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On 4/23/2017 at 10:28 PM, ejp626 said:

Murakami's 1Q84

I thought it was pretty interesting but at 1/3rd in, it switches from having elements of magic realism and the uncanny to a full-on fantasy novel with supernatural beings involved.  At this point, I'll finish it, but I think it was a wrong turning point.  (Also, how many times does he need to reference Orwell's 1984? -- it comes up over and over and over.)

I just stumbled across Murakami's story "Town of Cats" in The New Yorker, which cleverly edits together some of the key events from 1Q84 and boils down 450 pages into 5 or 6!  Now if he had just done that for the second half of the novel!

After this, two Canadian novels: Callaghan's The Many Colored Coat and MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night.

Edited by ejp626
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Someone asked me for a John Cage interview that Art did
and so I pulled a few of these issues out and i'm enjoying
them again. One of them even has a handwritten letter that
Art was going to send to an "Andrei", but I guess never did.

Edited by rostasi
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  • 2 weeks later...

I finished 1Q84.  It had a few interesting moments, but certainly nothing that justified its length.  In many ways, I consider the ending a cop-out.

I am almost done with MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night.  It's quite good.  I personally like it far more than his Two Solitudes or Barometer Rising.  It's mostly a love triangle with political overtones (one of the parties involved goes off to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War).  While it is a very different (and perhaps wiser or more forgiving) book, there are a few interesting parallels to Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier (which I hope to reread this fall).

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4 hours ago, ejp626 said:

I finished 1Q84.  It had a few interesting moments, but certainly nothing that justified its length.  In many ways, I consider the ending a cop-out.

If you read the English translation it was substantially abridged! Not that you were missing out on much of value imo.

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Qiu Miaojin Notes of a Crocodile (NYRB)  My impressions were very negative.  It was a boring, whiny tract, full of self-pity.  I really can't understand why this was a cult book, other than she wrote openly about homosexuality at a time her culture was not receptive.  And probably also because the author committed suicide, which always generates its own cult followers...  Anyway, I wouldn't recommend this at all.

I am now launching into Morley Callaghan's The Many Colored Coat.  I am cautiously optimistic.

 

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10 hours ago, ejp626 said:

A few books on the fantastical side.  I'm reading PKD's The Man in the High Castle.

 

For alternative history involving a Nazi WW2 victory, I can also recommend Robert Harris' Fatherland and Len Deighton's SS-GB. 

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