"1Q84" by Haruki Murakami

    This is the latest novel by Murakami, made available in English only last year.  It is similar to other Murakami novels in style and structure, but foregoes the first-person narrative which has become Murakami's trademark.  This has been held against him by some reviewers, but it doesn't seem to me that detracts from the atmosphere and the beauty of the book.  I must say that I felt this novel is weaker than several of his other books that I have read and loved.  It is definitely the largest of all, counting at over 1000 pages, but it seems to me that it could have been at least 1/3 smaller without significant loss of meaning.  It feels like the author has tried to write an epic book, something that will be monumental, but Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, although about 1/3 shorter, feels like a story of much more epic proportions.
  The book introduces us to Tengo and Aomame, the main characters who met when they were 10 years old and fell in love, something that they didn't truly realize until they became 30.  Aomame is a fitness instructor who kills abusive husbands on the side, while Tengo is a part-time mathematics teacher and full-time writer.  Things get more complicated when a secretive pseudo-religious organization "Sakigake" and Aomame murders their Leader, a man with telepathic and telekinetic capabilities, which seem to be just the surface of his powers.  The characters move from the original world of the story happening in 1984 to another world, that Aomame calls 1Q84 (Q (kyu) in Japanese means 9), where there are non-material beings called "the little people" who "talk" to special people called "receivers" and create entities by incubating them in floating cocoons called Air Chrysalis.
  Although the "little people" are never fully explained, as other Murakami's books, it is suggested they have always shared this planet with humans and communicated with special representatives of the human race. The book is a combination of a love story, fantasy story and description of Japanese society in the mid-80s.  The correlation with Orwell's 1984 world is quite subtle, having to do with the Big Brother concept, of which the "little people" and the Sakigake members could be seen as proxies.  Overall, I was left underwhelmed by the book, even at 1000+ pages and over 48 hours on audio, it still fails to rise to the heights of "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", "Kafka on the Shore" and even "Norwegian Wood."  It is a great book, but not mind-blowingly-amazing like the afore mentioned Murakami titles.

"Conan the Usurper" by Robert E. Howard

   This volume, part of the first softcover printing of Howard's Conan stories edited by LeCamp, chronologically fits between Conan the Warrior and Conan the Conqueror.  Conan is in his 40s and looking forward to become king of Aquilonia, the strongest of the Hyperborean kingdoms.  The volume containts four stories.  The first, about a pirate's treasure guarded by demons, has been heavily rewritten by LeCamp and notes the start of Conan's interest in leading Aquilonia's rebelion.  The second story is set in Conan's universe, but only remotely mentions Conan himself as leading the rebellion.  The third story is about the campaigns of Conan and him fighting and winning over the wizard Thoth-Amon on his path to the crown of Aquilonia.
  The fourth and final story is actually the blueprint for the last (as in Conan's age) Conan volume, Conan the Conqueror, and describes the events in a more concise manner.  This is probably the weakest Conan volume overall, but Conan's allure has always been set out in those few great stories like Red Nails and the imagination of the subsequent writers like Robert Jordan, the comics franchise and the movies.

"Conan the Conqueror" by Robert E. Howard

This is another of the Conan editions edited by Sprague LeCamp. In this novelette Conan is around 46 and has been a king of Aquilionia for a while.  He got there by deposing the original kings and their dynasty and in this volume Valerius, one of the heirs of the old dynasty, with the help of a wizard awakes a 3,000 year dead wizard Xulthotun and with his help win over Conan's army and overthrow Conan as the king of Aquilonia.  However Xulthotun secretly saves Conan and brings him to the siege camp to offer him to be the puppet king of Aquilonia instead of Valerius, but Conan refuses and is saved from a death by being eaten by a giant, gray ape by a slave girl.
  Conan then goes through much of the new kingdoms gathering support for himself but also trying to follow the path of the Hearth of Ahriman, a magical jewel that can be used to bring mummies back to life and fight against the magic of Xulthotun.  Conan ends in Stygia, way south, where the cultist of Seth, the snake god, have stolen the jewel to put it in a pyramid-shaped temple of Seth and bring back to life a number of ancient Stygian sorcerers from their mummies.  Conan is kidnapped by a 10,000 year old near-naked female vampire, but he resist her call and eventually kills the cultists and the Kithai followers and gets the jewel.
  On the way back to Aquilonia Conan gathers a huge army and attacks Xulthotun and Valerius near a river which fails to rise as cast by Xulthotun's magic because the Heart of Ahriman was used against him.  Finally Xulthotun is killed by Conan and turns into a shriveled mummy, which is what he was all along.  Conan becomes a king of Aquillonia once again and frees the slave girl that helped him.
  Overall an interesting read, though too much emphasis on battles and less on monsters, which is what usually makes good Conan stories.  Anyway, written by the legendary Robert E. Howard and published last before his suicide at age 30, this is an entertaining and exciting story in the Conan storyline.

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is a seminal book in literature, one of the pillars of modern and post-modern prose.  Although the narrative is not very clear and autobiographical parts are mixed with hallucinations and speculative thought, the overall pace of the novel is interesting and thought-provoking.  The story loosely follows Rolling Stone journalist Raoul Duke and his Samoan lawyer Dr. Gonzo as they drive from LA to Las Vegas with a suitcase of every imaginable and obtainable drug to cover first a race and then a convention about drugs for police officers.  The characters in the novel are on drugs and alcohol combinations pretty much through the entirety of the book and much of the narrative describes them panicking from taking too much of some particular drug or mixing too many different drugs together.

After arriving at the first hotel to cover the race in Las Vegas, the pair destroys the hotel room where they were staying, already high on the many drugs they consumed on the way there from LA.  When being thrown out they separate and Raul Duke drives back to LA while the Samoan flies.  However Raoul turns around half-way through, after being stopped by a smartass cop and meets with Dr. Gonzo, the lawyer, who now has in tow an imbecilic girl, who's apparently a wannabe painter from the Midwest.  As she is high on LSD the pair decides to get rid of her, but she follows them until they get separated and lose her in the stupor of their continuous drug and alcohol binge.

The book is a great example of Gonzo journalism, invented by H.S. Thompson while working hiself for the Rolling Stone and other newspapers.  It is interesting that Thompson wrote several variations on the same style (and pretty much the same book) throughout his entire life until he shot himself at age 60.  This book and his proverbial hatred for Nixon are probably the best-known legacies of his literary career.

"After Dark" by Haruki Murakami

"After Dark" was the last novel by Haruki Murakami before 1Q84 and it is a little bit different than most Murakami's novels.  First, it is very short, which is very unlike Murakami, only 206 pages.  It was published in 2004 but the first English translation was done in 2007, while the audio book one even later.  The novel happens in only 6 hours between midnight and 6am, mostly in a Denny's restaurant and a nearby love hotel "Alphaville".  Mari, a 19 years old student and Takahashi, trombone player and student who met Mari and her beautiful sister Eri some time back for a pool party.

There is a former female wrestler involved, who is now the manager of the love hotel.  A few maids in the hotel also appear on stage, as well as a 19 years old, beaten up and robbed of all belongings, start naked Chinese prostitute.  A representative of a Chinese prostitution gang and a sadistic computer programmer who works night shifts and uses prostitutes regularly to get away from his ordinary wife and kids round up the main characters in the book.  A main character who spends most of the book sleeping is Eri, Mari's beautiful sister who one night declares she will go to sleep for a longer time and continues to sleep for the next two months.

The book is written more like a movie script or a teleplay than a true novel.  Often the author tells us directly about what point of view we have, at what angle we are seeing things and uses declarative descriptions like in a play script.  This detracted from the book for me and made me unable to enjoy it as much as his other works like The Wind Up Bird, Norwegian Wood, Dance dance dance, Kafka on the shore, etc.  There are not too many magical elements, except for Eri sleeping in a non-deterministic room in a non-deterministic space and world.  An interesting read overall, but below Murakami's usual standards.

"Flash Fiction" by James and Denise Thomas

This was the required reading book for my Junior Creative Writing class in college.  I never finished reading it then, and didn't find the time to do it in the following 13 years or so... until now.  All of the stories are 750 words or less.  It has become a kind of a fad in the last decade for notable magazines to put very short word limits on accepted fiction work, like 1200 words, or 900 words or even 750 words.  I never believed that one could express proper emotion and build proper characters in such short space.  The only thing you could do in such short space is write "mood pieces", a bit in Rimbaud style, a bit like emotional safety valve going off in a more-or-less connected and relevant emotional rambling.  For the most, it is true of the stories in this book.  These are the kind of fiction stories one might find inside general interest magazines or tabloids.  Not too much time investment, but still a certain payoff for reading them.  Writing short-short fiction requires meticulous planning - or none at all. It depends.

There are some definite gems in this collection.  Some of my favorites are:  232-9979, Subtotals, How to touch a bleeding dog and Deportation at Breakfast.  Still, it is difficult to get emotionally involved and dis-involved (in order to move to the next story, the next involvement) in only 750 words.  A writer can write for a certain word length (comics authors do it all the time, and the outcome is good), but that does not give the writer the freedom to let the imagination flow, there are limits, artificial ones that stifle and smother.  That is not the way.  If a writer expresses a full emotion or idea and the result happens to be under 750 words (very unlikely) then so be it, but the word limit should never be one of the starting parameters of a work of art.  This book can be read over many days, and that is probably the way to do it, but in that way it is easy to forget it it, and remember it 10 years later.  You can also read it in one day, a few hours, but then it results in a jumble of images and emotions in your head.  I am not sure which is worse.

"Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami

One of the last Murakami's books, it is also one of the more experimental ones.  Though "The Wind-up Bird Chronicles" has plenty of riddles and points left for the reader to figure them out, in "Kafka on the Shore" one feels that this kind of structure is taken to the next level where it forms the basis of the entire book.  It is a story of Kafka Tamura and Satoru Nogata, two lines of narrative that intertwine and depend on each other without the two characters ever actually physically meeting.  Murakami has mixed some US army reports from the occupation period of Japan about mysterious occurrences which have to do with the story, but also to remind the Japanese reader about that psychologically painful period in Japanese history which some contemporaries refuse to believe it ever happened, as does one of the characters in the book.

The first 300 pages seem to talk about unconnected events and some parts are so meticulous in details (like Kafka washing himself, pointing to every body part as he goes over it) that to the the Western reader, used to instant-everything and "jumprightintotheaction" narratives it might be unnerving, but, in classical Murakami style, everything comes together in the last 100 pages in a brilliant and fascinating way.  One of the main story lines is the Oedipal myth, where the 15 year old Kafka Tamura has sex with a woman who could (and yet, also does not have to) be his mother.  He also has sexual encounters with a much younger woman, Sakura, who could be his sister, but yet, does not have to.  There are strong sexual descriptions, typical for Murakami, who wants to shake up the Japanese conservative establishment.

The second main theme is the connection of the human with the spiritual or otherworldly, drawn mostly from Shinto worldview of spirits, both in woods and in cities, and gateways through to the other world hidden in special stones, forest clearings and deep woods guarded by entities which are more concepts than anything else.  This view is contrasted by the everyday reality of boring jobs, city lives that go nowhere, and work/life routine that kills the spirit of the human being, one atom at a time.  However, "Kafka on the Shore" is also an uplifting book, hinting at ways of finding oneself in the modern world as well, as long as one stays true and close  to certain symbols and meanings that make the difference between and empty, routine life, and life filled with meaning and excitement.