Book 112: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

I started out liking this novel a lot and while I didn't stop enjoying it, I did feel like maybe it was a bit longer than it needed to be by the end. I think part of the problem is that I expected all the different loose threads in the novel to somehow come together in the end and they didn't except for in the vaguest ways and even then only by conjecture on the part of the reader. And many of these threads were interesting which is why it was so disappointing to me when they ended up not really going anywhere or just hanging loosely in the story.

I have to give it to Murakami, though - he takes a story about an unemployed man in his late twenties/early thirties who is simply lounging around and makes it interesting for six hundred pages (maybe that's why he had to throw in all those loose threads).

I'm kind of half-assing this review but I kind of took a break while reading this novel to read Lehane's The Given Day so I'm sure that affected the way I felt about the novel. I actually liked the writing style quite a lot even if the main character just seemed to kind of float along with all the craziness that was happening in his life at times.