The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle!!!

Title: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Author: Haruki Murakami

DOP: 1997

This book is amazing! I found it at a book store two days ago, after seeing it on display and remembering that a friend of mine read it and highly recommended it. At first I was a bit skeptical, I had read one of this author's earlier books, and although I liked it alright, it wasn't great. However, this is one the best books I have read in a very long time. I've only had it three days and I've already read 128 pages, which may not seem like that much, but is a lot for me. The book follows the story of a 30ish year old man living in Tokyo named Toru Okada. It describes his life including his disenchanted marriage, the quitting of his job, and the search for his lost cat. There is a strong element of mystery involved in the book that causes the reader to question and examine each characters' motives and behaviors. Also present is a sense of the super natural. Several characters have some vague psychic abilities and are able to tell the future in some way or another. There's also a haunted house which seems to hold the answer to many of the books mysteries. The Japanese culture that gets infused into the book also makes it a very interesting read. So far this is shaping up to be an amazing book with a very strong story line and well developed characters.

Well I Got Tired of My Book...

I've stopped reading Stranger In A Strange Land. I made this decision about a week ago and I haven't looked back since. There were many reasons I decided to stop reading it and I will list these reasons in the following blog. The book has an interesting enough idea for a plot and it wasn't particularly poorly written, it just didn't do a very good job of keeping my attention. It wasn't exactly what I would call a "page-turner". I only got about 30 pages into it but at the point I got to the events were moving very slowly, too slowly for my liking. All that had really occurred was this odd man from Mars had been discovered and he was now being held in a scientific lab and was undergoing a series of studies. The language was a little drab and boring; you can only be so interesting when discussing tests to run on a man from another plant. Another thing that contributed to me putting down this book was the fact that I had just read a heavily science fiction book, and although I find it to be a very interesting genre, one can only take so much of the sci-fi formula consisting of aliens, robots, space travel, and scientific jargon. I'm glad I decided to stop reading this book because it led me to the discovery of a truly amazing book...