After selling more than one million copies in its first week of publication in Japan in April 2013, ‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage’ by Haruki Murakami has been one of the most highly anticipated novels of the year arriving in bookshops in the UK earlier this month. It tells the story of Tsukuru Tazaki who had four friends in high school whose names all coincidentally contained a colour: Akamatsu (‘red pine’), Oumi (‘blue sea’), Shirane (‘white root’) and Kurono (‘black field’). During his second year of university, Tsukuru’s friends announce without warning that they no longer want to see him or talk to him ever again and refuse to tell him why. Now in his mid-thirties, Tsukuru meets Sara who thinks he should finally come to terms with what happened and find out why he was suddenly shut out by his friends all those years ago. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: August 2014
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
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Top Ten Quotes About Reading
From the works of Cicero (“A room without books is like a body without a soul”) to George W. Bush’s pearls of wisdom (“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures”), there are thousands of quotes about the wonders of reading. Here are a few of my favourites:
10) “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.” (Keith Richards)
9) “It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them.” (Schopenhauer)
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The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller
‘The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life’ is Andy Miller’s account of his journey through reading fifty books he had always intended to read. After years of pretending to have read classic novels he had never even glanced at and realising that the only book he had read was ‘The Da Vinci Code’ by Dan Brown in the three years since becoming a parent, Miller set about finally getting round to some of the great works of literature which had passed him by for so long. Continue reading
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Revenge by Yoko Ogawa and The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke
August is Women in Translation month hosted by Biblibio and I have recently read two works of translated fiction written by women which were both shortlisted for this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Firstly, there’s ‘The Mussel Feast‘ by Birgit Vanderbeke which is a novella translated from the German by Jamie Bullock and was originally published shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The second is ‘Revenge’ by Yoko Ogawa which is a collection of eleven loosely connected short stories translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder.
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The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker
‘The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair’ by Joel Dicker tells the story of Marcus Goldman, a young author suffering from writer’s block after the success of his debut novel. His former professor and mentor Harry Quebert is arrested and charged with the murder of his fifteen-year-old lover Nola Kellergan who is found buried on his property in New Hampshire thirty-three years after she disappeared. Marcus becomes obsessed with solving the mysteries surrounding Nola’s disappearance and starts investigating what really happened all those years ago. Continue reading
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Penguin defends “creepy” new cover of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Although the saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is supposed to be metaphorical, the controversy surrounding the new Penguin Modern Classics edition of Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ suggests that many readers care about actual book covers quite a lot. Variously described as postmodern, sexualised, creepy and downright terrifying, the new edition of Dahl’s best-loved book released next month ahead of its 50th anniversary has provoked some very strong reactions from readers and critics this week.
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Parade by Shuichi Yoshida
Set in Tokyo, ‘Parade’ by Shuichi Yoshida tells the story of four twenty-somethings who share an apartment together. However, when a homeless teenager called Satoru moves in, nobody seems very sure who the newest resident really is, why he is living there or if he is connected with the shady activities of their neighbours and the recent violent attacks on local women. Or, as Yo Zushi writing in the New Statesman put it: “Imagine if Friends had ended with the revelation that Chandler was a psychopath – and that Joey, Monica, Ross, Phoebe and Rachel weren’t bothered by it.” Intrigued? I certainly was.
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