Books and Literature

[Kat]

On 11/4/2018 at 12:33 AM, dheu said:

I'm dredging this thread out of the depths of the Space Junk section, all because I want to see Yuzu's Helsinki LP but there's too many hours to go until then...  I've got to amuse myself somehow!

 

There are a lot of posts on here (from a long time ago ) about Haruki Murakami.  To be honest, I have a love-hate relationship with his books.  For instance, I love "Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World" (it's one of my favorite books) but many of his other books I can't get into, such as "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle".  I really tried with that one, but I just couldn't appreciate it, even after making it to the end.  It combined the mundane inanity of thorough descriptions of every day actions like making spaghetti (which felt like it happened every other chapter) with such bizarre situations that I couldn't follow the thread of the book.  The most memorable part of the book for me was the story told by the officer who ended up in the well, which I still remember, even though I can barely remember what the main character did throughout the book (except make spaghetti).  "Hardboiled Wonderland" was a revelation to me.  I think I was hoping "Chronicle" would be the same.

 

But I've never really been a huge fan of contemporary fiction anyway.  My tastes in books are kind of backwards.  When I was a child, I was reading books like Les Miserables, the Brothers Karamazov, and the Count of Monte Cristo.  Now that I'm an adult, I read young adult fiction.  I guess I'm just weird.  

 

 

Murakami reminds me of Kafka. I cant get into anything overly surreal. Magic realism is another I struggle to get into, but I enjoyed his more recent "Men Without Women", it was a collection of short stories.

 

My go too's tend to be history, memoirs, bio/auto bios, and then fiction.

 

History: The Romanovs, Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar, Stalin's Nomads, Mao's Cultural Revolution

 

Memoirs: Remembering Shanghai, Threading My Prayer Rug, Lady Death: Stalin's Sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Secondhand Time: Last of the Soviets, Voices from Chernobyl

 

Biography: The White Boned Demon: Madame Mao, Wallace in Love, Empty Mansions

 

Autobio: Where the Past Begins-Amy Tan

 

Fiction: Anna Karenina, Dreams of a Red Chamber

 

Fiction is really hurting right now. I cant seem to read it at all anymore-at least since quarantine began. Really, even history is getting hard. Memoirs and Bio's tend to be my greatest source of escape and distraction. I bought several other fiction novels, but I cant get into them. They sounded interesting and something right up my alley, but I cant muster up the energy, or absorbed myself into one long enough it seems.