Haruki Murakami, Russel Banks, and Larry McMurtry Hit the Reading List

Over the past couple of weeks, my currently-reading list has shrunk all the way down to four books. And even one of those is my perpetual-read, the Mark Twain biography by Ron Chernow of which I reached the forty percent mark just today  - with still over 600 pages left to go. I have, though, added three very different books to my current reads, and I’m enjoying each of them:

I’ve only read Haruki Murakami once before, and that was his 1Q84, a kind of dystopian, parallel universe take on Orwell’s 1984. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is very different from that one. Tsukuru is a young Tokyo college student whose four lifetime friends (two boys, two girls) back home suddenly ghost him. He gets a brief message to that effect from one of them, and they disappear from his life. Now at age 30, he is still scarred from the experience and looking for answers. 

I’m a fan of Russell Banks novels, but even though I got hold of a review copy of Rule of the Bone way back in 1994, I’m yet to read the darn thing. So here goes. HarperCollins describes the book this way: “The new rule was basically don’t bother your parents and don’t bother the cops or one of them will sic the other on you, because to them, to all of them you’re just another homeless stoned dropout dealing small-load boom to the locals.” From what I’ve seen from Chapter 1, the unnamed narrator is fourteen when the story begins, so I suppose this is a coming-of-age novel of sorts. 

Larry McMurtry’s When the Light Goes is the fourth book in his “Thalia, Texas" series, a series also called by some the “Duane Moore" series. Duane is the central character in McMurtry’s famous The Last Picture Show, and by the time this book opens he’s gone from around 17 years of age to about 65 years old. Duane, though, is still pretty much 17 in his head, and he still calls his own shots in life. This one ends with Duane undergoing major heart surgery, an experience that McMurtry himself had a difficult time getting past emotionally. I’m curious to see how McMurtry handles this part of the novel, considering the terrible depression that resulted from his own experience with the surgery.

I’ve also purchased a handful of e-books I want to talk about, but I’ll save those for a later post. Including the back catalog of one of my favorite western writers, Alan LeMay, it’s turned out to be a pretty big handful.