Books Books Books!

Being the avid Pinterester that I am, I have a large book album full of books I've loved, books I have yet to love, beautiful libraries and any book related things. I came across a small book challenge: 12 Books, 12 Months, 2012. I didn't come across this though until around November 2012, so I decided to start for 2013. This was the perfect book challenge for me. If you read my blog you know, I work in a book store, and have for 5 years now, during this time, I've met and made several friends who are huge book lovers as well. I generally try not to compare myself to other people, but I see my friends zip through book after book like it's their job - sometimes it literally is - while it took me 6 months to finish A Clockwork Orange, which is just slightly over 100 pages. In my defence, that book is written in a language of it's own and I found myself re-reading pages over and over to fully understand them. I would then give up and put the book down for 2 months and read something else. I'm generally not the type of person to set challenges for myself, as I lack motivation for small mundane things, but this challenge, I thought, was going to be something I would do, and I've been meaning to write about it for a while now.

So here goes, my first book was:
#1 Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay
I never officially wrote a review for this one having read it before I started my blog, so I will give you a mini-review now. I LOVED this book. If you do read my blog, you know I have a strong fascination for anything regarding WWII, more specifically, the Holocaust. I've read The Diary of Anne Frank, and Night by Elie Wiesel, both great books. Anne Frank's diary focuses more on hiding from the Nazi's during Amsterdam's German Occupation, it doesn't talk about the holocaust, because they were not very aware of what was happening. The book does contain a prologue as to what happened to the family after they were captured. Night however, is only about the holocaust. It is a first hand account from victim and survivor Elie Wiesel. He and his family were taken to Auschwitz, he then had to participate in the death march to Buchenwald. Sarah's Key was right on track to what I like to read. After reading it, I honestly can not believe it took me so long to do so, I had heard about it for some time, and came across a great condition copy at Value Village one day and did not even hesitate to buy it. Usually books sit on my shelves for a long time before I pick them up, having a very large stack to get through. But Sarah's Key only sat for a couple weeks before I grabbed it. It is a fiction novel, but it centers around the Vel' d'Hiv roundup in Paris in 1942. I vaguely remember hearing the words "Vel' d'Hiv" before, but it wasn't something I was very aware of at all. Generally during and after reading a book, I like to do research on any of the true things talked about, so this book opened my eyes to a new aspect of the war that I was not familiar with. Sarah and her parents are round up to the Vel' d'Hiv and taken to Auschwitz. Before they are taken, Sarah hides her little brother in a secret cupboard in their shared room and takes the key with her. During the whole trip her only concern is to get back and save her brother. Simultaneously we are switched back and forth to chapters of an American journalist living in Paris, Julia, who is given the task of writing of the anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv. She discovers the apartment that her and her husband have inherited from her husbands grandmother, belonged to none other then Sarah's family before they were roundup. Julia then embarks on a journey to find out anything she can of Sarah and her family, and if they are still alive.

#2 13 Reasons Why - my review here.

#3 A Tale For The Time Being - my review here.

#4 The Story of The SS by Nigel Cawthorne
This book is exactly what the titles states. After reading so much about Jewish people and the Holocaust, I decided to learn a bit more about the people behind it, and we had a copy of this book on sale at work. While there are interesting parts of the book, one chapter devoted to the Holocaust itself, for the most part I felt as though I was sitting in high school history class again. WWII wasn't something I found particularly interesting in high school, and while I did very much pay attention to the video I remember my teacher showing, on holocaust survivor stories, most of the WWII part, and the entire semester was not something I looked forward to. This book has a lot of names and dates, that no one other then a history major, could remember. I found my mind wandering, and I'd have to pull myself back in to pay attention, other parts did get interesting, but for the most part, I found it dull. It is though, just a history collection on the SS itself. If names and dates are something that spark your interests, this book would be a great read, that being said there were several stories inside that I had never heard about before, so that made it worth the read to me. This book probably doesn't contain anything you couldn't find by doing some google searches of your own. I'm the type that googles EVERYTHING I find interesting, so next time, I may take that route instead.

So that's where I'm at right now, almost to the end of our 3rd month, I've finished 4 of my books, and I'm well into my 5th. I think that's pretty good so far. This 5th book is quite interesting, but you'll have to wait until I'm finished to find out what it is, a hint though: it has a movie coming out.

Book Journal #2 - A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

From Indigo:
"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."

First let me state, that I have never read a Ruth Ozeki novel before. Having worked in a book store for the past 5 years, I don't recall ever even seeing her books on our shelves. I took a gamble with this one. The Manager at my store reads a LOT. She always gets to books before anyone else can, and I feel sometimes, that it's hard for my co-workers and myself, to read these books after her and claim them as good as she does. When I saw this book come in, the cover caught my eye. While you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, being a Graphic Designer myself, I know that book designers out there are doing a much better job on the cover designs. So I decided to give it a shot, hoping that if it was excellent, I would have found the next great book before my manager did. So there was a bit of an underlying scheme I had other then reading a good book.

The novel starts out with one of our main characters, Ruth, whom I feel may be an alter-ego to our author, finding an object in a large plastic bag on the beach. Ruth lives on a very remote island off the coast of BC - Whaletown. Thinking it is garbage washed up from the ocean, she brings it home to throw away. Her husband, Oliver, being the curious person he is, decides to open it. The contents of the bag are a Hello Kitty lunchbox, inside the diary of a young Japanese teenager, Nao, and the french diary of her great uncle, Haruki #1, who was a kamikaze pilot in the Second World War. Ruth begins her journey of reading Nao's diary and trying to figure out the fate of Nao, as her diary was written in 2001. Nao, without directly saying the words, is suicidal while writing her diary, and with the tsunami of 2011, Ruth does not now what may have happened to Nao.

With alternating chapters between Ruth, and Nao, we learn the story of Nao's Great-Grandmother Jiko, who became a Buddhist Nun after the second world war when her only son Haruki #1 was killed. Nao gives us some insight into her being bullied in school, having been raised in California in an American school. Her father is let go from his great job in the tech industry, and the family must move back to Japan. Having let his family down, Haruki #2, Nao's father, feels great shame and is also suicidal. Ruth embarks on a journey to track down Nao and her family anyway she can. After multiple Internet searches, she continues to come up empty handed on any information of the family. She decides to reach out to an old friend of a colleague, whom she figures must have known Nao's father while they were living in the United States. Ruth tries searches for tsunami victims with no results. She has Haruki #1's french diary translated to better learn of the family.

This book did pull me in right away. I find I'm more interested when the chapters go back and forth between multiple characters, and I also enjoy reading diary-style novels, so this one hit 2 birds with one stone for me. While the story became in-depth and we discovered more, throughout most of the book I felt as though there wasn't a whole lot happening. Until I got to the end. Everything unfolds and we catch up to Nao and her family. The book finishes with some unanswered questions, but I felt very content with the way it left off. There's nothing I dislike more then when a book leaves so many loose ends, with no indication of a sequel. So when this one ended I felt very at peace with the story just told to me.

To me, this book hit everything I like. Ruth's mother died of Alzheimer's, while it doesn't go into it much, it's still there. Alzheimer's is close to me, so I liked that aspect. Nao's great uncle fought in WWII, in which I have a strong interest. Her great-grandmother is a Buddhist nun, Buddhism is always something I've found fascinating. Like I said, I enjoy multiple person narrative and journal entry novels. Her father is a great mind in the Internet and tech industry, and in the end, we are even thrown into quantum physics and alternate universes, which is oddly, something I think about quite often. I really enjoyed this story, and definitely will be looking into Ozeki's other novels.