Sorry to go on, but what a glorious surprise this book is proving to be. I hadn't realised quite how ready I was for a completely new reading direction, or that I would be totally and utterly mesmerised by Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, and I can see the sense and pleasure, if only it were possible, of this approach to reading it as recommended by the Los Angeles Times...
Here's an unorthodox suggestion: Try to read Haruki Murakami's "1Q84" in as close to a single sitting as you can. It won't be easy — the novel clocks in at 926 pages and is often densely allusive, if readable throughout. Still, there's something about the book that requires the deep immersion, the otherworldly sense of connection/disconnection, that only an extended plunge allows. You want to get up from these pages feeling groggy, as if you've been wrenched out of everyday experience, drawn into a landscape where the boundary between reality and imagination has been rendered moot.
I can see exactly how that would work here because 150 pages in the book is completely hypnotising and has been very difficult to put down, it really is a wrench to leave this increasingly strange world that Murakami describes, peopled by even stranger, slightly off-kilter characters doing even more slightly off- kilter things
I'm not sure if this is typical of his style or not, I'll leave that to all you experts out there, but what should at times be seemingly monotonous if not boringly excessive detail has me gripped and engaged at every level and with a narrative voice that I love. Every detail matters and I don't want to miss a single thing.
Thankfully all this coincides with a week off work and some travel, so plenty of reading time to come and thank goodness there will be no year-long-interest-sapping wait for Book Three, out next Tuesday.
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