Murakami Preview Post

Greetings!

For anyone who has stumbled across this site from the wide world of intertubes, this is an online book club of the read-a-book-and-talk-about-it variety (not the columbia-house-buy-ten-for-one-dollar variety). Every month we'll be reading a book and generating online discussion and debate.

Let's get things started in style: post-modern Japanese fiction! Woo. First up, we have Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I'm reading the Vintage copy, translated by Alfred Birnbaum. Written in 1985, this book contains two intertwining narratives: that of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland and, of course, that of The End of the World. Although belonging more to magic realism than science fiction, HBW&TEW does employ many elements of "dystopic future" sci-fi and creates for us a new world (or worlds) with which we must familiarize ourselves. In the first chapter we are immediately hit with some of Murakami's most prominent themes: magic realism, the everyman narrator, sexuality, (un)spoken language, and the physicality of communication.

Murakami writes in what the internet calls a "post-war mindset", using narrators that question and subvert established orders, critiquing (seemingly omnipresent) societal norms. In many of his works, the different modes of communication used -- varying through combinations of spoken, heard, written, read, electronic, past or live -- carry different emphases and different nuances that he uses to rework our expectations of human interaction.

What I love about his writing is the honesty of it. His narrators take things as they come; they act, react and respond. They don't spend a lot of time whining about what could be, or wishing "if only x, y, z" hadn't happened. They are curious, and often go to great lengths to observe things, but they are still ultimately realistic.
I also appreciate his rather dry sense of humour as well. "A hallway as long as Marcel Proust?" (10).


All right folks!
Tune in mid-way through June for the my discussion topics, but feel free to leave comments/thoughts/questions before then.

~Laine

Summer Picks

Here is your list of summer readings (which one my roommates picked out of a hat):

JUNE

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

written by Haruki Murakami

picked by Elaine

JULY

Birdsong

written by Sebastian Faulks

picked by Sherry

AUGUST

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

written by David Sedaris

picked by Jax

Meet Your New Library

After some serious brain crunching we have gathered a list of books that we will be reading over the next year and beyond (in no particular order):

1. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
2. The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland
3. At Swim- Two-Birds - Flann o'Brien
4. The Cave - Tim Krabbe
5. When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro
6. When You Are Engulfed in Flames -David Sedaris
7. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
8. Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
9. The Man Who Was Thursday - G.K. Chesterton
10. Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder- Evelyn Waugh
11. Black Hole - Charles Burns
12. Travesties - Tom Stoppard
13. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
14. The Kite Runner- Khaled Hosseni
15. Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
16. Still Alice - Lisa Genova

Other suggestions

• The Accidental - Ali Smith
• Love in the Time of Cholera- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch
• Men at Arms (first book of the Sword of Honour trilogy) - Evelyn Waugh
• Cambodian Odyssey - Haing Ngor
• My sister's keeper - Jodi Picoult
• Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature - Jan Lars Jensen

Do Not Disturb: Thinking in Progress

Essentially I feel as if I should start this new journey off with either some wise or some witty words, but I can't force either of those. So, instead I will just keep it to a simple WELCOME!

Now that you are here, it is just a matter of getting this show on the road!