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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

*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.