The Book Club Blog

Books for any occasion

Review- The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Ever since I read a Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami, I fell in love with his surreal and slightly bizarre writing. I have read most of his books and when Kafka on the shore came out a couple of years ago, I wolfed it down, it was definitely one of my favourites.

Then I found this one in one my favourite book shops where they were having a massive sale, couldn’t remember if I had read it or not so decided to purchase it nonetheless. My thinking being that if I had already read it, I could give it as a Christmas present to someone. And, I hadn’t read it!

Murakami has a talent of writing about the world beyond our own world. Where strange things happen, that could make no sense whatsoever but wrapped together in a story in the real world somehow just does.

In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, our main character begins to experience things which are slightly off character beginning with the cat that dissapeared, and then his wife dissapears. The story is about how he tries to find his wife and the rather strange characters he comes into contact with during his search.

I love how he connects even the most random story-well, one might feel it is random as one reads, in with the main story. How ones fate is written in stone, and no matter what decision is taken, it still leads back to where they are supposed to be.

I really enjoyed this book and if you are a Murakami fan, you should definitely enjoy it too.

Have you read any Murakami? Do you enjoy his writing?

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Review:Love in the time of Cholera- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I received this book through the book swap that was done here at The Book Club Blog and my person who sent it to me, Cat, told me it is her favourite Love Story of all time, and one of  her favourite books sitting at no 3.

 

I have never read him before, so when I found this book in my parcel, I did feel a little daunted but also pleased, because if there was any one reason why I would read this book, it would be because I received it as a gift. And I did read it, it took me longer to read than normal, but I put that down to an extremely hectic last month and severe lack of reading time (about 20minutes at bed time each night) and I enjoyed it.

 

It definitely is not my usual genre and as I said, felt a bit daunted by it, but it had an interesting story, I did find it a bit bizarre – for those of you who have read it- about how one man can ‘not’ live his life  because of one day getting the love of his life. But I think that is probably just my pessimistic side coming out. The ending was lovely and sad at the same time and just makes you realise how short life really is.  And compare it to my favourite love story ever Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins it is a world apart but yet quite similar. The theme being trying to find eternal life in order to love for longer. You would have to read the books and come to your own conclusions.

 

I can honestly say that I enjoyed Love in the time of Cholera but it doesn’t beat Jitterbug Perfume in the love story department!

 

Have you read both, what did you think?

 

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