dovegreyreader scribbles

1Q84 progress report...

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.

1Q84 day... the Indie Bookseller comes to dovegreyreader...

Right, look, now I know I am the worst offender...

• Yes, I do get free books
• Yes I can ask publishers for copies of books I would like.
• Yes I will often feel a little too embarrassed to do that (even after all this time) and if it is something I really want I will buy it.
• Yes I will then hunt around for the best value.
• Yes that is often on Amazon.
• Yes I do have a Kindle.
• Yes I do love it.
• Yes I am on a limited book budget

Oh I could go on and on offloading the guilt-ridden confessions but when Ron of the Plymouth Bookshops (and who we see at Port Eliot each year)  put out a tweet that he was really excited about Tuesday 18th October, and not because it was the day of the Booker Prize,

looking forward to murakami day tues can't wait free cd janacek sinfonietta with each book. Its the music which binds your soul to 1Q84

So publication day for the latest offering from Haruki Murakami and 1Q84 clearly a book that Ron rates very highly and with which there  would be a free CD with very copy bought.

Now I've had my eye on this one. It sold over a million copies in the first month of publication in Japan, and whilst I have never really focused my attention on Haruki Murakami I had always planned to one day. But this sounds like a real epic and I love the sound of it...

The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo.

Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. She has been on a top-secret mission, and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult.

Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange affair surrounding a literary prize to which a mysterious seventeen-year-old girl has submitted her remarkable first novel. It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in unusual ways. Can her story really be true?

Both Aomame and Tengo notice that the world has grown strange; both realise that they are indispensable to each other. While their stories influence one another, at times by accident and at times intentionally, the two come closer and closer to intertwining.

I half wondered whether a gift-wrapped copy might appear in the post from the publishers, which it hadn't... not even an un-gift-wrapped one. I'm sure I could have asked for one and it would have arrived, but I had decided to have the buying pleasure and nab it at £9.99 on Amazon, or perhaps the £8.99 Kindle version, until Ron's tweet that is.

Then I thought perhaps I'd actually buy into the publication day buzz and drive into Ron's shop in Plymouth, The University Bookseller.. and buy a copy there.

Hmm this is the problem...

£8 for petrol, £4.50 to park, £10 for lunch, £30 for things I didn't really need in M&S but might as well get while I'm in there, ditto £20 in Boots, plus £20 for the book, and probably £20 for another couple that I saw and liked the look of but didn't really need (that new Alexandra Harris biography of Virginia Woolf probably) so over £100 for a book.

Does anyone else have this trouble.

That's why I sometimes shop on Amazon.

Anyway  I tweeted back (and bearing in mind I am a very recalcitrant tweeter because I just can't believe people are interested in my 140 letters + spaces epithets) 'Will you have them in the Plymouth shop.' and it's true, not many people would be riveted by that.

'Yes' replies Ron 'shall I drop you one round?'..again not of international interest or likely to 'trend' ( which is what happens when you stir up a twitter storm and everyone's talking about you,) but Ron lives just over the way from us on the other side of the Tamar Valley.

'Oh yes please, as long as I get the free CD, and you are faster than Amazon?' (73 characters)

Incidentally Ron did tell me to look at Hive as an alternative place to buy online and I am...

Anyway true to his word the Bookseller came to dovegreyreader bearing the book on the morning of publication day, and I now have it in my hands (incidentally there was no way the cat was moving from that spot.)

Now that's what I call good, old-fashioned 5* service.

Cheers Ron, you're a legend.

And is anyone else planning to read 1Q84??

Any Murakami fans out there with other recommends??