Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013) - Haruki Murakami

 

Although this is just my second experience with a Haruki Murakami novel, I’ve learned that he is immensely popular in his home country of Japan. In its first week alone, one million copies of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage were printed - and by the end of its first month in publication, all but 15,000 of those books had been sold. And from what I’ve read, this is not uncommon in Japan for a new Haruki Murakami novel. 

“A unique sense of harmony developed between them - each one needed the other four and, in turn, shared the sense that they too were needed."

 

Tsukuru Tazaki is a thirty-six-year-old designer of Tokyo train stations who has been in a relatively deep depression for the last sixteen years - ever since the day he was mercilessly kicked out of the close-knit group of five high school friends that had sustained him through the ups and downs of his high school years. Tsukuru was the only one of the five to leave home to attend college in Tokyo, but he managed to stay part of the group by returning on weekends and holidays to spend almost the entire visits home with his friends. His family barely saw him. 

But suddenly, and totally without warning or any kind of explanation from any of his friends, Tsukuru was cast out of the group. Today it’s as if Tsukuru is stuck in some kind of emotional loop because he still feels such a deep pain from being cast out of the group that he sometimes considers suicide to be his best option. But now, Tsukuru has a new woman in his life who will not commit to a deeper relationship unless he finally confronts what happened to him all those years ago. She wants to start with a clean slate.

So Tsukuru is off on a quest, one that could finally give him the peace he needs to get on with the rest of his life - or not. 

I didn’t know what to expect from Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage when I began it, and that’s probably a good thing because I likely would not have picked it up if I had. This is a novel about loneliness, rejection, and self-identity. It tells a rather dark story, and maintains a hint of sadness even as Tsukuru edges closer and closer to learning the truth about why he was so suddenly ostracized by four people he once considered family. It is beautifully written and translated, and if you are in the mood for something like this, it will leave you with a lot to think about.

What I’m Reading This Week (4/23/26)

 Although I have five books going this week, they are not the ones I expected I would be reading after just purchasing over a dozen new ones a a few days ago. Of course, my long term reading of Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain continues, but the other four that I’m reading were not in my immediate plans before…suddenly they were. I did abandon one last week that I had high hopes for, Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks. That one just turned out to be more depressing than I can handle right now, and I grew weary of every single character in the story. Had no sympathy for any of them, including the main character who is just a misguided kid with few prospects in life. That was my second attempt to read Rule of the Bone, and I quit only about 30 pages farther in than I quit on it the first time around. There won't be a third try. 

In addition to the Twain bio, these are the four I’m reading now:

Buckeye was just destined to jump to the top of my TBR. Everywhere I looked for several days it seemed that someone was talking about this Patrick Ryan novel. The tipping point was finally reached when I read Susan’s review of Buckeye over on her blog The Cue Card. I’m over 40% of the way through the story now, and I’m enjoying it despite Ryan’s somewhat dry approach to storytelling. The best thing about Buckeye to this point is the quirkiness of Ryan’s characters; the worst is how slowly it’s all coming together. But maybe that approach works well as a whole, so I’m not going to judge him on that approach just yet. I do now understand, however, why so many readers seem to have given up on this long novel before finishing it.

I mentioned Time and Again to someone last week and then couldn’t stop thinking about how much I enjoyed reading it back in 1972. So I finally gave in and just started re-reading it for the first time in over 50 years. That’s the first edition cover of Finney’s classic time travel novel, so if you go looking for it today, it will look very different - especially after its move tie-in cover. This is the book that made me a life long fan of time travel fiction, and through the first two chapters it is holding up very well to my memories of that first reading. 

Over the years, I’ve spoken many times about Elmer Kelton’s western novels. I’ve read most of them now, including the juveniles, so when I read Kelton it’s almost always a re-read. Stand Proud is no exception. I first read it in the mid-eighties when I was just becoming a big fan of Kelton’s writing, and honestly, I remember very little about it. As it turns out, it’s the story of an early Texas settler now near the end of his life who is own trial for the murder of a man who has been an enemy of his for about 50 years. It takes place in the present, with flashbacks to the 1860s when they first became such heated enemies. I’m almost halfway through it, and although it’s moving a little slower than I remembered it, the story is holding up really well.

I drove over to Beaumont last week for lunch with a few old friends I graduated high school with some sixty years ago, and I needed an audiobook to keep me entertained and awake for the 200-mile round trip drive. Without much research, I downloaded An American Outlaw, the first book in John Stonehouse's (if that’s not a pen name, it’s perfect for someone who writes this kind of book) eight-book series featuring US Marshall John Whicher. Turns out that it was a great choice for a road trip because it is so gritty and action packed that my mind seldom drifted from it for more than a few seconds at a time. It reminds me of the kind of thing that Craig Johnson writes, and I’m a big fan of Johnson’s work so it’s a good fit for me. I’m not much into audiobooks these days, so I still haven’t finished it, but I plan to soon.

So there you have it. I do have a couple of new ones sitting firmly atop my TBR for next week, but I’m enjoying my re-reading so much right now that I might just revisit my shelves again before I get to those.

Small Things Like These (2021) - Claire Keegan

 Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a difficult book to review without inadvertently straying into spoiler territory almost immediately. It comes in at fewer than 130 pages in total, putting it firmly in novella territory, and elimination of spoilers from the conversation leaves little but generalities to talk about. The problem is not with the generalities themselves; they are all positives. It’s more that without ruining the book for those yet to read it, it’s impossible to get much into the novella’s actual plot. 

But here goes an attempt to give you enough of the bare bones of the plot that you can decide for yourself if Small Things Like These is a story you want to experience for yourself.

It’s 1985. Bill Furlong, a coal merchant who makes regular deliveries to his customers, lives and works in New Ross, a town in southeast Ireland very much culturally dominated by the Catholic Church. Bill is a decent man, the father of five young daughters, and he works hard and long to provide for his family, especially now during the Christmas season when even just a little extra income can make all the difference in the world to their lives. Everyone knows him and respects what Bill does for the community while often taking a personal financial hit in order to ensure that none of his neighbors suffer during the harshest winter months.

And this is a harsh winter. It’s cold and gray outside, the shipyard has been closed for so long that people are struggling to pay their bills, and they depend on coal deliveries to keep their families warm through the worst of it. Bill is working harder than ever, but has little to show for his extra efforts.

Then just a few days before Christmas, Bill has his world view shaken while making a last minute coal delivery to the local convent. What he learns about the harsh reality of life inside that convent leaves Bill with a decision to make that is powerful enough to change not only the course of his own life, but that of his wife and five daughters, forever. Now the question becomes will he look away for his and his family's own good, or will he have the courage to do what he  knows is the right thing. 

Small Things Like These has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it actually did win the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. There is even a 2024 movie adaptation of the novella staring Cillian Murphy that I would like to see now because of its great reviews. 

For something so short, this one packs quite a punch. Especially that last sentence.

Read a Book Today - Somebody Has to Do It

 I can’t vouch for the methodology behind the survey that generated this chart, but it pretty much reflects the numbers I’ve been seeing over the last few years from numerous other sources. The takeaway headline is easy to spot: The top 4% of readers by themselves read almost half the books read in this country in any given year. But the saddest takeaway, by far, is that 40% of U.S. adults don’t read a single book per year. Not. Even. One.

I suppose that’s at least partially attributable to the fact that we have so many choices today when it comes to learning new things or just entertaining ourselves. The internet is a treasure trove of learning possibilities that offers free college lectures, documentaries, movies and television shows, online degrees, instructional videos covering everything imaginable (YouTube is indispensable when it comes to these), etc. But come on. 

According to the arts.gov site (National Endowment for the Arts), the reading slide started back in the early 1990s, and has never really stopped. There is, in fact, some indication that the downward trend may have started as early as 1982 with small, unremarkable yearly drops over ten years that really became more noticeable in 1992 when the yearly percentage drops accelerated to a degree that they could no longer be ignored. Another startling NEA statistic claims that “daily leisure reading” had dropped from its 2004 peak of 28% down to 16% by 2023. That is a drop of over 40% in less than 20 years, and I don’t think it’s an accident that it happened during the Netflix age. 

The scariest thing about this trend, though, is that it is proving true across all age groups, even children. 

So what if the problem is that it is just too much work to read for pleasure if you find it difficult even to read at all. Average reading scores in schools have been slipping for a while, and it looks like that trend, too, is going to be a long one. It is said that the average reading level among all adults in this country today is at roughly a 6th grade level. I don’t know about you, but that scares the heck out of me - and it explains a whole lot about what’s wrong with the world today. 

When the Light Goes (2007) - Larry McMurtry

 

When the Light Goes is the fourth book in Larry McMurtry’s five-book Thalia, Texas series. The main character in the series is Duane Moore, who was a high school student when introduced in the first book in the series, The Last Picture Show. In this one, Duane is in his sixties, and he’s feeling a bit mortal even if he doesn’t want to admit it to himself yet. 

Duane's wife has been dead for two years, his son has taken over the family oil business, and Duane has pretty much become an eccentric recluse who just rides all over the county on his bicycle. And then Duane senses himself coming back to life a little when his son hires a brilliant young geologist who specializes in finding productive oil reserves in fields thought already to have been played out. It doesn’t hurt that she’s as attractive to Duane as she is brilliant.

But Duane is not a young man anymore, and his heart has other ideas about his immediate future.

McMurtry published only two novels after When the Light Goes, and by this point he was starting to explore end-of-life and legacy issues in his fiction. Duane urgently needs open heart surgery if he is to survive much longer, but he is largely ignoring the problem despite his steadily worsening condition. Despite the age difference between Duane and Annie, their love story is mostly a heartwarming one, and McMurtry is honest and blunt about whatever problems (be they sexual ones or compatibility-based ones) the age difference does cause. 

The interesting thing about what Duane goes through, is that McMurtry himself lived through a very similar situation at age 55 when he had quadruple bypass surgery. He was connected to a heart-lung machine for something like five hours, and came out of the experience a broken man. He felt that he had truly died on the operating table, and that his old personality had shattered and was never coming back. McMurtry even hung the term “largely posthumous” on himself - and he believed it to be an apt label. He went into a deep depression and spent over a year lying on his sometime co-writer Donna Ossana’s Tucson couch and staring out the window. He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t write, and was completely unable to read for pleasure. Ossana probably saved his life by finally getting him to co-write Streets of Laredo with her at her kitchen table. But whether McMurtry ever completely got over the experience is another question.

I suspect that the fictional relationship between Annie and Duane was one very meaningful to McMurtry, and I think that adds some significance to When the Light Goes that the novel would not otherwise deserve. This is not one of McMurtry’s best books, but it is one his fans will want to read in order to extend the Duane Moore story for one more chapter, if for no other reason.

Latest Book Haul: From How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder to Around the World in Eighty Days

 After buying almost nothing for most of a month, I’ve been on a little e-book buying spurt the last couple of days. I’ve purchased a combination of recently published books, older books, and back catalogs from some of my favorite authors. Among them are:

I can’t even begin to count the number of short stories I’ve read over the years, but I can’t recall a single one by Lorrie Moore. Lately, though, I’ve run into her name everywhere I look, and it’s all extremely positive about her skills as a storyteller. So now I have to see what I’ve been missing. I’m not sure how many stories are in this collection, but the book is almost 700 pages long, so plenty enough to satisfy my curiosity. (2009) 

I’m on kind of a nostalgic quest to find the style of science fiction that I enjoyed as a kid, mostly stories about aliens and the exploration of distant planets - and most definitely not the Star Wars kind of shoote-em-up thing. Godfall (2023) seems to fit. Instead of the massive asteroid that seems to be headed for a direct hit on Earth, a three-mile tall alien corpse gently falls into a small town in Nebraska. Then, after the local murders begin, the sheriff in charge of keeping order in that small town has to figure out the link between the murders and the dead alien. This is book one of a trilogy. 

I’ve heard lots of good things about How to Commit  a Postcolonial Murder, and thought it might make a good change of pace read. It’s a recent debut novel, but I’m hoping the AI impact on it is minimal and that Nina McConigley actually put in the work herself. It’s the story of two Indian-American sisters who decide that their uncle, fresh from India, needs to die - sooner rather than later - for a good reason.

I’m not sure when I’ll be ready to read this Sherman Alexie memoir, but I grabbed a copy after my recent review of his short story collection Blasphemy. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is said to be a raw account of Alexie’s childhood in which he addresses the culture of sexual violence on the Spokane Indian reservation on which he grew up - including his mother’s rape as well as his own double rape. I’ll have to be in the right mood for this one, but I hope to learn more about how this kind of sexual aggression is so commomnly passed from generation to generation. (2017)

I have fond memories of reading Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days when I was a kid, so I decided to pick up this 100th Anniversary Collection Edition. It was brought back to mind last month when I stumbled on an adaptation of the novel being featured on Prime Video right now. I only watched the first episode of that new series, but the book has been on my mind ever since, so I grabbed a copy. (1873)

I read a lot of pulp fiction when I was in my teens, including the more popular westerns of the era. One writer I kept coming back to, because his books seemed more realistic to me even then, was Alan LeMay. The Smoky Years is a 1935 novel that he wrote about the range wars that caused much of the violence associated with the peak of the cowboying days. It tells the story of a cattle baron trying to hold on to his empire while being challenged by a newcomer to the area. The characters are of LeMay’s usual gritty variety, and in the end The Smoky Years turns out to be a revenge story. In addition to this LeMay title, I picked up copies of: Thunder in the Dust, West of Nowhere, and Winter Range. (I already have copies of his two classic: The Unforgiven and The Searchers.)

Unless the buying bug hits me hard again, that’s all the book-buying I intend to do in April. But May’s a whole other month...