Cover Design by John Gall for Vintage International
BOOKS READ 17: THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE BY HARUKI MURAKAMI
This book took so long to get through.
It is quite hefty, a little over 600 pages.
It was definitely a chronicle.
It was a chronicle in the sense that this book started out with this simple man with a simple problem and it escalated into this intense, complex, and crazy story with all these crazy elements.
There were parts that were slow to get through, parts that were really difficult to read, which is interesting, it was maybe the second time where I had to actually stop reading a book and collect myself before I could read past where I stopped. These parts were insanely violent, scenes that begin to haunt you when you see traces of it in your own life, things that once you begin to fathom you do not want to comprehend because of the immense pain that can be inflicted onto another so easily. And then there were parts of the book that were you know, good, worthwhile.
When I had first started the book, I was like, you know I am going to take my time with this, not rush through anything, because I noticed I was doing that with past books, and to be respectful of Murakami and reading and whatever, I was going to allow the time needed to read this book. But I could only get through like 5 pages a night. There was just so much to take in, and the amount of pages was daunting, not to mention just trying to even hold the book in a comfortable position in bed was a pain. And there were such large gaps in between when I would read this book and I just ended up forgetting what was happening. So this week and weekend I sat myself down and ploughed through this book, and for me, this is how the book should be read, in a continuous flow, completely consumed.
And then it didn’t feel so long.
