Updates & Reviews... {READ THIS!}

Good Morning and Happy Thursday my lovely readers! Have you been keeping up with this month's READ THIS! book choice? In case you've forgotten (announced here), December's book to read is:


Source

Have you all grabbed a copy from your local book store? Or downloaded it onto your Kindle? Or maybe, just grabbed it from the library? Either way, I'm sure you're enjoying this fantastic novel as much as I am. To encourage your reading, I wanted to share with you some published reviews of 1Q84:

Alan Cheuse, with NPR, reviewed it as such: "The deep and resonant plot that serves as the anchor for her actions, she's longing for her lost childhood love, Tengo Kawana. He's now a writer whose movements and thoughts we observe in alternate chapters. Their story, a modern romance, par excellence, takes place under a sky with two moons and unfolds at a leisurely pace, but in compelling fashion, luring us along with scenes of homicidal intrigue, literary intrigue, religious fanaticism, physical sex, metaphysical sex and asexual sex.
Murakami's main characters find themselves drawn toward each other as irresistibly, magnetically, hypnotically, soulfully as well as physically in ways just as powerful as any characters in contemporary Western fiction. Despite the novel's enormous length, I felt the same attraction. Two moons, two worlds, a girl with 900 wonderful pages."
The LA Times writes, "For Murakami, such a statement establishes the stakes of "1Q84," framing it as no mere fantasy but rather a multilayered narrative of loyalty and loss. Such issues have often marked Murakami's fiction, most vividly perhaps in the densely beautiful "Kafka on the Shore" (2005) or the understated stories of 2002's "After the Quake." Yet in both heft and scope, in its sense of metaphysics and of metafiction, "1Q84" takes things several levels deeper, aspiring to more density, more depth of emotion, and for the most part pulling it off. Make no mistake — this is a major development in Murakami's writing; while I've generally enjoyed his books, only a few transcend a trademark mix of contemporary rootlessness, pop culture riffing and what I've come to think of as magical realism lite. Novels such as "A Wild Sheep Chase" (1989) or "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" (1997) come off as 21/2 dimensional, as if they don't quite have a fully nuanced sense of life. With "1Q84," however, Murakami evokes a fully articulated vision of a not-quite-nightmare world, in which reality goes its own way and we have no choice but to adapt."
Finally, my favorite review comes from Michael Dirda at the Washington Post: "There’s no question about   the sheer enjoyability of this ­gigantic novel, both as an eerie thriller and as a moving love story. Nonetheless, Murakami doesn’t neatly solve all its mysteries or tie up all his threads. “1Q84” also treads close to being a grandly conceived yet still slightly pulpy melodrama, something like a more fantastical “Atlas Shrugged.” There’s even a cliffhanger at the end of nearly every chapter. For me, though, there’s just no getting round two crucial facts: I read the book in three days and have been thinking about it ever since."
I cannot wait to finish this wonderful, albeit massive, story and I hope you can't wait too! I'd love to hear your thoughts on it so far - do you love it or hate it? If you haven't started it yet - there's still time!  

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