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In China there is a saying: “It takes 3,000 years of prayers to place your head side by side with your loved one’s on the pillow.”

This collection of ten short stories delivers a truly insightful look on modern Chinese history through the eyes of common people living during the last hundred years.

Yiyun LI manages to cover the sensitive topics of the Communist Revolution, Great Leap Forward, Tian’anmen Square and homosexuality in a way that points no finger yet still tells it as it is.

One story best read each night before bed.  Well worth a read.

Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Awesome.

Last Tuesday I caught the Sun fun bus to Farnborough town centre so I could grab a couple of new books from WH Smiths.

Normally I wouldn’t shop for books at WHS, but there were extenuating circumstances: now that I spend so much time of the bus to/from work I’m reading a lot more.

I’ve enjoyed three Haruki Murakami books recently: Dance Dance Dance, which I bought quite a while ago, but didn’t get around to reading; Norwegian Wood and South of the Border, West of the Sun, both of which were birthday presents from James and Kim.

Norwegian Wood is the book that shot Murakami to fame in Japan.  He became an overnight celebrity but didn’t fancy it… his response was to shut down his jazz bar in Tokyo, Peter Cat, and move away from Japan with his wife.  It’s a muddled story (as all of his books are) about… hmm, love, commitment and death.

I’d have to say that Murakami is my favourite author.  I’ve read a lot of his books: the three I’ve just mentioned, as well as The Elephant Vanishes (a collection of short stories), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore.  I like the way he describes scenes and events, turning common situations into extraordinary happenings.

But.  I’ve read a lot of his books lately… I decided that instead of picking up another one, I’d try something else.  I got a little carried away in WHS and in the end walked out with three new books: The Life of Pi, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and a complete collection of Franz Kafka’s short stories.

I hardly know a thing about any of these books but because the selection at the small WHS was so poor (plenty of crappy trainjourney novels, Mills and Boon, and other assorted trash) I was sort of thrust into picking up something I might normally skip over.  The Life of Pi was different from the rest, so I picked it up; Kafka’s short stories were easy: Murakami has made reference to this author in his book Kafka on the Shore; and In Cold Blood… well, I’ve seen the film Capote and that is as good a reason to pick up a book as I need.

I’m on Pi now and so far it is interesting but nothing as extraordinary as Kafka on the Shore… yet.

I did a search for The Tale of Genji yesterday, after spotting a complete translation in a bookshop a few weeks ago. I don’t really know if it is a story I will like but I’d quite like to give it a try… after all, it’s supposed to be the first novel ever written.

When I search Froogle I usually just type it into Google first and then select the Froogle tab. This caused me to come across The Tale of Genji, which has a fairly complete summary, background information and most importantly a comprehensive set of photographs of the temples and gardens that are used in Genji Monogatari. This is cool not only because they’ll certainly be a handy reference to anybody reading the book, but also because even as a set of Japanese temple photographs they are surprisingly complete.

I remember now just how much difficulty I had in putting names to some of my temple photographs a couple of years ago. A handy resource to have.

A long time ago now I picked up a DVD in Fopp… it’s called All About Lily Chou-Chou (in Japanese they call it “riri shushu”), which is a fairly surreal film about growing up as a teenager in Japan. I’d never heard of the film before, or the director, or anything about the film. It was purely the DVD box that made me pick it up and buy it. It’s a really light and heavily saturated green colour (of the rice paddies) with a boy wearing headphones and a CD player. It turned out to be a really great film which just goes to show that sometimes you can judge a film by its cover… or at least that just because a film has a good cover, doesn’t mean it’s going to be crap.

Anyway, at the same time I bought a book by Haruki Murakami called The Elephant Vanishes. Again, I’m not too sure why I chose this book. It had a nice cover, lots of black and white, and it was written by a Japanese guy. I like reading books about Japan. The DVD I watched and enjoyed, but I never got far with the book. It sat around on the little coffee table we had in our flat for quite a while. Occassionally I would pick it up and read a bunch of pages before getting bored.

Anyway, while I was somewhere in Laos I think I ran out of things to read. My Discworld novels were all finished and I was stuck in the middle of nowhere (literally) without anything else to read. So I picked up the Murakami book that I’d brought with me.

As it turns out, it’s not a single novel, but a collection of short stories. Some of them were utterly bizarre. One (the first, I think) was about a guy cooking spaghetti when he receives a phonecall from somebody that says he knows her. It’s all fairly odd stuff but I was pretty upset when the story came to an end. The rest of the stories were great too, though… a hungry couple randomly decide to go and raid a bakery in the middle of the night and the woman who can’t sleep.

The thing about his writing is that it’s so detailed. This would probably normally put me off but somehow he creates a scene and people perfectly… there is no doubt in your mind as to what they are like. That’s a pretty clever thing to be able to do, if you ask me. Interesting too… I didn’t really want to stop finding out about the people or the things they were doing. As I say, I was pretty annoyed with the spaghetti story because it ran out… I think this was because it was the first story and I hadn’t yet twigged that this wasn’t a single book, but a collection of short stories.

I’m not sure why but before I even picked up this book I had bought another one. In a second hand bookstore in Thailand (Chiang Mai, I think) I took in some Discworld books I’d finished and went out with a few more Discworld books and another book by Murakami… The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

I’m reading it now. It’s pretty silly really because I’m only really reading it because I’ve run out of other things to read. Good things are hard work. They’re hard to get your teeth into, that’s what I find. If you gave me a choice between watching, say, Missing Impossible: III and a newly-discovered never-before-seen Akira Kurosawa film it would be quite an effort for me to go with Kurosawa over mindless action. I don’t know why… I guess it’s just easier. But chances are that when I finally did get around to watching Kurosawa’s film I’d enjoy it far more. It would have much more of an effect and I’d recommend it to people when I’d long forgotten about what happened in MI3.

I can’t put The Wind-up Bird down… it’s absolutely amazing. It’s got everything you could want from a book… it covers things I guess I would turn my nose up at normally… it goes into what can only be described as the metaphysical or paranormal while at the same time still being a “regular” book. It doesn’t claim to be sci-fi or anything like this. It’s just plain good and it’s been the first book in a long time that I just can’t put down. Each chapter I finish I just have to start reading the next, no matter how late it is or how early I should be getting up in the morning. They should hand this guy out instead on long haul flights instead of providing everybody with three or four newspapers that all say the same thing! That’d keep everybody entertained for sure.

I almost forgot to mention that the short spaghetti story was actually an extract from this book. So I’m learning a lot more about it all. I was pretty surprised when I first started reading. Woo! It’s good!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4635874.stm

Vlad’s take on the curious whale fiasco:

“They should just shoot the bugger and sell him to the sushi places.”

I just have a quick browse of the BBC News website only to discover this rather disturbing news headline.

“Fears for health of Thames whale”.

“Fears for health”... yes. “Thames,” okay. “Whale”... wtf!?

So, anyway. It turns out that a whale has somehow decided to visit the Queen and got stuck on the way back. Way to go, Mr. Whale!