What We're Reading
Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on or the music we’re loving.
Ingrid is reading Haruki Murakami
It’s well known around Readings that I’m a Japanophile and that I’ll read practically any
or
that has a connection to Japan.
I’m also a huge fan of Haruki Murakami’s work, both older and newer, and right now I’m reading his 2007 memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, about Murakami’s four-month preparation to run the 2005 New York City Marathon.
Murakami’s inspiration for starting long distance running came around the time that he sold his jazz club in Tokyo and committed himself to becoming a full-time writer. Long hours at the desk meant the pounds were piling on, especially as he wasn’t doing the hard physical labour which is the lot of hospitality workers. The book reveals much about Murakami’s private routines and writing habits and, for fans of his work, these are fun insights. Unexpectedly though, when Murakami is running (he runs for a few hours a day, six days a week and has done so for over 30 years) he prefers not to think about writing at all!
My inspiration for reading Murakami’s book is that in the last month I’ve also started running because I too am spending too much time desk bound (in addition to work, I also started part-time study this year). Murakami started running at 33 years old and has completed over 30 marathons of 42 kilometres and one ultra-marathon of 100 kilometres.
I’m two years younger than Murakami was when he started running, and I don’t drink or smoke as much as a former jazz club owner, so I live in hope that perhaps one day I will achieve running greatness too.
Nina is reading The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
I absolutely loved
. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.
I picked it up after reading the surrounding hype in various US publications. At roughly 500 pages (and only available in hardback) it’s a commitment – but a commitment worth making.
The Interestings follows a group of teenagers – who meet at summer camp in the 1970s – through their lives to middle-age and beyond. The narrative jumps around in time – within the space of the first few chapters, you’ve met the characters as both sixteen-year-olds and fifty-somethings – and the rest of the novel concerns itself with the time in-between. Events that are mentioned in passing in one chapter will be expanded on much later, and secrets, too, are carefully revealed.
Some of the characters become rich and successful; others don’t, and Wolitzer examines how this divide tests their relationships. The Interestings is also a fascinating reflection on friendship, jealously, love, talent and why we are drawn to different people. It’s a big, ambitious book with a lot to contemplate, but at its heart, it’s a wonderful example of creating a set of characters the reader won’t want to leave behind. I highly recommend!
Bronte is reading We The Animals by Justin Torres
I actually read this book in December last year (my excitement over discovering it undoubtedly got lost in the midst of the chaos that is Christmas) but I
was
reminded of it just the other day when chatting with a friend. We were talking about first time novels that we’d loved and I remembered how impressed I’d been with this particular debut.
Vanity Fair
called it ‘a gorgeous, howling coming-of-age novel that will devour your heart’ and I couldn’t agree more. I felt like the wind was kicked out of me reading this thing.
Largely written in the first person plural (think The Virgin Suicides) the ‘we’ in question are three sons of a mixed-race couple. Ma and Paps married young (she just 14) and the blurb describes the love between this couple as ‘a serious, dangerous thing’, the familial interactions in the slim novel shot through with violence. There’s a particularly memorable scene where the boys are hiding in the bathtub while their parents begin to make love on the other side of the curtain that has stayed with me. Torres’s use of language is astounding and rather than explain how, here’s an excerpt from the novel on the Granta website that is definitely worth a read. I felt breathless even just re-reading this short section.
For me, much of the charm with a first novel is that the risks are evident. There are plenty of things in this book that don’t work – I didn’t feel that the ending was satisfying or well-wrought – but this didn’t change my feelings at all. I was completely caught up by Torres’s voice and style, trapped in the boys’ imagining of the world. The writing felt interesting – fresh and exciting – and that’s so often a feature of the books I love best. I can’t wait to read more of his work.
(Speaking of first novels, I’m so excited to see Colm Tóibín at MWF this weekend – his debut, The South absolutely killed me.)