2025 Readings 38

 It seems like I've fallen behind in my readings, which would make sense because I just plowed through the end of the semester, but actually it's because I've been in the middle of some massive books: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, and Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, and Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls. I finished the third of the three on Sunday night. Murakami has a special place in my heart, partially because I will always associate him with helping me get through a terrible time in my life. As I've no doubt discussed here on the blog, I remember spending most of the first holiday season after B and I split, squirrelled away, hiding from the world, reading Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Since then I've read it several times (and doubtless will again), along with other favorites such as Kafka on the Shore and Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and 1Q84 and Sputnik Sweetheart and South of the Border, West of the Sun and A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, etc. Obviously, I'm a huge fan. Truthfully, I haven't enjoyed some of his later works as much, although I don't know if that says as much about him as it does about me: we all change. I can remember the machinations I went through to track down a copy of 1Q84 when I lived in Abu Dhabi. It was 1Q84 where I think he became much more hit and miss, and at times almost lapsing into being a gentle self-parody of him (when will one of the characters descend into a well - or receive an unsettling call from a mysterious woman while he's cooking pasta, etc.). Nevertheless, I've enjoyed every one of them, and maybe I'm just judging his latest works unfairly. The City and Its Uncertain Walls reads as a revisiting of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Kafka on the Shore (more, undeniably, the former than the latter), and at a certain point I felt that the "uncertain walls" were a commentary on his own perception of his works. I don't know if, in the end, it added up to anything, but I don't think that Murakami novels actually ever are designed to add up to anything, it's all about the journey. This journey simply feels less inspired.