Wow! Ozeki

I didn't know much about A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki, before I opened the book, other than that it is a nominated for the 2013 National Book Critic's Circle Award.  And wow!  It was such an inventive, readable, heartbreaking, intelligent, funny novel.  The story links together the lives and voices of a 16-year old girl named Nao who lives in Tokyo, after moving to Japan after her father loses a good tech job in Sunnyvale, CA, with Ruth, a writer in Canada.  Picked on mercilessly in school and dealing with her overworked mother and suicidal father, Nao takes to journaling to express herself, and to try and tell the story of her 104-year old great grandmother Jiko, a Buddhist zun.  Nao's diary is found on the shore by Ruth, a writer living on an island in British Columbia after the Japanese tsunami in 2011.  I found myself more considerably more interested in the parts of the novel told by Nao's perspective, but overall, this was like nothing I've read before.  Refreshing - read it!

Rags and Riches

There are many Doctorow books that I really enjoyed (my most favorite being World's Fair), and while Ragtime was filled with interesting characters and sub-plots, it felt overly peopled and without focus.  Doctorow employs an interesting technique of including both real people (Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Harry Houdini, etc.), with fictional characters.  While he captures the excitement of New York City in the early 1900s before WWI and focuses on ideas and events critical to that era in American history, there was no one story line that truly engaged me. 

Deep in Detroit

LeDuff, a native Detroiter, blends personal history and journalism in Detroit: An American Autopsy.  With grit and unflinching detail, LeDuff highlights Detroit's challenges and characters, and gives us a glimpse of day to day life in what used to be one of America's most prosperous cities.  While this book won't give you all of the historical background, its more personal and storied approach to portraying life in this city is highly effective and readable.  One can only hope that over time, this city ravaged by unemployment, a failed school system, over 70,000 abandoned buildings, and political corruption can rise from its ashes.