Four Corners of the Sky: The End

This is the last of my Big Library Read diary posts.

The big reveal is that Sam and Jack's crazy mom killed their father the Judge. But wait!!

I'm still not sure about the Queen. How many of them are there? Are they all fake? Where did the jewels come from, and how did Jack find them in the first place? Were they really buried on the farm? Were they fake too? Did Ruthie know about them? Why on earth would Jack have hidden a jewel in the Spirit of St. Louis in Lambert airport? Why was the King of the Sky a good place to stash the queen for 20 years? Why do the feds care about this, again? How did Raffie's mom get in on this? Do banks anywhere ask you three riddles before they give you your deposit? Will Brad and Melissa live happily ever after? Georgia and Trevor? No one misses the million dollars?

So the book was reasonably fun.  I have a suspicion that I missed a lot of the allusions and layers. Would not have read it but for Big Library Read. I think it was a good choice for the program because it's easy to talk about.

The Goodreads data shows some gradual uptake over the course of the free availability.

I think that one's affinity for a book or for an author depends a lot on whether you know and love the characters in the book. Or if you don't know the characters, perhaps they're sufficiently exotic that they fascinate you all by themselves. It helps if the book is well written and cleverly constructed, but that's not enough to make you love the characters. Love strikes like lightning and disrupts like a tornado, destroying one house while leaving the next unscathed. That's why the "book discovery problem" is so hard, and why a friend's recommendation is so much more useful than any algorithm could be.

Four Corners of the Sky: Chapters 42-48

This is the 8th installment of my Big Library Read diary. I'm through with Part 3 and on to Part 4.

Parts one-four have been titled North, South, East, West, presumably the title's four corners. North is centered in Emerald, North Carolina; South takes us west to St. Louis, East is Miami, and West seems to be Key West. Part 5 being "Home" is not much of a spoiler.

So what was "North" about Part 1? Is this about Oz's good witch? A game of Bridge? Why not North, West, South, East? Did you know that in Chinese, the order is always East-South-West- North (Dong Nan Xi Bei, 東南西北) which also means "all directions".

The Anemoi, or four winds, had personalities that were cold, hot, unlucky and mild. Maybe. Winter, spring, summer, fall?

I guess everything will be revealed at the end.

I'm much happier with Ruthie as Annie's mother than some girl friend from Barbados, but I'm guessing this is a misdirection from the author.

Annie seems to have fallen hook, line and sinker for the scam, whatever it is, and I bet Sgt. Dan is in on it.

GoodeReader has an article about Big Library Read.

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Four Corners of the Sky: Chapters 39-41

This is installment 7 of my Big Library Reading diary, covering chapters  39-41, through the end of Part 2.

I had been reading Four Corners on my train commute into Manhattan for Book Expo America. But on Friday Overdrive pushed an iPad update that somehow left my Overdrive app in a half-updated state. So that slowed me down a bit. I need to get it in gear; I have only 5 days left on my checkout!

Maybe it's the influence of BEA, but there seemed to be a LOT of alcohol consumed in these 3 chapters. So I have a few things to say about that today.

Sgt. Dan Hart drinks ALMOND LIQUEUR????? Is that an alusion to a movie I didn't see? Because if Brad was drinking almond liqueur I would think nothing of it, but Dan Hart? What kind of love interest (I got that right, didn't I?) drinks almond liqueur? And after a bottle of Cuervo, too. Annie drinks pitchers of mojitos after saying she doesn't drink. Also, Brad's bottle of beer.

Speaking of mojitos, congratulations to the Evoke team, which won the Publishing Hackathon book discovery competion with their website that makes emotional connection of characters in books more salient. The mojitos at the afterparty were just AMAZING, they set this reading diary back about 10 chapters worth.

So Melissa Skippings is a vodka martini girl. Good for her.

Zemanta is recommending blog posts about Nutella Martinis. So they win the competition for drink discovery via books.

Next Diary Entry

• How to Make a Nutella Martini (crazyadventuresinparenting.com)
• Nutella Martini (neatorama.com)
• Famous cocktails: from silver screen to bars and clubs (brandsandfilms.com)
• Lavender Liqueur (annashortcakes.wordpress.com)
• Get creative with quince: a recipe for Quince Liqueur (toogoodtowastesa.com)

Four Corners of the Sky: Chapters 35-38

This is installment 6 of my Big Library Reading diary, covering chapters  35-38. At Book Expo America today, Overdrive president Steve Potash announced that Four Corners of the Sky had been downloaded by 37,000 library patrons, more than 50 Shades of Gray or Gone Girl. Sales of Michael Malone's other books had gone up by 500%. And these 4 chapters were quite long.

There's starting to be a bit of conversation on Twitter about the book. At another session at Digital Book 2013 Josh Schanker of BookBub presented data showing that it takes about two weeks for a book price promotion to have an effect on buzz or sales. Four Corners is a pretty long book, so it's likely that any effect of offering it in librararies is just now starting.
One thing I saw on Twitter was a report that the Wizard of Oz was Malone's "inspiration" for Four Corners. The allusions are pretty thick, so now I need to list them so I can start enjoying the book again.

• Annie lives with aunt and uncle; her parents are missing.

• Annie leaves home in a twister. My mind was more in the Tempest

• Annie's Toto-ish little dog jumps into the plane with her

• Emerald (City)

• When she gets to Miami, she's the only black and white thing in a suddenly colorful world

• rubies and gold

• Jack and the wizard are con men

So there are some obvious allusions. It's not like the original Tron, which is almost a remake of Oz. So unless Annie goes off to Cuba to kill a wicked witch, I don't think Oz is much help in understanding Four Corners. Like the many movie allusions, it's embroidery, peripheral to the narrative. Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

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Four Corners of the Sky: Chapters 29-34

This is my fifth diary entry for Big Library Read. I'm at IDPF Digital Book 2013 today, and Book Expo America the rest of the week, so we'll see if I can keep up.

We finally meet Jack, and all I can think of is Clint Eastwood.

The explanation of the birth certificate and Claudette Colbert is rather charming, but don't you think Jack would have worked a scam on her, too?

At this point in the book, I know a lot about Annie, but I don't feel I know her at all. We see through Annie's eyes, and she's a keen observer, but she never focuses on herself. We don't hear her voice much, and she hasnt done anything that says who she is other thanfly into atornado. The central question of this book, it seems to me, is "will Annie be seduced into Jack's big scam? Will the reader be seduced as well?

Chapters 35-38

Four Corners of the Sky: Chapters 15-28

This is installment 4 of my Big Library Reading diary, covering chapters 15-28. If you want to follow along, you only have until Saturday, June 1, to check the book out from any of 7,500 participating libraries, but you'll still have two weeks to read it.

The Memorial Day holiday, combined with my reading momentum and some exciting passages got me all the way to the end of part 1.

The 2 codes are now half solved, and it turns out I was right about the tail numbers, sort of. A good mystery allows the reader to figure some thing out, after all. But this whole code thing makes less sense now. Who makes a password out of tail numbers and then writes half of it inside a baseball cap? We've learned from Raffie that Jack has a prodigious memory for Shakespeare even if he can't remember his daughter's birthdate. So why would he pick a password that he couldn't remember?

Now that the courier's box has been retrieved from the King, it seems we can just abandon her in St. Louis, which seems a bit callous.

This birth certificate has been bothering me. How, exactly do you get a fake mother's name onto a birth certificate? Even in Key West, a woman can't just waltz into a hospital with an assumed name and drop a baby. So the birth certificate could be a complete forgery. But why bother with it at all? If we assume that it's not a fake, then Annie's mother had some reason to not even have a child. If she had died in childbirth, there would be no reason for the pseudonym.

Brad is seeming less scary, more goofy and more of a plot device. How else would we get characters to St. Louis and Miami?

Do pilots of private jets wear helmets?

I really sympathize with Annie when she says that everyone in her life seems to be talking with everyone else on the phone except her. The reader is similarly cut out of Annie's hyperconnected world. Storytelling will have to adjust somehow. With ebooks, it's not impossible to have a character phone you when you get to a certain page. Or at least send you some texts. That's what I would call immersive storytelling!

There are a lot of close friendships in this book. I was glad to learn the backstory of Clark and Sam. Friendships don't sell books though; I fully expect passion to break out in Part 2.

I'm a bit annoyed at the formatting errors I see in this ebook- random paragraphs aligned center instead of left, inappropriate line breaks. These are conversion artifacts that a publisher would be horrified to see in print, but somehow it's not a disaster in an ebook. It's possible that the errors are introduced by Overdrive but more likely they can be traced back into the publisher's production process.

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Four Courners of the Sky: Chapters 10-14

This is installment 3 of my Big Library Reading diary, covering chapters 10-14.

Putting tape on windows does NOT do any good if in a storm, OK?

These 5 chapters were a bit of a slog for me. I realized that I consistently have trouble with time shifting. The cognitive load of keeping multiple timelines straight distracts me from enjoying the narrative. And it makes me think: "They're STILL eating sushi?"

Just to confirm that I'm not imagining this, I'm going to list all the timelines in these 5 chapters:

1. Chapter 10  Brad is calling from Charleston: "the present":.
2. Chapter 10 Annie's career at the Naval Academy: 5 years ago?
3. Chapter 10-11 Annie's wedding: 3 years ago?
4. Chapter 11 in Emerald: a few months after the wedding.
5. Chapter 11 Annie leaves Brad: a year later?
6. Chapter 11 Annie's neighbor Trevor: a few more months later, maybe one year ago?
7. Chapter 11 Brad's calling again: the present.
8. Chapter 12 Is Annie in Emerald or is she on an aircraft carrier?: 2weeks after leaving Brad
9. Chapter 12 On the phone with Georgette: sometime later.
10. Chapter 12 Emerald: a bleak March weekend. I need the Sam-Brad relationship explained.
11. Chapter 12-13-14 after a review of Annapolis, we're back to the present.
12. Chapter 14 flashbacks to Annie's 3rd, 5th and 7th birthdays.

Maybe it was the twister.

Rafael Rook is a fantastical character. I'm pretty sure nothing he says turns out to be true. But I think we're supposed to pay attention: El camino no está en el cielo. El camino está en el corazón. (The road is not in the sky. The road is in the heart)

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Four Corners of the Sky: Through Chapter 9

This is installment 2 of my Big Library Reading diary, covering chapters 5-9

We get a few answers, but Malone lays out a whole bunch more questions. In Chapter 7 we find out that Annie was NOT talking on her cell phone while driving 95, she was stopped at the side of the road. Well thanks, thats sets back some character development right there. You'd think the Porsche would come with a Bluetooth package.

Meanwhile, the pink cap and the aviator jacket turn out to have codes in them.  The baseball cap has a code written in it: 362484070N, and the jacket has another code in it: 678STNX211. I did not expect a girl-and-her-plane book to go all Neal Stephenson on me and get all into cryptographic keys. If that's what they are. Google is not our friend when it comes to these codes- don't bother trying. Swiss bank account numbers? Airplane tail numbers? Coordinates for a ship's wreckage? Robert Langden's phone number?

Also there's something that Jack wants in the plane.

The rubies and emeralds in the attic seem a bit far-fetched. Although when my cousin cleaned out my uncle's house after he passed away, he would routinely fine gold coins interlaced with the trash and junk, so I guess people are like that.

Speaking of dusty attics, the women around Jack seem to function as his memory- Annie has a photographic memory, and Sam saves everything like they're holy relics. This obviously means something deep. Yay librarians.

More clouds. Egyptian clouds from The Ten Commandments. And the threat of a twister, making me think of the devastation in Moore. A secret uncle named Jack who died at two. And I bet almost-ex Brad is going to show up like evil Jack in The Shining. There are  so many veggies in this soup, if Malone can keep this from going mushy, he's a great chef. In any case, it's getting quite interesting.

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Four Corners of the Sky: Through Chapter 4

Here it is, my first Big Library Reading diary post.

The first two pages of a novel are always hard for me. Sometimes I have to read every sentence twice. I don't know what the book is about. I have trouble keeping all the names straight. I react to images and get distracted from the book because my mind hasn't entered the book's full world yet. Four Corners of the Sky was no exception. Maybe I was supposed to read the blurbs and the reviews first.

So, through the Prologue and four chapters, Malone has laid his puzzle pieces out on the table, and he's succeeded in getting me interested in how they're going to be put together. At this point , the names seem kind of hokey. Annie Peregrine Goode, really? Emerald? D. K. Destin? But you have to grant the author some leeway to start; he'd better layer some meaning onto that primer coat by the end of the book. Some of the pieces are like the four corners of the puzzle, easy to spot by an experienced puzzle solver. The "four corners" image, for example. It's even on the first page of the prologue. Again, it strikes me as a bit unsubtle, but OK. I rather like being on the lookout for quartets. "Jack? Jack! Jack! Jack!"

Another corner piece is the "King of the Sky" - "Queen of the Sea" couplet. Should be interesting to see how Malone connects the modernish magic of the airplane with the exotic magic of an Incan totem. This is totally stream-of-consciousness, but I just saw Star Trek Into Darkness last night and something about this reminded me of the Kirk-Spock-Khan timeline reshuffling. But what's with the pink baseball cap?

I like reading about speed-obsessed impatient Annie, though I'm kind of groaning at the daddy issues. One thing really bothered me. She's driving her Porsche Carrera at 95 MPH over country roads while talking on her cell phone with probably-going-to-be-love-interest Vice Sgt. Dan Hart. (give-away name/title!). Doesn't she know how DANGEROUS that is????

Please no spoilers in the comments, ok?

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Big Library Read Diary: Four Corners of the Sky

Although the first Big Library Read (BLR) started on May 15th, it wasn't until yesterday that I got Four Corners of the Sky onto my iPad. Four Corners is the book that Overdrive is making available for free in librararies around the world- at last count 7500 of them! My local library Montclair Public, is part of a regional consortium, BCCLS, that decided not to participate in the Big Library Read in its first incarnation. There wasn't enough advance notice for BCCLS  to participate in such an initiative and do it well.  "BCCLS doesn't enter into such endeavors half-heartedly and felt that a two week window wouldn't allow us the time and effort a project like this deserves" BCCLS Library Services Director Arlene Sahraie told me. I hear similar things from other libraries.

The rapid roll-out of Big Library Read shows up in other areas. I haven't seen a single mention of the program in the mainstream media; it's an initiative with historic implications, in my view. On the other hand, when the program's impact is studied, there won't be the confounding effect of non-library promotion.

On GoodReads, you can see the sudden, but modest effect of the program:

 We'll soon see if that's a one-time bump or the short end of a hockey stick.

I looked into other libraries where I would be entitled to library privileges. In New York City, where I have business, NYPL isn't participating, which might account for the lack of MSM interest. I applied for a card from Queens Public Library, one of the most innovative public libraries anywhere, which is participating in BLR, but I would have to show up in person to get the card approved. So I went to another New Jersey library which approved me for a card. They're a member of a different consortium, eLibraryNJ, that's participating, so I'm finally set to start reading. 

I'm interested to see if online conversations develop differently if an ebook is available to large numbers of people. So I've going to keep an online reading diary on this blog. There are 55 chapters of 4 corners, and I have a 2 week checkout period to work my way through it, so that's 4 chapters a day. We'll see how I do. It's good that I have the full 2 weeks even thought the program ends next Saturday. With BEA and IDPF on my plate, I won't have that much time.

I'm also going to collect here all the online conversations centered around this BLR that I can find, especially blog posts. So far, I haven't seen anything develop. So feel free add yours via the comments!

• My Diary
• Through Chapter 4
• Chapters 5-9
• Chapters 10-14
• Chapters 15-28
• Chapters 29-34
• Chapters 35-38
• Chapters 39-41
• Chapters 42-48
• Finished
• Blogs
• nothing yet
• Twitter: 
• #biglibraryread 
• @michaelmalone10
• Facebook: 
• Chat with Michael Malone
• Michael Malone Page
• Goodreads
• Four Corners of the Sky
• Anne Arundel County Public Library discussion
• Huntsville-Madison County Public Library discussion
• The Four Corners of the Sky Book Discussion (AACPL, Maryland)
• Lower Macungie Library discussion
• LibraryThing
• Reviews