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GeekNights Book Club - 1Q84: Book Club Review
Tonight on the GeekNights Book Club, we bring you our thoughts on Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. It's the book club, so we'll assume you've read the book. If not, then this won't make a whole lot of sense (though this bingo card might give you a hint of what happens). But before that, briefly, we consider Facebook's continued failure as an IPO, chained as it is to the sinking boulder of Zynga, Google's Fiber initiative in Kansas City, and announce that the next book in the GeekNights Book Club will be The Man Who Was Thursday.
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For starters, the book was unnecessarily long. The first half was very engaging where it presented the characters and the various plot elements. The whole "other world" and "little people" was very intriguing. There were many things going on that made me go WTF and I couldn't wait to find out what was going on.
However, as the book went on it gradually lost my interest. There were so many unnecessary repeats of details. How many times does Murakami have to remind me about Aomame's small uneven boobs, Aomame's childhood friend, Tengo's amazing abilities when he was a student, Ushikawa's oddly shapped head, Fuka-Eri's funny way of speaking, Tengo and Aomome's hand touching in the class room, their messed up childhood, etc?
It seemed every chapter I was either a rereading about a character's past, their inner dialogue, or their physical appearance with only a slight bit of new information. It felt like I would read a chapter and find out that I had barely learned anything new or progressed much at all in the story. Everything could have been told in half the length. After a while it just became tedious reading the same thing over and over again.
There were also parts of the story that seemed to have no purpose but to increase the length of the book. Near the end Aomame sits in the safe house and literally does nothing but yearn for Tengo yet chapters upon chapters are still dedicated to her. The entire Ushikawa investigation is painfully and gratuitously drawn out. Tengo's visit to his Dad took up a lot more pages than it should have. Also, what was the point of repeatedly emphasizing him as a child prodigy when that never became relevant during the plot?
The plot itself had many weak elements. The whole Tengo and Aomome relationship is pretty absurd and unbelievable. So they touched hands as a kid and have been longing for each other since? Granted, it's suggested that they are "connected" somehow but it was hard for me to care about their love story or whether or not they will meet due to such a weak romantic structure. Also, the narrator repeating the same story about their childhood does not make me care more. Having the characters masturbate to each other's names also does not make me care more.
There is also not much of a release or climax. The resolution of some of the major plot points are very underwhelming. Such as when Aomame meets and kills the Sakigake leader and when Aomame finally meets Tengo. I was left with a "wait, that's it?" feeling. A lot of the minor plot elements are never resolved. What ever happened to Fuka-Eri? The Dowager? What exactly are the little people and what do they do? What is the fate of Sakigake? What is up with the immaculate conception?
Despite this I still enjoyed this book more than I didn't. I agreed with most of what was said in the episode, and I enjoyed the allegorical elements and his writing style. I just felt like the book dragged on longer than necessary without a specific driving force connecting the random plot elements.
Is this book suppose to be a romance? A sci-fi story? A fantasy story? Social commentary? It doesn't seem to be good at any of them.
Why does a story have to cleanly and strongly fit the mold of an existing and popular genre? Is it not actually a positive aspect of the book that it isn't just another cookie cutter tale that fits neatly in a genre?
As for the length and repetition, I like that sort of thing. How many scenes in Evangelion are nothing more than a shot of the empty street with cicadas chirping? How many scenes in Galaxy Express 999 are just the train chugging along through space? I like these repeated scenes because they allow you to experience the atmosphere of the world instead of just moving the plot along at a grueling pace.
I also like some amount of repetition. It is an important thing that allows the repeated ideas to have elevated significance above non-repeated ideas. Things that are not repeated are not usually remembered very well, even by people with good memories. Repeating an idea firmly implants it in the readers mind such that it lingers even as you read over other passages.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1695
http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Thursday-nightmare-ebook/dp/B0082S1VDM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343666395&sr=8-1&keywords=the+man+who+was+thursday+kindle
Also maybe it's just me but I hated almost every one of the Aomame chapters. Beyond the need for her as a catalyst for the plot progression I felt like the book would have been better without her in it.
EDIT: Actually I should say I mostly just hated Aomame, her chapters weren't that bad except for when it just focused on her. When she was just a participant in something I liked her situations.
Alex Butterworth's excellent history The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents.
I also admit that I'm not much of a literary type, so I'm not very adept at picking up on themes and subtleties. When the book talked about there being two moons, I just assumed that they were two moons and that was it. I never assumed they were representative of something else.
The feel of the book was very much like another Japanese novel I had to read in school and recently re-read (to determine if I wanted to keep the book longer or not), Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata. I imagine that if you liked 1Q84, you'd like Snow Country too. I didn't like Snow Country personally for some of the same reasons I couldn't get into 1Q84, but at least it's a much shorter novel.
Also what was up with Aomame never referring to her child as a child, or a baby. She always calls it "little one" which I thought was gonna be some sort of surprise but wasn't.
That is the thing with art. Much art in the world offers its entire self on a spoon to the audience. You go to see a summer blockbuster, and you walk out with 100% of what that movie had to offer. You read a book and you come away with only 25% of the treasure. Where was the rest of the treasure? It was right there in the book, but you didn't have the skill, or put forth the effort, to extract the other 75%. A book that has buried its meanings is far more bountiful as each sentence holds the riches of two or three others, if only you are able to dig it out.
The same is true with games much more literally. Most players miss large percentages of content in video games due to lack of skill or effort. Even someone who beats a game with 100% completion may miss a great deal due to lack of skill. Did you really experience the full thrill of Portal if you didn't finish some of the puzzles with insane speed? You will never know what that feels like if you are unable to pull it off. In a board game I may see underlying mechanisms which are invisible to less experienced players. The game for me is now a robbed tomb. A new place I have discovered, yet is bereft of treasures. To others it is still a bountiful orchard of fruits untasted.
I did not know how to read properly until I luckily had a great English teacher in 7th grade. For those of you who were not so lucky, here is one thing you can do to start down the path. Whatever you read next, even if its a comic book, you must keep one thing in your mind. Every word (and/or picture) in the book was put there intentionally by the author(s). Out of all possible words, why did they choose that word and not some other word? In reality monkeys on typewriters do not write great works, nor do people who write randomly and frivolously. The words of a great book are there on purpose. Discover that purpose, and the power of the book shall take you.
Let us try one that is relatively simple. Why did Murakami choose to give Aomame the name Aomame?
I listen to a book every 2 weeks during exercise and commute, and unless someone can give me a REALLY good reason why I would want to spend additional hours reading the physical book, when I can just listen to it.. Why would I ?
What do you see? WHAT DO YOU SEE?????? TELL ME!!!!!!!
Edit: Apart from the fact that I can't spell all the made up nouns, Korrae, Chorae, whatever, having only HEARD them :P But really.. not that. Is there science or is this just BS? A story is a story if you ask me.
Get a stopwatch and a page of a book. Time yourself reading the page out loud. That is the audiobook speed. That assumes you don't speed up the audiobook 2x, which people do. Now get a stopwatch and read the same page to yourself. I will do this right now.
First (Kindle) page of translator's preface to Crime & Punishment timed imprecisely with iPhone stopwatch:
Reading out loud - 55.7 seconds
Reading to self - 20.3 seconds
I guess I'm even faster than an audiobook at 2x.
Even if you pass over any arguments about possible neurological implications, there is at least one reason to read with your eyes. That is to improve your reading skill and speed, which are extremely important skills that affect every day life.
Consider how important reading speed is on the Internet. I can read a forum post faster. I can read more Wikipedia pages and research things faster. I can read a page of Google search results faster. There are so-called speed reading techniques out there, but really the only way is practice. If you are reading more slowly than an audiobook , then I consider that to be pretty bad. Imagine how good you would be at reading now if you had read all those books instead of listening.
That at least doesn't require much evidence. Practicing reading will make you better at reading.
In The Prince of Nothing, for example, there is consistent fabricated set of root languages implied by the spellings of proper nouns that add both color to the work and make it much easier to understand context. In fact, having access to this allows the reader to infer a great deal more about the world than hearing the words alone could possibly allow.
Further, a narrator brings their own bias, emphasis, tone, and thus interpretation to the work. Don't you want to experience the work directly, rather than through an additional unnecessary layer of interpretation?
Also, I hope all those typos and grammar issues were purposeful, or you're going a long way to prove my point. ;^)