The 2020 Book Club Thread Strikes Back!

This year has been a busy one for books, I have read a lot and the year is only just halfway over. The books/comics I have read since I updated the last thread are:

Dead Space: Salvage: Antony Johnston.
Tiny Deaths: Robert Shearman.
Suttree: Cormac McCarthy.
We Have Always Lived In The Castle: Shirley Jackson.
80 years of The Flash: Various.
Norwegian Wood: Haruki Murakami.
Stranger in a Strange Land: Robert Heinlen.
The Rules of Attraction: Bret Easton Ellis.
Confessions of a Mask: Yukio Mishima.
DC: The New Frontier: Darwyn Cooke.
Best Served Cold: Joe Abercrombie.
Fight Club: Chuck Palahniuk.
Butchers Crossing: John Williams.
Animal Man Book One: Grant Morrison.
The Forever War: Joe Haldeman.
The Room: Hubert Selby Junior.
Superman for All Seasons: Jeph Loeb.
Children of Ruin: Adrian Tchaikovsky.
The Hobbit: J.R.R. Tolkien.
Flannery O'Connor: Complete Stories: Flannery O'Connor.
Ringworld: Larry Niven.

If anyone wants me to go into detail on any specific titles mentioned I will do.

 

What about that Murakami? In one interview he said something like it's his crappiest book and that he doesn't get why people like it.

 

The only other Murakami book I have read is Kafka on the Shore, and I definitely liked that more, but I still liked Norwegian Wood a lot.

 

I'm mainly able to read so much because I have so much free time, and I try to be disciplined with my reading, setting aside time to read every day even if I dont really feel like it. I've always been a fast reader, it just took me a while to get back into the swing of things after spending literally years reading nothing at all. I also consider reading to be the main way I get inspired to write my own stuff (along with listening to music weirdly enough,) so the more I read, the more I want to write, and the more I write, the more I want to read, and so on.

 

A few days ago, I finished reading the NIV (a Bible translation). I didn't like it very much. I've just started the NASB.

 

I just finished "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" today, and it feels so dark to me. My first time read such a villain origin story. What a fresh perspective ...

 

I am in complete agreement with Murakami tbh. It is one of the most disappointing reads I have ever picked up. And I love the Wild Sheep Chase series and Hard-Boiled Wonderland. I know I'm not in the target audience for Norwegian Wood, just too many sexual scenes, I hated the end.

 

This year I have been an inactive reader but this thread inspires me to pick up books more often.

I have read:

Most Likely to Succeed (Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith)

Unoffendable (Brent Hansen)

Break Free (Vladimir Savchuk)

Beast in the Shadows (Edogawa Ranpo)

Tattoo Murder Case (Akimitsu Takagi)

Out (Natsuo Kirino)

Body of Work (Christine Montross)

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Anne Fadiman)

Some of these reads were for college courses, some weren't but one things for sure.

I miss fiction. I am about halfway through A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole) and beginning The Overstory (Richard Powers). I should just stick to those two for now. Hope to at least have those on my list before this year's end.

 

I listen to a lot of different genres, but mainly rock/metal, various types of electronic, and some jazz type stuff thrown in too.

 

Wild Sheep Chase is on my shelf to read sometime this year. I kinda get the impression people dont like Norwegian Wood because its not as surreal as the authors other works?

 

Interesting. When I browsed around online I got the impression that Norwegian Wood is onsidered a good entry book before going at the more surreal ones. I've already ordered it from my library so I might as well give it a go later this week, I can share my opinion afterwards.

 

Currently reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I watched the movie a couple of years ago before getting into reading. The book is narrated by death and beautifully written. It's about a girl named Liesel who is living with foster parents during Hitlers rise to power. It's a story of friendship, hardship, loss, thievery and of course the love of books. An easy book to read and as always, much better than the movie.

 

Where are my non fiction homies at?

 

That's true perhaps. Norwegian Wood has its merits, I understand some might take the sex to be

Spoiler: small spoiler

more symbolic of life (choosing life/recovery over death/suffering) and a means of coping... I'm not completely onboard with its underlying philosophies, but other readers may relate more

.The time and setting of the novel make it for an interesting study as well. If I were of that era perhaps I would get it a bit more. I personally enjoyed South of the Border, West of the Sun and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki more than Norwegian Wood. Tsukuru has light surrealistic elements, but I enjoyed it becuase I see a little Tsukuru in me. South of the Border, I find the story, characters, character motives to be better written than Norwegian Wood.