1Q84 made a big splash in the literary world when the English translation was released in 2011, but only recently did I get around to reading it. Haruki Murakami is among my favorite living writers, and I always relish the opportunity to return to his weird psychological landscapes. This nearly-thousand-page novel is comprised of three [...]
Max More and Natasha Vita-More’s The Transhumanist Reader is probably the single best source for readers interested in a crash course in transhumanist philosophy. It presents more than forty essays addressing myriad aspects of transhumanist theory, with a good mixture of classic (i.e. pre-21st-century) papers and contemporary ones. It is a dense text containing a [...]
Anyone who reads Murakami expects a hefty dose of weirdness, but I think The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle set a new bar for me. This novel’s psychological density and elusive tone make it difficult to say anything definitive about it, except perhaps that it subverts the idea that human experience is definable in any consistent way. I [...]
After several years of observing the barrage of praise that’s been heaped upon Cloud Atlas by friends and critics, I finally sat down to read it, convinced it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. One hundred pages in, I’d already dismissed David Mitchell’s well-loved book as nothing more than a garish, sprawling, unfocused coterie [...]
In this novel’s table of instructions, Julio Cortázar states that Hopscotch “consists of many books, but two books above all.” The reader is given a choice: read the book in normal fashion and stop at the end of Chapter 56 (in which case a large portion of the book will remain unread), or jump between [...]