Continuing the discussion from What're you readin' (Part 1) - #2036 by jujotech.
Previous discussions:
i’ve heard of them in like passing but i have never read them!
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the laundry files have this unfortunately whedony whiff to them even though there are a lot of bits about them that I like
Also we need a new thread title
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Tome Alone: Lost in New Work (Reading Thread 2)
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Came in here to try to come up with a thread title but I don’t think a better one is possible
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I recently read The Magician of Tiger Castle, the first novel for adults by one of the all time great children’s novelists, Louis Sachar (of Wayside School and Holes fame). According to interviews, it began as a YA novel, but Sachar became completely engrossed in this side character, a vain middle-aged magician whose “magic” is really more like magical realist herbalist medicine. He found he needed this guy to be the protagonist, but he was afraid he couldn’t focus a YA novel on a 40-something year old man, so he decided to start over with this adult-oriented approach.
I really enjoyed this book! It’s funny, it’s written in Sachar’s classic style – short, digestible, episodic chapters, plain but engaging prose, breezy plot. Stylistically and structurally it does feel like you’re reading a children’s novel, but the actual content of the story is much more adult than his other work I’ve read. It’s quite melancholy in tone, and it gets very philosophical about aging, watching the world change around you, and reflecting on one’s place in history. At the same time, it’s got that classic Sachar whimsy, adventure, and camaraderie.
Big recommendation from me, especially if you liked his stuff when you were a kid!
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Started a biography of London by Peter Ackroyd. Sort of a loose history which jumbles up the chronology and keeps a fairly poetic tone throughout whilst also providing an accurate history. It assumes some familiarity with London’s layout but is pretty good so far. I like how it avoids a very dry chronology by just leaning into tangents. We’re gonna talk about mud and fire and fossils. Put a pin in 1066 I gotta tell you something interesting about Pentonville…
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lunchtime chats at work revealed that one of the new hires had found an interesting old book about farms and I asked about tractors
guess I’m reading the rest!
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Right now I am reading
Economic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx
It’s early Marx so it’s exactly what it says on the tin
The Fort Brag Cartel by Seth Harp
Pretty harrowing shit
Last month I read:
Tender is the flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
I enjoyed it but damn it was a little on the nose.
Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval
A masterpiece of filth
The Haar by David Sodergren
enjoyable but not that deep
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tragic that this company likely faded away before the invention of trucker caps.
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I’m curious what Haruki Murakami books people like on here, if at all (I’ve read Norwegian Wood, Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Kafka On The Shore and The City and Its Uncertain Walls)
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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the short story collection After the Quake
After Dark was so bad I never read anything he wrote after that
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I’ve ‘read’ (listened to while driving or in the bathtub):
- A Wild Sheep Chase
- Dance Dance Dance
- The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
- Sputnik Sweetheart
- Kafka on the Shore
I liked The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and A Wild Sheep Chase the most, and Kafka on the Shore the least.
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Oh hey, I read Girls Against God a while back and liked it a lot, but keep forgetting to check this one out.
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he started repeating himself to an embarrassing degree around when he got really popular in the US in the 2000s and he can be pretty chauvinist in a way that gets to even me, but Hardboiled Wonderland and the few immediately after it are a pretty good run
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He’s very chauvinist in some ways but I also find it refreshing that he insists that japanese people need to do better memory politics about their war crimes in ww2. Its such a contrast to most japanese pop cultural exports
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yes I think I probably underestimate the importance and uniqueness of his holding the line there because it’s much easier to remember when other countries did war crimes
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I remember enjoying Wind Up Bird Chronicles and Wild Sheep Chase most. Killing Commendatore feels a bit under read, enjoyed it.
I’ve read:
A Wild Sheep Chase
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Norwegian Wood
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Kafka on the Shore
1Q84
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Killing Commendatore
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
After the Quake
The Strange Library
I think 1Q84 and The City and its Uncertain Walls might be my least favourite but for different reasons. Colorless Tsukuru is also a pretty pathetic protagonist.
I think a lot of his books are basically about being a man who is sad about not having really good sex more often in his youth.
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this is what makes a lot of his less fantastical novels so unpleasant to me. Books like Norwegian Wood, Sputnik Sweetheart, etc. I’m always a little baffled when someone says one of those is their favorite, like they’re admitting to something unseemly and don’t realize it.
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