Tag: Memorable

Haruki Murakami – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle | Review

Title: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Author: Haruki Murakami

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 628

Rating: 4.5/5

I picked up this book as a buddy read with my friend Charlie, who’s also an excellent author in his own right. Buddy reads are almost always more fun than regular reads, but I think I would have still enjoyed this one regardless. That said, it did have at least one other impact because we read it three chapters a day instead of all in one go, and I think that helped me to take it a little more slowly and to savour it.

And there was plenty to savour here. Possibly one of my favourites was also the most brutal scene, in which someone got skinned alive with all the efficiency of someone peeling a peach. Murakami is a truly talented writer no matter what he’s writing about, which in this case meant that the whole scene was horrifically realistic, right down to the way that the man screamed.

I also like the sort of slight hallucinatory quality that the book has. It’s almost like a series of interrelated vignettes as opposed to a traditional novel, but it works really well and gives you something different as a reader that you might not have been expecting. I’ve read Murakami a bunch of times before of course, but he takes things in a slightly different direction here.

There’s almost something timeless about the storytelling here, and you have to give Murakami credit for that. Credit is also very much due to Jay Rubin too, who’s the translator here. I was stoked to see that when I picked it up because Rubin is my favourite Murakami translator. I was excited to see that right on the credits page, and the book just kept on getting better from there.

Another memorable series of scenes are those that took place at the bottom of wells. There was something deeply disturbing about those scenes, and you could really sense the claustrophobia. To be honest, it’s making me feel a little bit weird just thinking back to them.

What’s interesting about Murakami is that he has this knack of writing stories that are slow paced and meandering but which still definitely go somewhere. They’re the kind of books where it feels like anything can happen, and that’s what makes Murakami so readable. This here feels as though it might be his equivalent of The Stand, and there’s certain that kind of epic quality to it.

But perhaps it’s more like Cloud Atlas or something like that, because it all takes place in our own world and there are none of the supernatural hijinks that come along with Stephen King, who I guess is the closest I can think of to Murakami when it comes to making fictional characters seem realistic while writing about the darker sides of humanity.

To be honest, when I got started on this book, all I knew about it was that it was a Murakami novel and that Charlie wanted to read it. I think I had a slight subconscious knowledge of it being quite a popular one amongst Murakami fans, but that’s about it. I’m glad that the buddy read gave me the impetus to pick it up and to order a copy in rather than just waiting until I spotted it in a charity shop.

So would I recommend this one? Oh hell yeah, I was very impressed by it. It might be kind of long if you’re new to Murakami, and I think most people probably start out with Norwegian Wood, but I think this book is a cracker no matter who wrote it. The fact that it’s a translation just makes it cooler.

Learn more about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.


Peter James – Faith | Review

Title: Faith

Author: Peter James

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 470

Rating: 3/5

This is another one of James’ lesser hits, which is kind of unsurprising because I’ve never found his standalones to be particularly strong. I guess I’m a Roy Grace fan more than a Peter James fan, although I am still slowly but surely working my way through everything he’s written. It’s just that this definitely isn’t at his best in this one.

Part of that is probably because of the characters. We’re mostly focusing on a manipulative plastic surgeon and his doormat wife, who he basically uses as a walking portfolio. Bad things start to happen to them, but really who cares? If anything, the fun in this story comes from watching their lives slowly fall apart.

Other than that, there’s not a great deal to say about this one. It’s a pretty competent thriller I guess, but I don’t really have much time for competent thrillers because there are so many of them out there and they’re all basically the same. In fact, by the time I was a third of the way through this, I was asking myself why I was still reading. But I’m a completionist and I’m trying to work my way through everything that Peter James ever wrote, and so I had to keep on keeping on anyway or my brain would have hated me.

And that brings us on to something of a problem for me, which is that I need to write another 200 words to finish off this review. But there’s just not much to say, to the point at which my favourite characters were some of the minor ones who didn’t really get as much air time as I think they deserved.

What more can I say? It was competent but not for me, and I feel as though even if you are going to read Peter James, you shouldn’t start with this one. Read some of the Roy Grace books instead, or if you’re not into crime then perhaps it’s worth checking out The House on Cold Hill. I think that one’s even been turned into a stage play, which could be worth checking out.

So would I recommend this one? Not really, I’m afraid. It was just a bit of a filler read for me, and I’m hoping that the next one that I pick up will be more memorable. I can’t say that this was awful or anything like that, but I do think that if you ask me about it in six months, I won’t remember a thing. That’s actually surprisingly common and it’s hardly the first time I’ll have read a book and immediately forgotten it. Shame it happened with an author that I actually quite like though, but eh.

Learn more about Faith.