Here are this week's picks:
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
Japan's most widely-read and controversial writer, author of A Wild Sheep Chase, hurtles into the consciousness of the West with this narrative about a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters—not to mention Bob Dylan and Lauren Bacall. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.
Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.
Pale Fire
In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade's self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue. Last Call by Tim Powers
Enchantingly dark and compellingly real, the World Fantasy Award-winning novel Last Call is a masterpiece of magic realism from critically acclaimed author Tim Powers.
Set in the gritty, dazzling underworld known as Las Vegas, Last Call tells the story of a one-eyed professional gambler who discovers that he was not the big winner in a long-ago poker game . . . and now must play for the highest stakes ever as he searches for a way to win back his soul.
Interested? Read any of them?
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1 Pages Flipped:
I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last year and I honestly didn't know what to make of it. The book takes you on this incredible journey that starts off so innocently and so ordinary and then at the end, you wind up back where you started. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing. The friend who recommended it to me said she went through withdrawal after reading it--she had no idea what to read next. I'm not sure if this will sway your decision to move it up or down on your TBR pile. But still worth checking out for the sake that it is his best-known work. Reading it has not hindered my decision or desire to read another book by him.
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