrieve them from my memory, if not from my bloody computer, and re-create them for you.

The whole reason I was doing three mini-reviews is because of how little time I have left in March: I have to go to Boston on Sunday for the Boston Gift Show for work, I have to drive to Albany on Tuesday to talk about books on the radio with the good folks at WAMC, and then on Wednesday I leave for Nashville for four nights with my husband to visit Vanderbilt, Ann Patchett, Parnassus Books, and my husband's nephews, not necessarily in that order.

Boy Snow Bird by Helen Oyeyemi is one heckuva novel.  I started reading it back in January during Tika's minithon and became enthralled. Oyeyemi takes the Snow White fairy tale as a jumping off point for exploring a small 1950s town in Massachusetts. Boy, our narrator, has just escaped a terrible living situation in New York City and has gone off to seek her fortune on the train. Her narrative voice reminded me quite a bit of Katey Kontent's from Rules of Civility. In other words, she is self-assured, a little less worldly than she'd like her readers to think, bright, a little grating, a wee bit unreliable, and perhaps just the tiniest bit on the make.

Boy marries a man and becomes stepmother to Snow, a beautiful child. But when Boy has a daughter of her own, Bird is born with dark skin and it becomes clear to Boy that her husband and step daughter are Passing for White. This revelation unleashes the inner wicked step-mother in Boy, and the rest is mostly history. Oyeyemi stands things on their heads, the entire time stunning the reader with peerless prose. What is identity? What is beauty? What does it mean to be the fairest of them all?

I was so impressed with this book that it became my store's March selection for its signed First Editions Club.  But don't just take our word for it: read this review from the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review and see why other readers can see the rising international literary star that is Helen Oyeyemi.

I feel similar warmth towards Dinaw Mengestu's new novel, All Our Names, which I also first started reading at the same minithon as Boy, Snow Bird. Before I say anything about the novel, I first have to quote from The Millions: "A MacArthur genius, a 5 Under 35 awardee, and a 20 Under 40 recipient all walk into a bar and take a single seat because it's one person and his name is Dinaw Mengestu." Seriously, why aren't you reading him?  He is, without a doubt, the hottest ticket writing in the English language today.

Isaac (which may or may not be his real name), an immigrant from Ethiopia, by way of Uganda, and Helen, his social worker in a small unnamed college town in the American midwest of the early 1970s, are our two narrators.  They may or may not be in love; they are certainly a couple, but being in love implies a passion that neither one is really capable of showing, at least not there, at least not then. Isaac may or may not have been involved with the government overthrown in Uganda; Helen may or may not be deluding herself that life is satisfactory for her and that she and Isaac have a future together.  Very little is what it seems on the surface of this novel, and that's the brilliant subtlety of Mengestu's writing. He writes between the spoken and the unspoken. His characters live between present and the past. And their lives are haunted by the living and the dead.

I didn't pick up on this as I was reading the novel, but when Mengestu was at my store last week, he touched on the parallels between America and much of Africa during the early 1970s.  Both places had just undergone periods of major upheaval in the previous decade--the Civil Rights era of the US, the anti-colonial movement in much of Africa--and yet those years were also marked by hope and idealism. By the time the 1970s rolled around, the hope had given way to disillusionment in both places.

Mengestu's new novel is also a pick for my store's signed First Editions Club.  I couldn't have been prouder to welcome him to South Hadley.

I first requested a copy of Violet Kupersmith's short story collectionn, The Frangipani Hotel, when I heard that the author was a 2011 graduate of Mount Holyoke College. My interest stayed piqued, however, once I delved into the stories themselves. Kupersmith takes traditional ghost stories of Vietnam and re-creates them in a modern setting.The blend of supernatural lore and the country's history wouldn't be complete without the presence of that other, all-pervasive specter: the Vietnam war.

Most of the stories take place in Vietnam, either the countryside or in Ho Chi Minh city, and while the ghosts take many forms, they seem comfortable interacting with Vietnamese and visitors alike. The blend of creepiness and whimsy is balanced perfectly, and I love what publisher Cindy Spiegel writes in the note to the reader at the front of my advance reading copy: the spirits are "as ordinary as the neighbor next door, and yet they carry with them the weight of history in the Vietnamese immigrant experiences and are informed by a rich storytelling tradition."

I don't read much horror, and this isn't Horror with a Capital H anyway, but the more subtle, slowly-get-under-your-skin variety. If you've read the excellent story collection by Yoko Ogawa called Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, you'll have an idea of what to expect, but whereas those stories weren't really rooted in the specific culture of Japan, Kupersmith's are richly evocative of the atmosphere of Vietnam.

NB: I read all three of these books in advance reading copy form, which were provided upon my request from the publishers: Viking, Knopf, and Spiegel & Grau, respectively. The first two books are available now and the last one will be published on April 1, 2014. No foolin'. 

Funniest Book I've Read This Year: The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

Like most book bloggers and/or booksellers, I read quite a bit.  My tastes tend towards the literary fiction end of the spectrum, sprinkled with good books from a variety of other genres, but mostly, I enjoy a dark read as much as the next person; Cormac McCarthy's The Road was my idea of beach reading the year it was published.  However, I'm frequently asked by customers for recommendations on the lighter end of the scale, but sometimes the request is for light but not frivolous, or for funny without raunchy, and these questions stump me.

More precisely, I should say they used to stump me. Now, however,  I have The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion and it will pretty much be the answer to every adult looking for a novel this holiday season. I read it over vacation in June and roared with laughter. In public.  There may even have been a snort or two.  (There were.) Seriously, this is the funniest book I've read this year, and it's certainly the funniest book I've read in recent memory, including humorist writing like Tina Fey's Bossypants or Ellen DeGeneres's Seriously, I'm Kidding. I liked it so much that I read it again four months later in preparation for the author's appearance at my store. Now it hangs out in the kitchen and I read it over breakfast or while my husband is making dinner, dipping into it here and there, and you know what?  It's still funny.

Here's the 4-1-1: Don Tillman is a professor of genetics at an Australian university. He's brilliant, loyal, and longing for a life partner.  You see, Don Tillman gets a lot of first dates but he's never been on a second one due to a wide range of behavioral quirks. He's got Aspberger's, but you wouldn't say he suffers from it--more like he triumphs from it.  He creates a multi-page questionnaire to weed out unlikely candidates for a wife, sincere but misguided in the belief that scientific method will prevail when more traditional outlets for dating have failed him.

Enter Rosie, sent to Don by his colleague in the psych department, looking for help discovering her birth father. Don thinks his colleague has sent Rosie as part of The Wife Project and is dismayed by this  boisterous, loud, bold, drinking, smoking, and habitually late young woman, yet oddly drawn to her.  To top that off, she also wears jewelry and too much makeup, dyes her hair,  is mathematically incompetent and works in a bar--she is clearly unsuitable for Don, failing the questionnaire spectacularly.

A genetics-inspired helix display for the author

Graeme Simsion with me

You don't have to be a genius to know how the book will end, but you cannot possibly predict the uproarious and delightful scenarios--and the occasional poignant one-- you will pass through to get there. This book has stood the test of all sorts of readers I know, ranging from a couple of 20-somethings up to my nearly-octogenarian mother. Three coworkers, the boyfriend of one of them, my husband, and even a hospital patient who said it was worth the extra pain brought on by her laughter because this book took her mind off of where she was. Like me, she liked it enough that she picked it up again to read as soon as she finished.

There are moments where it flags a bit, but these are rare and fleeting in a generally streamlined and tight novel. And it's no surprise, considering that this novel started off as a screenplay.  This book is funny in a very smart way, and in my experience, that's difficult to do well.  For every When Harry Met Sally in existence, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of bad rom-coms.

I wish I could excerpt a few passages, but the scenes that are so funny are big, and need too much build-up, so it's not really worth doing. Here's one paragraph that might give an idea of Don's habit of being sincere-but-misguided: the one woman who ticked all the right boxes on the questionnaire has also demanded that her partner be a good dancer.  Fair enough, Don thinks (he really is quite fair). He's aware he's being particular and it's reasonable to expect her to be particular, too.  He doesn't know how to dance, but how hard can it be? He watches movies and YouTube videos, practicing with a skeleton in his office. Here's what happens when he and his partner hit the dance floor at a faculty ball on their first date:

"I took her in the standard jive hold that I had practiced on the skeleton and immediately felt the awkwardness, approaching revulsion, that I feel when forced into intimate contact with another human. I had mentally prepared for this, but not for a more serious problem. I had not practiced with music. I am sure I executed the steps accurately, but not at precisely the correct speed, and not at the same time as the beat...Bianca tried to lead, but I had no experience with a living partner, let alone one who was trying to be in control."

Just the phrase "standard jive hold"makes me want to giggle. If you know me in real life, and if we usually exchange Christmas presents, then be forewarned: do not buy yourself a copy of this book.  If you know me in real life and we don't normally exchange Christmas presents, well, you just might get one this year.  That's how much I love this book and want everybody I know to read it, too.  It will make you laugh in all the right ways.

If you don't want to take my word for it, take the word of the acquiring editors the world over who have bought the rights to The Rosie Project in their countries; the number was more than three dozen and counting the last I looked. And naturally since it began as a screen play it will end as one, too.  No word on casting, but I confided to the author that I think he'd do well to court Benedict Cumberbatch for the role of Don Tillman, who was in agreement. He's had a bit of experience playing the brilliant, gorgeous, socially awkward, probably-Aspbergian genius who maybe-just-maybe longs for love:

Bluest Hair in Coldtown: Book Launch and Review

Sorry for the delay in posting, but you know, sometimes Real Life interferes with Book Life. One week ago tonight, my coworkers and I hosted the launch party for Holly Black's latest novel, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, which is one of my favorite YA books for the season. When I'm really struck by a particular book and my store hosts an event for the author, I sometimes do wacky things like color my hair. For Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus from a couple of years ago, I went for a bright, fire engine red in honor of that book's reveurs. In honor of Tana, the heroine of Coldtown who has blue hair, and of Holly Black who also has blue hair, I decided to give myself blue hair for the day, too. I can't speak for Tana, but Holly's professionally-lightened-then-tinted hair looked considerably better than my spent-twenty-bucks-at-Sally's-for-temporary-blue, but it's the spirit that counts, right?

Holly with booksellers

I loved The Coldest Girl in Coldtown from page one, when I read it on the plane on my way to Anguilla for summer vacation a few months ago.  It's immediately engaging and well-written, and clearly this is not your daughter's vampire novel.  True, it's a young adult book, but Holly wrote this book in homage to the great vampire works she read growing up.  If you think vampire books begin and end with Twilight and thus haven't given them a fair shake, give this one a go.


Tana lives in a slightly futuristic world where a rogue vampire decided to break all of the ritualist rules of Vampire Secrecy by infecting hundreds and hundreds of people with the Cold, and they, in turn, infected thousands and thousands and so on. This created worldwide havoc, but at least in the US there are a handful of Coldtowns, where vampires and humans live side by side in an uneasy alliance: humans allow vamps to feed on them just a little via IV tubes rather than by biting (which spreads the Coldness), and therefore the vamps' food source doesn't dry up (literally) and the humans can keep on being human and not Cold.

One day, Tana wakes up from an all night party to discover she is the only partygoer left alive from a mass vampire attack. When she discovers Aidan, an exboyfriend infected with the Cold, and Gavriel, a mysterious but insane vampire, chained up in a bedroom, her split decision to try to rescue them both by driving to the nearest Coldtown (in Springfield, MA) changes all of their lives. You'll find no romanticized notion of vampires, no helpless heroine, and no love triangles here.  Instead, you'll get a moral-but-complicated-heroine who often doesn't know what the right thing to do is, plus a vampire who is unhinged, secretive, and seductive. It's hard to predict whether the denouement will bring revenge, romance, or revolution. In other words, this book is thoroughly fun and refreshing.

Holly, answering questions from the audience

We had a packed audience for Holly's reading, followed by a vigorous Q&A, where I was both disappointed and relieved to learn that Holly wrote Coldtown as a one-off.  I've been saying for the last three years that what I'd really like were fewer series and more substantive single novels being published with complicated and interesting heroines, hold the love triangles, please.  Holly delivered *precisely* that, but next time I'll include the caveat "unless I really like the heroine, in which case please write more."

Anna obligingly demonstrates the proper placement for candy fangs

Holly also brought candy fangs for the entire audience and passed them around in a basket. My bookstore gave away fang glitter tattoos to everybody who came, and the publisher provided us with Coldtown glowsticks to give away to the first 50 people who bought the book.  So all in all, it was a pretty kick-ass night.

In parting, here's a photo of me before the event--you cannot really tell, but there are actually three shades of blue happening in my hair.  And my eyebrows are slightly tinted, too.  That's bookseller dedication, peoples.  It took three showers to wash all of the residual blue out of my hair and nearly an entire bottle of conditioner to get my regular hair texture back to normal, but it's so worth it. And for any of you publishers out there who would like to subsidize a professional color coordination of my hair for your next big event, you know where to find me!

Book Revew: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

For my job, I receive books every day with an editor's letter tucked inside, exhorting the 101 reasons why I should read that particular book.  (Why, yes, I do love my job. Thanks for asking.)  But what I do not receive every day is a book with letters from ten different editors around the world, exhorting the 1,001 reasons why I should love this book, and that's the first thing that made me sit up and take notice about Ruth Ozeki's new novel, A Tale for the Time Being. The ARC that Viking sent out included notes from editors in the US, UK, Canada, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Australia, Greece, and the Netherlands. I had not read Ozeki before, but I thought, "A-ha, clearly this is a book to be reckoned with."

And I was right.  Mostly I just want to heap superlatives on this book, but I'll try to tell you a bit about what the book is about, though that will be tricky.  Like the quantum physics that infuse (infuses? Is the word "physics" singular or plural?) the story, it's a book that alters as one reads and observes. Because a summary would be too complicated, I'm going to borrow the publisher's own marketing blurb here:

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.

Nao has become one of my favorite narrators in literature.  She is very much in the vein of Midori from Haruki Murakami's novel, Norwegian Wood, which is to say she's bubbly, bright, and annoying-but-endearing. Her father is suicidal, and the cruelties she endures at the hands of her classmates (shockingly, with the tacit permission of her teacher) make every American YA novel about bullying look like a bonny good time. It's no wonder that she wants to follow in her father's footsteps and try to end it all.  Yet she has this wonderfully indomitable spirit and sense of humor that juxtaposes in a fascinating way with her avowed fate.

Jiko, Nao's great-grandmother, is also a terrific character. Though there are some secrets she has guarded all of her life, she serves mostly as Nao's sole source of stability and as such, she guides her in the way of  Zen Buddhism. Nothing Nao says or does can offend or surprise her, despite Nao's best efforts.

With the character of Ruth, Ozeki starts to break down fiction's fourth wall. Character Ruth splits her time between New York and an isolated island in the Pacific northwest, just like Author Ruth. Character Ruth is a practicing Buddhist novelist, just like Author Ruth. And the similarities go on.... Ruth (the character) is something of a Japanese scholar trying to defeat a bad case of writer's block, so her obsession with Nao's found diary becomes a way for her to sublimate her anxiety. Her husband is a quantum physics-quoting botanist, so there's that, too.

Top all of that off with the fact that Nao's diary excerpts as they appear in the book are amply footnoted for the benefit of a non-Japanese audience, and that the footnotes are attributed to Ruth--but is it Character Ruth or Author Ruth? It's hard to tell sometimes, and that's the whole point, I think.

I love the opening lines to Nao's first section. They put me a little bit in mind of the Emily Dickinson poem, "I'm Nobody!Who Are You":

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 sometime 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 (p. 4).

I also love this: "I don't mind thinking of the world without me because I'm unexceptional, but I hate the idea of the world without old Jiko. She's totally unique and special, like the last Galapagos tortoise or some other ancient animal hobbling around on the scorched earth, who is the only one left of its kind. But please don't get me going on the topic of species extinction because it's totally depressing and I'll have to commit suicide right this second" (25).

And this bit about Nao's time living with Jiko at the temple:

They bowed and thanked the toilet and offered a prayer to save all beings. That one is kind of hilarious and goes like this: As I go for a dump/I pray with all beings/that we can remove all filth and destroy/ the poisons of greed, anger, and foolishness.

At first I was like, No way am I saying that, but when you hang out with people who are always being supergrateful and appreciating things and saying thank you, in the end it kind of rubs off, and one day after I'd flushed, I turned to the toilet and said, "Thanks, toilet," and it felt pretty natural. I mean, it's the kind of things that's okay to do if you're in a temple on the side of a mountain, but you'd better not try it in your junior high school washroom, because if your classmates catch you bowing and thanking the toilet they'll try to drown you in it. I explained this to Jiko, and she agreed it wasn't such a good idea, but that it was okay just to feel grateful sometimes, even if you don't say anything (167).

That gives you a pretty good flavor for Nao's narrative sections, equal parts earnestness and impishness. There is so much that is extraordinary about this book, but I fear I'm not doing it justice.  I think I will close with the blurb that I wrote up for Publisher's Weekly Galley Talk, as sometimes it's easier to say more with fewer words:

Zen philosophy and quantum physics blend seamlessly in Ozeki’s brilliant new work of metafiction, where sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between the author’s attempts to build up and break down the fourth wall. Or as Jiko, the wise and wizened Buddhist nun from the book might say, “to raise or to raze, they are the same.” Jiko’s calm, hard-earned acceptance of contradictions contrasts brilliantly with the life of her great-granddaughter, Nao, a bullied schoolgirl with a suicidal father, adrift in a sea of emotions she is incapable of navigating. When Ruth, on the opposite side of the Pacific, discovers Nao’s diary among the post-tsunami flotsam and jetsam, she becomes obsessed with Jiko’s and Nao’s stories—to the point where she’s convinced that solving the diary’s puzzles will ease her restlessness and dissolve her writer’s block.  I’ve rarely encountered a novel that has made me think about our world quite as much as this one has, where distance and time are mutable depending on the observer, and what is a reader if not the ultimate observer? Ozeki’s novel feels, impossibly, both timeless and utterly of our time, but I suspect that might be the hand of Jiko guiding me. 

NB: I read an advance reading copy of this book, provided to me by my sales rep, which Viking publishes on March 13, 2013.