« Game, Set, Match | Main | OFIIDIM Is A Go »
May 16, 2007
Books I Read In Transition
New Total: 121
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
by Haruki Murakami
Publishers Weekly: Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.
My Review: I am SO sad to be missing this month's book club meeting (I'll be in NYC), because this book was chock full of things to talk about. I love the Japanese take on magical realism, I love how things are left unexplained, and I love how the ending is just as it should be. I've now read two of Murakami's work, and I look forward to reading the others.
---------
Salt: A World History
by Mark Kurlansky
Los Angeles Times: Kurlansky continues to prove himself remarkably adept at taking a most unlikely candidate and telling its tale with epic grandeur.
My Review: Epic grandeur, huh? Reading this book made me feel like a cultured person, someone who might pick up The Economist and make it through a whole article without stopping to stare into space (or slump over for a quick nap). The facts were certainly interesting, and presented with aplomb...and yet, it wasn't quite like I was eager to pick up the book each night for another go-round.
---------
The Secret Lives of People in Love
by Simon Van Booy
Publishers Weekly: A breadth of experience and setting distinguishes this somber first collection of 18 very short stories by New York-based Van Booy...Van Booy's characters are shipwrecked by fate and memory but tarry on, like the narrator of "Distant Ships," a lifelong Royal Mail loader who stopped speaking after the death of his son 20 years earlier, or the homeless man chased by ghosts in "The Shepherd on the Rock," who aims to "live out the last of my life" at John F. Kennedy International Airport. These tales have at once the solemnity of myth and the offhandedness of happenstance.
My Review: I bought this book the night that Mr. Pilot and I broke up, and so my reading of these stories was colored by my own inner turmoil. That said, I loved the stories. They made me ache, and I marked the book with little post-it notes for all the sentences of profound truth that jumped out at me from the page.
---------
The Art of the Start
by Guy Kawasaki
Publishers Weekly: Kawasaki (Rules for Revolutionaries) draws upon his dual background as an evangelist for Apple's Macintosh computer and as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist in this how-to for launching any type of business project. Each chapter begins with "GIST" ("great ideas for starting things"), covering a variety of facets to consider, from identifying your customer base and writing a business plan to establishing partnerships and building brand identity. Minichapters zero in on particular jobs that will need doing, while FAQ sections address the questions readers are most likely to have: Kawasaki covers the basics in an effectively casual tone. Much of the advice, however, consists of generic banalities—start your company's name with a letter that comes early in the alphabet, use big type in presentation slides for older businessmen with declining eyesight, and avoid writing e-mails in all capital letters—that can be found in any mediocre guide. Fortunately, Kawasaki does rise to the occasion here and there. He goes into great detail when it comes to raising capital and offers effective methods for sorting through the nonsense associated with interviewing prospective employees.
My Review: I'm continuing to plow through a list of books that are supposed to help me make the Big Idea a success. This was one of them. It wasn't brilliant, it wasn't terrible. I got some good ideas, but since I'm now past the "start" of the Big Idea, mostly I just congratulated myself where I had succeeded and realized where I went wrong in the early stages of the project.
