Iarla

honestly i saw the ending coming

the ending to this made me a lot sadder than i was expecting

the copy of this i got for my kindle ended really abruptly at 75% (the last 25% was the final chapter repeated again for some reason) through and i think that actually suits the book very well

story of your life is definitely the highlight of this collection, with tower of babylon in a closeish second. the rest of the stories, though, failed to really hook me, and a few of them like understand or liking what you see just sort of annoyed me

im definitely going to be continuing this trilogy. bar all the pop culture shit, this is what i pictured in my head when i heard about Ready Player One as a 14 year old.

i think murakami is like literary comfort food for me. the prose is simple enough i can read fast but feels very meaningful (even though im not sure i ‘got' this book - not in its entirety). a part of me wishes it had been a bit longer, but considering the setup of it taking place over a single night, had much more happened it would have felt a bit too hectic

also theres no way this many japanese businesses were just casually playing jazz cds in 2004

6 stars

v depressing but not in a v impactful way i guess

a good read if u feel very aimless as long as u watch out for the (lots of) weird writing of women. i feel like i didnt get some of it, but i think i did actually and there wasnt a ton there for me to have gotten. but it was pretty good overall. more of a 3.5 than a 4 but no half stars allowed on this site i guess

i didnt read any of the 50 page long appendix because it took me so long to read i was really bored by the end. it was good though

really fantastic book and incredibly moving. chris mccandless was a very complex person and it feels like this book does a good job of capturing some of what made him tick
i also highly recommend waiting until after finishing the book to look up the photos he took

extremely cleverly written, gets you asking all the right questions as to solving the case and yet you still never figure things out quite right until it's all revealed

one of the funniest smartest things i've read in my entire life

quite good probably but the fairly dense writing gets a bit tiring after a while and i wish they wouldn't talk about being In The Hands of God so much.

the actual writing was quite nice a lot of the time but the premise the world was built around was fundamentally ridiculous and the author doesn't do much work to make that mesh with the rather serious and straightforward plot. this isn't really like other dystopian novels where everything is allegorical and maybe a little tongue in cheek sometimes- this is mostly just about its central premise and how horrible a world like that would be. that doesn't really work when a lot of the worldbuilding is so absurd i thought it was satirical at times.

speaking as a night vale superfan, this book is funny and witty in the same way the podcast is but i found myself getting inexplicably very annoyed at the narrative and characters towards the last fifth of the book or so. i'm not sure if this universe is built for full length plots like this