flemmings | (no subject)

My copy of 1Q84 pt 1 arrived today, speeding from Japan as if from New York. I hadn't realized it was a hardcover. Perhaps that will make for easier reading, or perhaps not. When Murakami is good, he is very very good, and when he is bad he's A Wild Sheep Chase, which goes nowhere and takes forever to do it. Cannot work up any enthusiasm for that book, and I've barely got to the sheep so far.

I'm being injected in the knee Wednesday, with instructions to stay off feet for the next 48 hours thereafter. I suppose I could read the Murakami and call it Japanese practice. But I'm much more likely to read The Kingdom of Gods, which I was saving for precisely this occasion.

On an unrelated note, why do people who write prefaces feel it necessary to summarize the plot? Don't they realize this is an unforgivable sin? Recent instance was The Life of Milarepa, that I bought with the $10 I won in the lottery Saturday night. And that isn't even a novel. I was expecting the preface to give me some background to the history of Tibetan Buddhism, and got it, but then I was in the middle of Whosis telling me the highpoints of Milarepa's life. Dude, sorry to be so shallow, but that's why I'm reading the book.

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I'm not sure about e-books. You can't underline unknown vocabulary in e-books. ^_^

I have no objection to hardcovers per se-- some books are just too dense and weighty for mass market paperback-- and the Japanese bunko format makes everything so *small*. One notices this most with manga, natch, that lose all their visual sweep in bunko, but prose can get bitsy enough.

I've been having knee shots for five years, she says proudly. This is injecting silicone under an MRI to make sure it goes in the right place. I suppose, she says belatedly, it might be as painful as the knee shots and much longer duration. Ah well. Shall see how well mindfulness meditation works when you up the ante.

And I'm confident the preface of KoG doesn't tell me the whole story to come, which is all I ask.

You can't underline unknown vocabulary in e-books.

Ah, but you can. And you can add notes, and you can do dictionary lookups on selected words. Depending on the device you're using. ^_~

*Note: this is not necessarily an ebook/ereader endorsement, per se, as they do not suit everyone's reading habits. But the options of what you can do with an ebook have improved.

(slyly) But can one write alternative kanji in the margins as well? That's the acid test.

The technophobe in this corner cringes at the very thought of trying to get/use an e-reader that would handle Japanese.

Ahhaha! Not in the made-for-English-markets ones, no. :)
Begs the question of how a navtive Japanese ereader would handle it. Hmm.

For the front of the cover shows somebody shot,
And the back of the cover will tell you the plot.

-- if I remember my Chesterton correctly.

Back covers will occasionally still do this, I note disapprovingly, even mystery novels. (I suppose you must tell me who gets murdered first, but it's beyond beyond to add things like 'and then her partner is fatally wounded and Sue must track a relentless psychotic killer.')

1Q84, FTR, tells me nothing but the title.

Ugh, the back copy on the paperback version of book 1 of Cyteen is one massive spoiler! It would work fine for the omnibus, but for the single volume it spoils the middle of the damn plot. >.>

Some publicist working late and not thinking, no doubt.

*g* So glad to hear someone else feels that way I do about Wild Sheep Chase. Although I feel that Dance^3 wasn't so bad. I'm pretty curious to know how 1Q84 is but haven't ponied up for the book yet.

I completely agree about the prefaces, it really makes me grrrr because I'm not gonna want to read it AFTER I've read the damn book, and sometimes the preface actually had something interesting.

(At least Murakami is almost impossible to spoil? You could tell me the plot and it would still tell me nothing.)

So glad to hear someone else feels the way *I* do about Wild Sheep Chase. ^_^ Seriously, it's all Haruki Murakami BEST THING EVAR have you read Wild Sheep Chase??? (Followed by 'His protagonists are so western.' 'Except in their passivity, and then they're very Japanese.')

I hope 1Q84 will be like Kafka on the Shore, but there's really no calling Murakami. And true, the plot has very little to do with the actual experience of reading the book. Like Ulysses, I suppose, only more so, because Murakami isn't doing clever riffs off Homer (Spot the applicability!) and stylistic loop-the-loops.

One must read prefaces after reading the book. Still a pain.