Please join me in reading A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. I didn't have any books on my radar for December and then, one miraculously showed up in my instagram/twitter queue:

@nautiemermate Yes, it's a really cool story! If you like books that take place on the West Coast and/or Japan you might enjoy it :)
— Simone K. (@by_simone) December 3, 2013

When I read the description I thought, 'yes! this sounds great!'. Here's what Goodreads has to say about it:

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 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 a 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 humour 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.

Does this catch your fancy? I've read the first few pages and it seems great.

Enjoy! Please, please, pretty please enjoy this one!

*after I wrote this I saw that it hit Best Books of 2013 at NPR (please read: awesome book compilation that you should bookmark)!