The first book was by one of my favourite authors, Haruki Murakami. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a memoir of sorts and not surprisingly, finds Murakami talking about his passion for running. His fervour is evident and was genuinely impressed to find out he had run about 26 marathons at time of publication and trains nearly every day while maintaining a writing career. Despite being a lover of his fiction, I struggled a bit with this one. I found it rambling and even though I could relate to a lot of it, the philosophies and thought processes could quite easily be supplanted into any other discipline, it felt quite self indulgent. It may have something to do with the translation, Murakami always writes in his native Japanese. I can't recall the name of the translator but it certainly wasn't Jay Rubin, master Murakami translator. I'm probably talking nonsense though, what do I know?
Anyway, I think I'll stick to his fiction from now on.
Second up was 'Eeeee Eee Eeee' by Tao Lin. My first foray into his work. I can honestly say I've never read anything like it before, very unconventional yet I loved every page. I find it hard to write about this one as it was often hard to work out what was happening at any one time! Dolphins, bears and sometimes moose co-exist with humans in a strange world where the President is an alien, Elijah Wood gets clubbed to death by a bear and Salman Rushdie plays poker. Disaffected youths talk to each other in short, abrupt sentences which are ridden with obsession and frustration. Often laugh out loud funny and dark in equal measures. If you want something different, read this book.
I feel like this blog is in danger of becoming a place where I talk about books. That was not my intention and I'm not exactly qualified to be a book reviewer. I promise to talk about other stuff too.
