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

1803 42nd Ave E,Seattle WA 98112

23 February, 2023

Description

Madison Books hosts an in-person Book Club meeting every month at 6:30 p.m., usually but not always on the last Thursday. Drop in to chat with your neighbors about some of the best books of this or any moment. All readers are welcome--you don't need to sign up in advance, but registering here will help us plan for the right number of attendees. Meetings are held at Parlour Wines, around the corner from the bookstore and across the street from the Madison Park tennis courts. While most book clubs focus on the hottest current releases, we're doing something a little different this year by reaching into the past. We'll be exploring narratives of the Northwest, both contemporary and historical, fictional and nonfictional, by women writers. Some you'll certainly have heard of, maybe even already read and loved, but others may be serendipitous discoveries. We have a list we're pretty excited about, and we hope you will be, too! Our February selection is A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. "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.