muninnhuginn | Book Tally 2005 (Reply)

I've kept lists, on paper, of books read over various periods of time. This time, without the risk of losing the pieces of paper, I'm as much interested in the fiction/non-fiction split. I seem, I think, to have morphed from a reader almost entirely of fiction to a reader of mainly non-fiction, mostly history. Somewhere along the way, poetry seems to have dropped right of the map. This end of the year, the contents are likely to be skewed by the nature of whatever we received as birthday or Xmas presents. Being a fairly slow reader, I don't suppose the list will be long: I'm not even expecting to clear the backlog (about 70 unread or part-read volumes alongside the futon).

So, to start out:

Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, fiction, Xmas present from J
Hardly earth-shatteringly novel after two consecutive Jonathan Carrolls, but well-worth the read, despite the annoying translation: too American--use of the phrase "the longest time" always makes me want to scream--and I don't need hibachi translating by way of a description ("ceramic brazier"). All the same, there were a handful of telling images:
In a sunken area in the middle of the coffee lounge, a woman wearing a bright pink dress sat at a cerulean blue grand piano playing quintessential hotel-coffee-lounge numbers filled with arpeggios and syncopation. Not bad actually, though not an echo lingered in the air beyond the last note of each number.
and
Still, it was unsettling seeing with my very own eyes a scene I had by now seen hundreds of times in a photograph. The depth of the actual place seemed artificial. Less my being there than the sense that the scene had been temporarily thrown together in order to match the photograph.