Category: Books

I was first introduced to Raymond Chandler via a used bookstore in Paris while I was studying abroad for a semester. I was so taken that I went out and read everything Raymond Chandler wrote, short stories, novels, essays.

During the pandemic, I thought it was time to revisit the top three highlights of his oeuvre, The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and the Long Goodbye.

This book was his first novel, however I read it relatively late in that project – I didn’t find a copy of it until after I moved back to the States. I remember enjoying it quite a lot, an impressive first novel that was an explosion of energy, dramatically announcing a new author into the scene.

Unfortunately, the book did not hold up under a second reading. There were a few cringeworthy moments in the novel which I had overlooked in a less politically charged time. The conversation around toxic masculinity certainly affected my read on Marlowe’s character, deflated the sense of pure energy that I experienced in the first reading.

It didn’t help that I was concurrently reading Frederick Frank’s Zen of Seeing, which included multiple critiques of “artifice”. Hardboiled detective fiction is doubly such, layering the mystery genre with an overtly self conscious writing style. I still enjoyed Chandler’s use of wild metaphors, but this bit of bad timing also took some of the fun out of the ride.

Thirteen years is a long time, so I’m curious how the other two novels will hold up. My memory of this book being a easy quick read still held true, so I don’t think it will be a major time investment. It will be interesting to see what my current self thinks of the literary indulgences of me, a quarter of my life ago.

PS: I did not notice this fact in my first read, but The Big Sleep was published right before World War 2. It was an interesting exercise to read it with the awareness that the story was written before the full horrors of the mid-century era had become apparent.

While digging around my books, I came across this little volume which had long ago cemented my love for Seth Godin.

It resurfaced at an opportune time since I’ve been contemplating what to do with this blog. I was concerned that keeping up this blog might be busywork that was getting in the way of doing something better, however I wasn’t totally ready to give up on the idea of publishing on a regular schedule.

I keep a platform for self expression outside of addictive Corporate Social Media to have some control my own writings. However, maintaining an archive does not mean I need to spend concentrated effort on this website. I had started and ended daily blogging over a full year in 2018-19. However, daily blogging required daily production, and with two young kids, that meant all my spare time was spent at the keyboard.  Even though I enjoy writing as a hobby, I also want to have time to read and enjoy the finer things in life, which a daily schedule did not allow.  

A few months ago, I gave this blog a slightly more focused tagline of “notes on my consumption”. The key change is that it has pushed myself towards a better balance of reading and writing. 

Knowing that I would be banging out a “book report” at the end of each instance of media consumption has created a solid excuse to regularly indulge in writing. The looming assignment seems to have been effective in sharpening my mind as I read the book. It’s an algorithm that keeps some pressure to create output at a less relentless rhythm than the rising of the sun. It has given me time to consume without devolving into a mere consumer.

Reading The Dip was down then up experience during these contemplations. The first section made me consider dropping this project and letting this blog just become an internet repository again, but by the end, it resulted in some fresh encouragement to keep going. 

The critical moment came at the end of that book, when Seth Godin encouraged the reader to decide upon the criteria for quitting before starting a project.

After some thought, I realized that this blog is not about having an audience even though I think the public nature of a blog helps sharpen my writing. Instead, writing this blog helps me enjoy the world around me better. So I will quit if it stops helping me better enjoy the world around me.

I’m pretty sure that this personal blog will not be particularly exceptional in the wider universe of personal blogs, but it still is the best internet site of my little world. So I’ll keep up this effort under this tag line, for now.

Who knows what I might find if I push through to the other side of this dip? Maybe it will just be a few months of weekly essays about the things around me until I come across another more compelling project. Maybe it will become a long running platform like Dave Winer’s blog. Maybe it will morph from idiosyncratic ramblings about my own stuff into something more public facing.

Grizzlypear has always been here for these various digital experiments.

Here’s to the current / next one.

After finding his voice in A Wild Sheep Chase, it seems that Murakami decided to explore all the genres at once. The book is fantasy and sci fi, with the mood of a hard boiled mystery and a little horror as well.

The hard boiled protagonist works well for Murakami’s typically semi-apathetic first person characters, as does the side plots of a few ladies whose attention he’s captured. However, Murakami is a bit subversive, taking an outsider’s view of the tropes of these styles, jumping in and out of the contrived silliness with bemused detachment.

In reading these works in sequential order, I’m wondering if I’m falling into an end of the world fallacy, rationalizing the author’s product as predestined in light of their past works. I had that feeling when I was doing my graduate thesis. It felt that all my previous projects was culminating in this specific thesis. But even under the stress of the deadline, I was still was keenly aware it might be my mind post-rationalizing my decisions as they were being made.

However, given Murakami’s exploration of multiple genres – and the title of the novel – I feel it is fair to indulge in this fallacy while considering this book.

Ultimately, it’s a fine novel, one where the cloth holds together, but the threads are never woven too tightly, as would be expected from a Murakami novel. The romances linger deliciously in their usual fashion and he indulges occasionally in his typically delightful wordplay of metaphors upon metaphors.

As his fourth novel, this was a fine senior thesis for his budding career as an author.

Drummer Hoff fired it off.

And so we’re introduced to the motley crew that will construct and fire the “Sultan”.

The art is stiffly whimsical in a stained glass style that is makes one nostalgic of the 60’s.

The text is rhythmical, based on a march.

The names are alliterative, each man and their rank.

The cannon is creates a big explosion, and nature returns to reclaim what’s hers.

This ending is both definitive and ambiguous.

Was it fired but once? What happened to all the characters we met?

Looking at the publication date, it foretold our hubris as we were stumbling into Vietnam.

Is it subtly subversive against the military industrial complex? Highlighting the wasted efforts of men and capital?

Or is it doubly subversive, inducing children to march to the war beat while assuaging its mildly pacifistic parents?

All we know is that the birds win in the end. But at what price?

Murakami makes the slightly absurd seem perfectly normal. This was already apparent from his first two novels. The great step forward in this third book is he modulates the flow of the narrative.

The first couple books created a uniform effect by being very flat. The Wild Sheep Chase stays within the general contours mood of its predecessors, but he adds dynamics to the mix. He doesn’t resort to anything extreme, but feeling undulates throughout the story. He’s now included a (restrained) climax.

Speaking of climaxes, these three novels are full of failed romances. Some that just leave you with a lingering longing, others just tragic. The girl with four fingers, the twins, and the girl with ears. The french major, the cafe girl, the ex-wife.

It’s odd to think that Mr. Murakami married young and has been happily married this entire time. His writing is so personal, it makes you think he himself is the protagonist. However this factoid of his biography reminds you of the fundamental disconnect between the author and the reader.

You might feel a closeness to the writer, but it’s just an artifice. It’s a novel…it’s all artifice! Murakami’s gift is making all that wacky ass shit seem perfectly normal.

And yet (like a sheep that infects your soul) it’s so true, it can’t be unreal.

I made two mistakes in reading this book. I read the blurb in the back which colored my expectations of what was to come, and then I read a couple reviews which tinted my perception of what I just read.

Normally that’s not a big deal, but I don’t think either those are good dynamics when I’m going to publish my own book report. However, lesson learned, so here are a few thoughts of that may be more or less original.

Pinball, 1973 and Hear the Wind Sing are ultimately forgettable novels. After completing this one, I’m quite certain I’ve read these two books in the past. I just can’t remember when or where.

That sounds like an vicious indictment, but I don’t mean it that way. reading Murakami is like floating down a lazy river on a moderately warm afternoon.

In that goal he succeeds thoroughly, even for his freshman and sophomore attempts. By the time you’ve completed each book you feel as if you are the protagonist who just recounted a tale from your own distant past, hazy muted memories of an incredibly strange and ordinary event.

However, I understand why Murakami was hesitant to re-publish these books in English. I would not recommend this pair as an introduction to his works, but I am grateful that he allowed them to be issued again. Everything that is special about his later works is embedded in these stories, just not as much.

I also see why these two novellas were published combined in a single volume. I don’t think Pinball, 1973 would make any sense on its own. It relies so heavily on the first book that I would say it this second novel is an extended coda. The two boys in the first book have moved on to their separate lives, and their stories are entwined only because of what you learned in the first book.

Beyond such dry analysis, it is worth mentioning that this book still tinkles the little bells buried in the depths of your soul. However it will resonate differently depending upon your age.

Murakami wrote this work in his early thirties, dead center between my college years and my current comfortable government life in the burbs. Twenty years ago, I would have identified strongly (too strongly) with the protagonists as they were navigating the moment. Now, I sit with the narrator as he relives his memories of a bittersweet past.

This book was published the year I was born.

I have an odd thing with numbers, so I suspect this is played a part in starting this new project to read through Murakami’s ouvre.

Like any other freshman work, you see both the talent and a lack of polish. This contrast is particularly highlighted when you compare it against the silky smooth introduction written in 2014, thirty five years into his career.

The book is quirky novella, where the protagonist does stuff and ends up more or less where he was, except he isn’t exactly the same. Which vaguely aligns with my memory of the other Murakami novels that I read a decade ago.

While reading the book, I got the sensation I may have read it before. I know that I downloaded a PDF of an english translation during my first Murakami kick, but I generally hate reading books online. I remember borrowing it from the library a couple years ago – though I don’t actually remember reading the book.

Then again, I can’t tell you anything about his other novels that I’ve read, aside from the covers of the five novels we transported from Houston to Las Vegas.

Hell, it’s only been a week since I finished this novel and I honestly can’t tell you what is the plot of this one either.

But goddamn. His writing, even as a freshman.

It had been a long time since I felt the fragrance of summer: the scent of the ocean, a distant train whistle, the touch of a girl’s skin, the lemony perfume of her hair, the evening wind, faint glimmers of hope, summer dreams.

But none of these were the way they once had been; they were all somehow off, as if copied with tracing paper that kept slipping out of place.

p. 89

I took an art criticism class in my first semester in college that introduced me to John Berger and Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. I don’t remember anything from my essay, aside spending a considerable amount of time at the gallery at the SF MOMA and noticing the color imperfections on different reproductions of this image.

Those afternoons at the gallery are among the few warm memories of a tumultuous year.

As for this little book, I vaguely recollect picking it up in Houston, without actually reading it. So about almost-quarter century after my introduction to Matisse, I finally read something about the man.

The book is fine, maybe a little small, but a succinct overview of the final period in his life. The writing is straightforward, but not simplistic. Now that I live in Vegas, the home of zero institutions of high art, I can’t be picky about reproduction colors, but I’ll attest that the printing is bright and vibrant.

It was a strange experience to read the last chapter of an artist’s life with no knowledge of him outside of staring at a single piece that he painted at the start of his career.

If I were to pursue it further, I’d need to pick up a good biography (which I most likely won’t do), but I almost certainly will purchase his own monograph Jazz which collected many of his cutouts.

I generally prefer artist monographs over publisher collections, since those books are usually a journey, not merely a collection of highlights.

However, highlights are famous for a reason, and I will be ever grateful for this little collection because it showed me this melancholy masterpiece. The Sorrow of the King.

This book is a cute collection of 75 nano-nonfictions. Little windows into the lives of the contributors, revealing a larger window in to the authors’ realities.

I have a standard critique of NPR radio programming that gets overless precious, and many essays comes close to crossing the line, but the photographs ground the collection.

Whatever the text may emote, the image of a “thing” to keeps the pairings from falling into pure sentimentality.

It’s a fun quick read, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it.

I have a note in the front cover that I got it from Half Price books on 28 November 2008. So I suspect this was pick up on one of the two Black Friday’s where I ended up winning a $200 gift cards from that store.

Was it worth lugging around between two cities and four houses over twelve years before finally getting read while in exile in the midst of a pandemic?

Doubtful, but it does got a nice backstory.

I heard about this book on an interview of Brian Koppelman on the Tim Ferris podcast. Brian recommended this book highly, and it makes sense given other books that he recommends. This memoir is the non-melodramatic version of the War of Art, which makes it a far superior book.

There is very little about writing in this book, but when Murakami talks about writing, it pops. Especially when he takes a couple pages in the middle of the book to discuss the three key ingredients to making it as a novelist – talent, focus, and endurance.

That passage alone is worth the cost of the book if one is an aspiring writer.

I’m not an aspiring writer, but I am an occasional blogger and a slob who has always known the need to get off the couch and start exercising.

He doesn’t glamorize running either.

Running is both the subject and the metaphor.

Put one foot in front of the other. Again and again.

He doesn’t claim any particular epiphanies during his runs. He just enjoys the solitude of running. But that is quite comforting as well.

As I’ve broken forty, I’ve become a better at getting bored. During this quarantine, I’ve started talking walks on a regular basis. Just a mile or two sprinkled with the occasional 10k.

It’s nice to exercise without expectation, not waiting for the runner’s high or some special insight. Just log a few more miles, one foot in front of another.

Coda:
As pedestrian as this book may be, it has resulted in three key decisions. Few books can claim such an impact on my life, even if it only lasts a short duration.

1. I’ve decided to read the entirety of Murakami’s english-translated ouvre. His writing is so forcefully delicate, personal and piercing, that I need to read it all. I had considered this exercise years ago, but his books had not yet been widely translated. They are now, and I have no excuse.
2. I’m quitting self help books. I’ve known for the longest time they are the junk food of non-fiction prose – quick easy reads that makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something but invariably leave you empty after a few days. Just as John Maxwell quit reading for pleasure to focus on his study of leadership, I am going to quit work related reading so I can focus on life.
3. I think I will refocus this blog with a new tag line “thoughts on my consumption”. My excursion into daily blogging last year was an interesting practice, but without a center the experiment felt rootless. “Write every day” may be a rule that works for many people, but I found myself being starved of input, since I was spending all my free solitude keeping up with the next blog post. “Write about any book that I’ve read” may result in a better balance between input and output. It doesn’t require constant output, but it doesn’t allow the blog to lie fallow for extended periods. Plus, it also addresses my great fear of becoming merely a passive consumer. We’ll see where this goes!