redshift

We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

Haruki Murakami is an author I consider incredibly talented, with the ability to write about the highly fantastical and the apparently ordinary and then tangle the two up together until you begin to lose track of which is which. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the latest book of his that I have read, and quite possibly the best. Although I’m a little tempted to say something like that almost every time.

The story deals with unemployed Toru Okada, and his missing cat, and his problems with his wife. To start with. Huge parts of the book are, as a friend of mine told me before I read it, “all about cooking and ironing shirts and stuff” — but it’s still entirely engaging. It’s even more than a little creepy, which is part of the beauty of the thing; the mundane can be deeply unsettling and the bizarre can seem natural and right. I found myself very much unable to let go of this book — not only in the sense of losing hours to actually reading it, but also in the sense that it lingered in my mind for a long time after I’d put it down. The book deals with hidden sides to all sorts of things, from the lives of its characters to Japanese history and society; and it deals with reality and unreality; and it’s also something of a detective story, as the central character tries to piece together what has happened to cause the changes in his life. Another thing I find remarkable about this book, like many of Murakami’s works, is its ability to pin down in words things that I — and presumably a lot of other people — have often felt, but have never been able to describe.

An intriguing, bizarre and sometimes deeply disturbing read.

I say this entirely as a good thing. It’s one of the best books I have read in a long time, honestly.

I stood still for a while, holding my breath and listening, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The phone had stopped ringing. I heard no bird cries or street noises. The sky was painted over, a perfect uniform grey. On days like this the clouds seemed to absorb the sounds from the surface of the earth. And not just sounds. All kinds of things. Perceptions, for example.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included.

The Uncommon Reader is an unspeakably lovely little book. The premise is simple: The Queen, through an odd sequence of events, Discovers Reading. And then reads everything she can get her hands on, to the horror of a number of people around her. It’s not a heavy book, and it’s not a complex book, but it’s wonderful and funny and touching, all in a very (appropriately) genteel sort of way. I smiled all the way through it; not hilarious, but charmingly witty. A story about the joys (and perils and limitations) of reading. Recommended.

My name is Liz, and I’m setting up home here. I read a lot, write a lot, and soapbox a lot — sometimes.

There are a few things I have plans to post here. First and foremost are my views on books I’ve read recently, although I can hardly claim to be an amazing literary critic or anything of the sort; I tend to read huge amounts of genre fiction, and I’m not necessarily all that discriminating. At least not in the same direction as everyone else. Secondly, cookery. I’m not an amazing cook either, but I do cook more or less everything I eat from scratch, and gluten intolerance has encouraged me to improvise a lot. With mixed results. Thirdly, I may talk from time to time about writing. I may also talk about anything else which seems sufficiently interesting, but really, if we go there who knows where it’ll end.

If you’d like to know a bit more about me, well — by training I’m an archaeologist, which means I’m good at digging things up and cataloguing them obsessively. I’ve played at being all sorts of things in the past, including a figure skater, a clarinetist, a sailor, a scientist and a classicist. I travel whenever I can, wherever I can. I live in a mid-size town in the East of England.

I think that’s enough for now. All you really need to know is that I read books.

– Liz