Post: Two Moons Over Tokyo
Monday the 13th of January, 2025, in mid-morning.

It had been a long time since I read 1Q84. And strictly speaking, I never actually read it. I listened to it as a very excellent audiobook shortly after it came out fifteen years ago.

I was a different person then, half my adulthood and forever ago.

I didn’t remember it. I mean, I thought I did. I thought I had an impression of the story, but I had convoluted bits of it in my mind and confused it with other things I must have read since or before or whenever.

Murakami drops hints to his methodology in the story, and the surreality of the plot seems to sweep by and if you aren’t paying attention maybe you miss these things. I wrote the other day that this book seems like a descriptive stew pot with morsels of plot mixed in. It is, after all, as much a sensory experience reading this tome of an 1155 page novel as anything else. The author has one of his characters spend months reading slowly through Proust and reflecting on that experience, and I think that this book might be a kind of modern, surrealist response to Proust in some ways. (In fact, I reserved a copy of Proust from the library to pick up later today to poke my nose into that to see if I get the same vibe from weird translated French literature as I do from weird translated Japanese literature.)

I don’t want to spoil the book by degorging the plot here though. It is a meditative slog through a closely parallel world from which the protagonists are seeking parallel escapes, each other, and understanding. And in all that, all those 1155 pages almost nothing happens and yet it is filled with life and action and heavy beats of human footsteps through time and reality.

It’s worth your time to read this.

Post: Jumping Back
Wednesday the 1st of January, 2025, in the late afternoon.

I could easily overwhelm myself here by just writing too much and then not reading enough.

It is the first dayof 2025 as I write this and I have set myself the bold goal of reading more. Scratch that. I have set myself the goal of finishing more books.

As it stands I have a lot of novels and non-fiction tomes with bookmarks protruding from them just sitting around. So, I am going to use this site to inventory the act of finishing as many of those as I can and then eventually starting some more.

Here’s the game plan: A post when I start (or jump back into) a book. A post when I finish a book. Simple.

I jumped back into 1Q84 this afternoon. I can’t tell you exactly why I stopped reading it almost exactly half way through, but maybe it had something to do with starting that job and shifting my habits and feeling guilty about reading in my spare time when I should instead be writing. Ironic that. Either way, I had left the whole thing at a kind of climactic moment in the story when one of the narrative threads hits a turning point moment and someone is—dun-dun-daaaaah—murdered. I won’t particularly try to use these posts to spoil things, but needless to say people are routinely killed by a character who is a kind of humble assassin and she is drawn into this complex magical realism narrative where she ends up assassinating a kind of prophet for this group and I closed the book back, well, probably five or six months ago, literally with the cliffhanger words of her jabbing a fatal spike into his neck.

So here I am, and the first book I am going to jump back into (I won’t say finish) is a bit of Murakami comfort-lit, and I can nestle into some quiet moments with this hulking tome of a story resting on my lap with the winter cold freezing the outsides and the story warming me up indoors.

Back at it.

Post: 1Q84 (Novel)
Monday the 3rd of June, 2024, in the evening.

I’m only about a quarter of my way through Murakami’s ten year old novel #1Q84 a work of surrealist magical #scifi that I consumed as an audiobook shortly after it came out, and decided to read the old fashioned way this summer. The author #murakami has been on my shortlist of favoured novelists for a long while and I’ve read most of his library at this point, and in many ways he has served as something of a personal literary inspiration for the types of stories I try to write. The style may not jive with my own writing style but definitely the bigger ideas and plots are a fascination to me and I dig the word surrealism of the journeys they take the reader on. Being a mere 250 pages into 1Q84 it’s escaping my memory where this particular plot is leading, but that just makes the discovery that much more satisfying.