Zen > Recent Status Updates

Compulsive and creepy ...

Darned if I can find the penguin classic listing of the version I'm reading. Never mind. So long since I read this, I'm holding off on the movie till after the re-read ...

I have been thinking of all you lovely people - but unfortunately I had to leave on an emergency flight from Australia to the UK last week - hence my absence here. My mum passed away on 13/5/13 with end stage MS. I made it in time and was blessed to have six days to nurse her. She is out of suffering now. Much to arrange and a gambit of emotions, but I will pop in and out on GR as I can x Take care all x

This seemed like the next logical choice, given all the Hustvedt cues of the past couple of days!

"Whenever I feel like I don't want to run, I always ask myself the same thing: You're able to make a living as a novelist, working at home, setting your own hours, so you don't have to commute on a packed train or sit through boring meetings. Don't you realise how fortunate you are? (Believe me, I do). Compared to that, running an hour around the neighborhood is nothing, right?"

How I love traveling into Murakami's alternative universes. Every time I encounter another one I'm riveted to the page.
"Then came the sound. A clicking of heels, high heels. Echoing eerily off the ceilings, bearing a weight ... the dry weight of old memories. All of a sudden, I was wandering through the labyrinthine viscera of a large organism. Long dead, cracked, eroded".

Put it down for a while, now picking it up to finish :)

Always such a lot of feeling amidst the bizarre. Murakami makes you care.
"The next thing I knew the room was flooded with silence. Waves of helplessness washed over me. I needed to rouse myself. I closed my eyes and counted from one to ten in Spanish, ending in a loud finito and a clap of the hands. One of the many skills I'd acquired living alone. Without these tricks I may not have survived"

Continuing my year of Murakami. Finally bought this one. Now for a second reading (and a re-rating).

My LT profile:
http://www.librarything.com/profile/Z...
Hoping to be able to continue keeping company HERE with those reviewers I have already been inspired by. Best case scenario: Things go well at GR and we happily continue here. Back up option, see above.

UPDATE: After much troubleshooting I finally figured out how to import books into LT. Turns out it was a file format problem. My excel file kept defaulting into 'workbook' instead of csv. Solved.

How absolutely frustrating trying to import books into a newly opened LibraryThing account. All I end up with is an excel file and when I try 'select file to import' and click on my saved excel file, then select 'upload file' it merely tells me 'there are no books in your file'. Which there are - in the excel doc at least. I actually thought this might be fun - an alternative cataloging system, but not working! Help?

'Suddenly our doors opened. Some odd looking characters, dressed in striped shirts and black trousers leapt into the wagon ... They began to strike out to right and left, shouting: 'Everybody get out! Everybody out of the wagon! Quickly!" We jumped out ... In front of us flames. In the air that of burning flesh. It must have been about midnight. We had arrived at Birkenau, reception centre for Auschwitz.'

Checking this out as it's had a widespread affirmative response. It's a quick and quirky read, so I'm scanning, but not something I'm inclined to spend a lot of time with. Very humorous though so far.

What a breathtaking, wondrous journey this book takes you on. Thoroughly transported at this point.

"Mr Hoshino, I don't know how many times I have to say this, but I'm not dressed up as anybody. I am Colonel Sanders. Don't get mixed up here, all right?"

"Ok ... But if you're the real Colonel Sanders, what the heck are you doing working as a pimp in a back alley in Takamatsu?"

Anywhere else this would be tacky. Johnny Walker (whiskey man) and Colonel Sanders (fried chicken man) in the same novel. Classic.

Spent Saturday morning at the monthly half-price book sale. Talk about look forward to it! (As well as the fun of uploading to my shelves). Some great funds today, but the best has to be a flawless hard-back copy of Don DeLillo's magnum opus, 'Underworld'. Something deeply satisfying about swimming in the stream of pre-loved books - and re-housing them.

The Oedipus prophecy enters the book. "Some day you will murder your father and be with your mother".

So glad to be finally reading Murakami's Kafka, the most thoroughly cat-ridden of any of his books I've read so far. I'm jealous. If only I could talk to cats too.

"Now I know how dangerous the forest can be ... I'd never imagined that trees could be so weird and unearthly ... [The trees here] have a physical power, their breath grazing any humans who might chance by, their gaze zeroing in on the intruder as though they've spotted their prey. As though they have some dark, prehistoric, magical powers."

"That person's shadow, too, looked as though half of it had become separated from him. It was as faint as yours".
"I see."
"What I think is this: you should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow."
And so the conversation goes between Nataka and Otsuka, the cat. Cats and shadows again! But you know, it never gets old.

Dear Ernest,
I realise you're one of the literary heavyweights, but I'm leaving you for Haruki.

"A language of ideas is, in itself, a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time. We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations"