to be sorted later #5

in which I'm plotting what Murakami I'll read in early 2024

I like to read Haruki Murakami at the start of the year. There’s no real rhyme or reason behind this, other than I find his books magical and strange and absorbing, and he’s written many, so it’s a practice I’m confident I can continue for some time.

January always feels like a great time to get wrapped up in something magical and strange and absorbing, which is probably why I’ll also seriously consider rewatching Station Eleven for the third time by mid-month.

So, the Murakami: Last year I read Dance Dance Dance, which I gleefully finished on my connecting flight from Miami to Quito, my aunt Kerry in a row nearby, also reading, but probably not a Murakami. This reading experience was made all the more satisfying as we were originally meant to go to Ecuador in January 2022, but it was canceled at the last minute due to COVID outbreaks. It had been a terrible disappointment, and I felt fragile and unconvinced we’d ever make it there at all. I didn’t quite believe I was actually going to Ecuador until I was on that connecting flight, finishing my Murakami far earlier than I had intended.

When my 2022 plans to read Murakami en route to Ecuador were thwarted, I was instead stuck in my apartment, reading 1Q84 on the couch with the cats. Probably worked out for the best, both because it was wildly impractical and unsafe to travel to Ecuador that January and also because the book 1Q84 is something like 1,100 pages long. In an effort to continue my extremely reasonable practice of packing very thick books in a carry-on, I had intended to lug that book all the way to South America and back.

I’ve been going on about Murakami probably too long here, but why stop now — a thought I assume he also has while writing!

2023 was a good year for Murakami and me, as I also read Novelist as a Vocation in early February, a reading made extra special as my boyfriend Phil had loaned me his copy, so I got to see all his highlights and underlined passages. What a delight, as I was alternately excited by a line that had struck him that also affected me, or I’d think, “But why that bit and not the previous paragraph?” (This is not an endorsement of writing and highlighting in books, to be clear. I don’t do that. I’m far too busy toting tomes on airplanes.)

Shortly after I finished Novelist as a Vocation, we had one of those unusually warm February days in Chicago, the kind that reenergize my spirit and remind me that the world is coming to an end at any moment. Phil and I took a long walk along the lakefront that Sunday. We talked about Murakami and we talked about a lot of other things. We talked, we walked, and I wouldn’t have been fazed in the slightest if I looked up and saw two moons in the sky that afternoon.

---

Debating my 2024 Murakami pick.

It will probably be Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, but feel free to convince me otherwise! The Guardian tells me it’s “full of ambiguity and sex” and who wouldn’t want to start a new year like that!

If you’re not already fully worn out with all this Murakami business, you can read even more about it — and my New Year’s Day 2022 — here:

Reading this and feeling inspired for my next solo adventure.

Jess Pan’s Substack is one of my most recent favorite things, and continues to make me want to blow up my life and work in a bookshop — and thanks to her latest post, to stay extremely hydrated this holiday season, yikes.

My annual Christmas reading.

I haven’t started A Christmas Carol yet, as instead of starting on the 22nd of December as planned, I chose to fixate on my January reading plans. (No, I didn’t forget about War & Peace! It’s on!)

& to all a good night!

---

previously: