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The Notable Books Council, a group of readers' advisory experts within the Reference and User Services Association, a division of the American Library Association, has announced its selections for the 2014 Notable Books List. Since 1944, the goal of the Notable Books Council has been to make available to the nation's readers a list of about twenty-five very good, very readable, and at times very important fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books for the adult reader. A book may be selected for inclusion on the Notable Books List if it possesses exceptional literary merit, expands the horizons of human knowledge, makes a specialized body of knowledge accessible to the nonspecialist, has the potential to contribute significantly to the solution of a contemporary problem, or presents a unique concept.

Leche caliente ( Hot Milk ) Deborah Levy Spanish Publishers ISBN 978-84-339-8002-1 An exploration of the sting of sexuality, unspoken female rage, hypochondria, and Big Pharma.Contabilidad para numerofóbicos ( Accounting for Numberphobics ) Dawn Fotopulos HarperCollins Español ISBN 978-141-85-9787-0 The book aims to demystify a company's financial dashboard in plain language, explaining how each measurement reflects the overall health of the business.Dejar de fumar es facilísimo ( Quitting Smoking Is Very Easy ) Maribel Gómez Spanish Publishers ISBN 978-607-748-085-3 Gómez offers readers techniques and a counting method that are intended to help them quit smoking.

\"What is wrong with wanting to 'relate' to a character when reading fiction?\" asks Will Eaves in his brilliant recent investigation into the relationship between life and art, The Inevitable Gift Shop. It's an important question -- and one that arises in relation to the work of the Dutch novelist Herman Koch, author of The Dinner and Summer House with Swimming Pool. Koch specialises in stories in which unpleasant and unreliable narrators describe nasty people doing not very nice things. In fairness, his interest in the unlikable and unrelatable doesn't seem to have done him any harm: The Dinner sold more than a million copies worldwide. Perhaps we are fascinated with his contemptible characters because they remind us of ourselves. \"'I didn't relate to any of the characters' means 'I caught sight of my rage in the mirror',\" suggests Eaves. Perhaps Koch is simply doing what authors have always done: holding up a mirror to nature. In Dear Mr M Koch turns the hoary old metaphor into a complex fictional conceit.

The opening sequences show them as defiant of authority, permanently glued to their mobile phones and briefly lulled from their torpor by the lure of prime weed from Baghdad or the prospect of sex. Shot in Academy ratio with a sprinkling of improvised mobile phone footage throughout, Home suggests something freewheeling and impressionistic but the dramatic impact is precisely judged and expertly controlled. Home is extremely successful in shifting the balance of our sympathies and...

  As the pages turn and the real essence of these individuals is exposed, a cooling effect takes hold, something more wide-angled and depressing than [Herman Koch]'s brattishness first suggests. \"What is it we look for in a book? That someone goes through a process of maturation -- that he achieves insight? But imagine if that process and that insight simply aren't there? Wouldn't that, in fact, be much more like life itself ?\" We can admire Koch for challenging us like this. We don't have to like the questions, however. Mr. M, you see, is a famous author, a person looked up to in society as a man of wisdom and learning. Underneath it all, our narrator reveals, he is not a very nice person when you get inside his head. Those themes of ambiguous victimhood and culpability shine through in M's views on modern-day immigration (\"there are some things that have to be said, because otherwise no one will say them these days\") and the sorry fight that the Dutch Resistance put up to the Nazis during World War II (\"Any German soldier told that he was to be stationed in Holland breathed a sigh of relief\"). Dutch society is weak and pitiful in the eyes of M. Far more serious a character reference, as far as his creeping stalker is concerned, is the fact that M refused to let the truth get in the way of a good yarn. He is accused of bending the findings of his own amateur sleuthing in order to serve the readability of Payback and thus appease a snivelling publishing industry, a book-buying readership of idiots and an insufferable troupe of fellow authors whom he despises for various reasons. The police investigation had never reached a satisfactory conclusion and now M's book is the accepted take on events.