"Wild Sheep Chase" by Haruki Murakami

On the heels of the 'Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' which, although starting slow, by the last few chapters it became my new top-favorite book, the "Wild Sheep Chase' is more organized, more 'ordinary' if that can be said about any Murakami's work, and definitely more accessible, although not as rewarding at the end.  It is the third tome in the "The Rat Trilogy" and although "Dance, Dance, Dance" continues with the same characters, the plot is completely different.

Again, the book starts somewhere in the middle of the story, and then each chapter jumps around the past and future to slowly start forming the background story.  The book start with the unnamed narrator being left by his wife of 4 years who had had an affair with his friend for the last year.  Almost all the characters in the book are unnamed or referred by labels and nick names.  The narrator is a partner in a small advertising agency in Tokyo, however all hell breaks loose when he publishes a picture of sheep that his friend "The Rat" sends him from Hokaido.  He is contacted by a powerful right-wing political figure and set on a wild sheep chase, from which his life will be forever changed.

The narrator meets his new girlfriend few months after his divorce.  She is a call-girls, a translator, an ear-model and also somewhat psychic, at least when relating to narrator's sheep chase.  Like most female characters in Murakami's books, she is quirky, says strange things, lives life by strange principles and dissapears from the narrator's life unceremoniously before the end of the book, explained in only a couple of sentences.  The narration is split between Tokyo and remote parts of Hokaido.  At the end it ends in anti-climax, nothing really happens or gets resolved.  The narrator goes back to his old life, the politician dies, the Rat dies (in a very weird, post-modern way), and everything goes on as if the sheep-chase never happened.

"Pigs Have Wings" by P.G. Wodehouse

  Recommended by many as a great intro to Wodehouse's work, this book is a classic example of English humor.  Although Jeeves, Wodehouse's most famous creation, does not figure in the book, we have a close surrogate in the buttler Beech, but even more in the figure of Galahad Gully Treepwood , the brother of Lord Elmsworth, the pig-breeder and competitor of Baron Parslow.  The plot is quite silly: two lesser British nobles are vying for the prize of the fattest pig, and when a few resourceful buttlers, siblings and servants get involved, along with a few romantic subplots, it becomes a chaos of miscommunication and misplanning.

  The book uses lots of names in the beginning and it is somewhat difficult to follow all these British antiquated names, but by the middle of the book, one gets used to them. There is plenty of humor, but it is the British kind, tongue-in-cheek and dead-pan being ever-present. Overall an interesting book and a good introduction to Wodehouse's works, but a book about Jeeves would be a better way to get to know his opus.

"Foundation and Earth" by Isaac Asimov

  This is the last book of the foundation series, timeline-wise, although not the last one written, as Asimov wrote two prequels after this volume, which tie the Foundation series even more tightly into the Robot series, to the level that Hari Seldon's wife was a robot.  It is basically a continuation of the same story from the previous book,  where the exiled counsellor, Golan Trevize, is trying to figure out if he made the right decision when he gave his nod to Gaia and eventually to Galaxia (in the previous volume "Foundation's Edge"), and withdrew it from both the Foundation and the Second Foundation, leaving their leaders furious.  Trevize now embarks on galaxy-wide search for Earth, the mythical 'origin' planet of the entire human race, now populating the entire galaxy.  He finds that every reference to Earth is carefully deleted from any and all record keeping systems of the known universe, but then he discovers the "Spacer" worlds and coordinates for three of them.

  In this way Asimov ties the Foundation series with his Robot series, which is in a much closer future alternate universe, and originally was unconnected.  He further completes that tie when in the last chapter of the book reveals that the secretive 'man in the shadow' was no one else but Daneel Olivaw, the most famous protagonist of Asimov's 'Robot' stories.   On the three Spacer world they visit, the crew is always exposed to danger which is usually only escaped by the 'deus-ex-machinae' device of 'Bliss' the representative of Gaia on the ship, who is also accidentally a very sexy woman, in a physical relationship with the third crew member J. Pelorath, a mythologist.

  The book is less of a character-based novel than a barely-disguised scientific discourse in futurism of the highest sort, about the future of the entire human race, and it shows in cold logic that this is the only viable way of long-term (and long-term here meaning millions, even billions of years) survival for the entire race and life in general, in a case where the human race is the only sentient race in the galaxy, even in the universe, though the other galaxies are irrelevant in Asimov's fiction.  At moments the book reads very slow, as the flow is adulterated by huge tracts of non-sequitur monologues, and there is not much of the character drama for which the atmosphere of the original Foundation Trilogy was famous.  Both this and the previous volume won awards, don't get me wrong, but this might have been more like tribute to Asimov's universe, than to the readability of the tomes at hand. Ultimately, a great conclusion and tie-in with Asimov's other series, but definitely not for the beginner in Asimov's universe.