I've now read 5 Haruki Murakami novels - 'Wind-up Bird Chronicles', 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland', 'After Dark', 'Kafka By the Shore', and 'Sputnik Sweetheart'. I vowed myself I'd branch out to other authors but I have repeatedly been rewarded by his novels, so it has been hard to turn away reading yet another one. And now I'm am currently 40% into 1Q84. Besides these, I've enjoyed reading Salinger, history on Elizabeth the Great, The Lover, and am just dipping into a helpful book on reading and writing.
On Salinger, I intend to return to his 'Nine Stories' once it arrives, following 1Q84. I just placed an order for it, as well as 'Franny and Zooey', which I read in November and couldn't believe how much I related to Franny at the time. I've also read 'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter', and 'Seymour, an Introduction', which continued by obsession with the character, Seymour Glass, and made the name an instant time-portal.
As I was walking one day, I stumbled upon loose pages of a book, and felt fully rewarded when I reassembled all the pages I could find. It is a history book on Queen Elizabeth, 'Elizabeth the Great', by Elizabeth Jenkins. Not very far into the book, an earl by the name of Seymour is introduced as a problematic figure in Elizabeth's life, and I was stunned by how often I'd been seeing the name. (A family friend of ours calls this the 'white Honda effect'. Once you get a white Honda, all you see are white Hondas.)
It takes me longer to read this book, since it is more informative than narrative, and more difficult to follow. In addition, there are sections missing, and names of European nobles all seem to be Mary, Elizabeth, Jane, Henry, John, and so on, both making it a crazy memory and google game to keep track of everything. Yet, it is eloquently written, and I've underlined many sentences that I admire for their clarity and poetry. Another one of my projects is to write enough poems or inserts to replace all the page gaps, then rebind it together in a sort of history-poetry collaboration.
At my friend Kay's recommendation, I read 'The Lover' by Marguerite Duras a few weeks ago. Since I couldn't find it on my library app, I ordered a hard-cover, with the original picture of the author upon the front. The story is not ordered in the typical manner; it made me feel as though I was trying to remember exactly what happened in a relationship, exactly who these people were, and why they were that way, but the memories only came to me in flashes - in poetic paragraphs. It's an intense, emotional, and often starkly honest story about a Lover, but is more about the main character's sorting through the past, and attempting to release or capture the events properly. I agree with suspicions of it being near to the author's own past, as it is filled with remarks that I find hard to be contrived.
Lastly, I am currently reading 'Reading Like a Writer' by Francine Prose, as a educational supplement to all this fiction, and I suppose as a simple replacement for my ideas of creative writing grad school. I am no too far in yet, but she has already stated the importance of each word and each sentence, and supports her claims with excerpts and clear description, and I don't doubt I will gain much from it.
More on 1Q84 to come soon.
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