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Showing posts from March, 2016

'Like the secretive, quiet fall of rain, they steal into the gloom'

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T hey say that surrealist author Haruki Murakami captures the 'common ache' of the 'contemporary heart and mind'. I thought this was a pretty spot-on description of some of his best short stories. I began reading Murakami in 2007, and he was a writer whose work and style resonated so strongly for me at that time where I'm confronted with the ambiguities of daily existence. He will always hold a special place in my heart as one of my favorite writers, although I will honestly say that over the years I've grown less affected of his stories than when I was a teenager which I think is for the best.  However, since life is indeed fickle, I once again found myself in another low point last year, and thus continue to heal from that to this day. Reading The Elephant Vanishes  was a most welcome endeavor then, because if there was any author that understands how inexplicable and often unknowable one's self is, it's Murakami-sensei. Composed of seventeen

A life may only be a sum of all its tiny events

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I was curious about Will Self as an author since I've seen numerous copies of his books around, and I found the premise of most of his novels to be both strange and promising. I originally began reading Great Apes  last year but found myself not in the mood for it at all, so I sadly had to put it aside. I finally got around to start reading his anthologies first, and Grey Area , I suppose, was a good place to start as any. Comprised of nine tales, this collection was an incredibly odd mix of the bizarrely mundane, the seemingly sinister, and the unintentionally comedic. Self' prose is quite an extraordinary feat of imagination and discipline; a breadth of ramblings that are far too technical and dry to be ever deemed as any kind of literary eloquence.  Frankly, I'm not even sure I wholly enjoyed the experience of reading this book. I think there were times I was too baffled by the style and command of his language and descriptions to ever just connect with a stor

MARCH List of Readables

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