Tristram's Reading Log

Tristram

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman:

Amazon Review wrote:

In an epic trilogy, Philip Pullman unlocks the door to a world parallel to our own, but with a mysterious slant all its own. Dæmons and winged creatures live side by side with humans, and a mysterious entity called Dust just might have the power to unite the universes--if it isn't destroyed first. Here, the three paperback titles in Pullman's heroic fantasy series are united in one dazzling boxed set. Join Lyra, Pantalaimon, Will, and the rest as they embark on the most breathtaking, heartbreaking adventures of their lives. The fate of the universe is in their hands. The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass pit good against evil in a way no reader will ever forget.

Northern Lights
Really enjoyed it. Lyra's world was well-crafted with so many curious things going on it was hard to put the book down.

The Subtle Knife
Took it a while to get going with the introduction of new characters and new worlds. Once it built up momentum there was no turning back.

The Amber Spyglass
And finally... it had to end somehow and this wasn't too bad. Always a good sign when you're disappointed that you've finished reading.

---

Up next, Camus and The Fastidious Assassins.

Tristram

I'd forgotten about the whole reading log thing.

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris.

http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/features/twctte/twctte_022307/index.html wrote:

This wickedly funny, big-hearted novel about life in the office signals the arrival of a gloriously talented new writer.

The characters in Then We Came To The End cope with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, secret romance, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. By day they compete for the best office furniture left behind and try to make sense of the mysterious pro-bono ad campaign that is their only remaining "work."

This book received great reviews and appeared on many '07 must-read lists. It must capture some kind of zeitgeist that I missed out on. Reading it felt like a chore. I had little to no interest in the small and petty lives of the characters or the almost non-existent plot. I'm not sure how this book was published nor do I have any clue how it obtained such positive reviews. Bar a few comic moments the book offered nothing. Most disappointed I've been with a read in a long, long time.

Tristram

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.

[quote=Amazon.com Review; http://www.amazon.com/Wind-Up-Bird-Chronicle-Novel/dp/0679775439]

Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.

Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight.[/quote]

What to say about this book? I'm not disappointed that I read it but there seems to be a lot of undeserving hype around it. The Amazon review is somewhat misleading. Whilst bizarre characters litter the text I think it's a stretch to claim that Murakami's work treats any of the the supposed themes of the text to any significant extent. Historical and cultural references are no more than touchstones that frame a novel which seems as disconnected from those bases as the central character Toru Okada. Indeed, if there is any central theme to be extrapolated from the text surely it is one of absence and an individual's loss of connection with society. It is difficult to care about the fate of Murakami's characters given the somewhat nihilistic viewpoint they adopt which at times reduces the act of reading to the pursuit of a resolution, of any kind.

I'm told Murakami's short stories work more convincingly, shall have to seel them out.