It’s not only boy wizards and teen vampires who can still ignite a book frenzy: as already reported in The Rumpus, Haruki Murakami’s two-volume (or longer?) new novel 1Q84 came out this week in Japan. It has already broken sales records and is “on track to sell a million and ‘become a social phenomenon,’” according to the publisher.

Many of Murakami’s fans were disappointed when plot information leaked out before Kafka on the Shore was published, so he clamped down, and speculation has been rushing to fill the news vacuum for months. Plausible guesses include a riff on Orwell’s 1984 (“9” and “Q” are pronounced the same in Japanese); an homage to Lu Xun’s True Story of Ah Q ; and the X-ray crystallography identifier for mouse acetylcholinesterase.

Enter Daniel Morales, of the excellent blog How to Japonese, who decided to liveblog his first couple days reading the book. Why? He starts with a great story about the only kind of professor there should be—the kind who takes his Japanese literature students and former students out to cheer on an unsuspecting and befuddled Murakami as he climbs Heartbreak Hill in the Boston Marathon. “It doesn’t make sense,” the professor says, “but we’re not doing it because it makes sense.”

Morales gets Friday off work, he scores an early copy of the book, he gets up at 5:56 a.m. with a fanboy squeal, and the madness begins!

Lots of mistranslations, lots of booze (including a beer called Norwegian Wood from the best beer store in Japan). Reading at its best:

7:45 It’s a magical taxi?

…

8:37 Great sentence: 「録音された拍手を長く聞いていると、そのうちに拍手に聞こえなくなる。終わりのない火星の砂風に耳を住ませているみたいな気持ちになる。」 This is spoiler free: “Listen to the recorded applause for a long time and it stops sounding like applause. It makes you feel like you’re hearing the endless, sandy winds of Mars.”

8:52 Mark it, dude. Page 25. Girl with strange ears.

…

12:28 Quick break for end of basketball game. Looks like The Lebrons will live to play Game 6.

Until at last,

21:15 Time to break out the booze! For whisky, I went with Bowmore, one of the distilleries Murakami visited when writing his book 『もし僕らのことばがウィスキーであったなら』 (If Our Words Were Whisky).

Interestingly, Bowmore is now owned by the Japanese company Suntory. Murakami calls Bowmore the “great dividing range” (35) of the seven Islay single malts because it’s so balanced; it separates the lighter whiskies from the more pungent ones like Laphroaig and Ardbeg. Here’s one of my favorite passages from the intro:

If our words were whisky, I wouldn’t have had to work so hard, of course. I’d hand you the glass, and you’d take it and quietly send it down your throat – that would be the end of it. Very simple, very intimate, very accurate. However, our words are words, and they can only live in the world as words. When we tell stories, we replace all things with some other more sober things and then can only live within those limits. But sometimes for a brief, fortunate moment there is an exception, and our words really do become whisky. And we – or and least I – live dreaming of those moments. Dreaming of what would happen if our words were whisky. (12-13).

There are actually some very similar passages in 1Q84. Here’s a taste from one of the characters:

“When I write fiction, I use words to change the scenery around me into something more natural. In other words, I re-form it. That way I can confirm that I, as a person, definitely exist in this world” (89)

Mmm…peaty.

More great stuff at the liveblog. And don’t miss this other excellent Japan blog with incredibly beautiful photos: he decided to liveblog his reading of the other liveblog. Not because it makes sense.

Condition: Just had dinner. No booze yet (I have some eight-year old Awamori scheduled for later tonight), but a mighty fine cup of coffee under the belt.

…

“8:52 Mark it, dude. Page 25. Girl with strange ears.” I’d probably be annoyed about this writerly tick of Murakami’s if it weren’t for the fact that, um, I also kind of have a thing for strange ears.

…

“22:40 Cutty Sark siting – pg 105.” My brother, Cain, was almost named “Cutty Sark.” I’m not joking.

Good times.

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Speaking of Bellow, the last novel I fell profoundly in love with was Mr. Sammler’s Planet, about an elegant old survivor in New York in 1969, values changing all around him and cohorts leaving his planet for the moon. The book is tighter than Augie March and Humboldt’s Gift, stuffed with plot and incredible characters.  I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Mr. Sammler’s Planet made me feel the streets again, hear the hiss of the apartment radiators and the traffic on Broadway.

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• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth

2666 by Roberto Bolaño (893 pages)
Intelligence: Average.
Character: Epileptic.
Scholarship: Sloppy.
Storytelling ability: Chaotic.
Prose style: Chaotic.
Use of language: Chaotic.
Overall: Phenomenal.

Ulysses by James Joyce (644 pages)
It’s a good book as well as a great book, but I resent its mandatory presence on lists like this one.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (865 pages)
Plot: Wife strays, is punished. Another couple finds true love in the country.
What Tolstoy does: Make every character, every thought and feeling, everything in the world come fully, wonderfully alive. For example, there’s the hunting scene. You may, like me, have never hunted or cared about hunting, but you will feel how these young men feel that fine Russian morning and love it.
Personal note: I went to college in the late 80s and early 90s and learned that canons are nothing but hierarchical power structures, etc. Then I read Anna Karenina and learned that some novels are better than all the other novels. Sorry! They’re just better.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1,455 pages)
Point: We think Great Men are the actors of history, but they are as bumbling and clueless as everyone else. None of us knows what we are really doing, in war or in peace.
Action movie or chick flick?: Both.
Pleasant surprise: Despite the book’s length, Tolstoy’s lightning-fast characterizations. “The Countess was a woman of about forty-five with a thin, Oriental type of face, who looked worn out from childbearing; she had given birth to twelve.” The blurry details (“about,” “looked”) only make it more real. Or an unattractive woman reads a compliment in a letter: “Her eyes, always sad, now gazed with particular hopelessness at the reflection in the glass. ‘She flatters me,’ thought the Princess. But Julie did not flatter her friend: the Princess’s eyes, large, deep, and luminous (at times rays of warm light seemed to radiate from them), were really so beautiful that very often, in spite of the plainness of her face, they gave her an allure greater than beauty. But the Princess never saw the lovely expression of her own eyes, the look they had when she was not thinking of herself. As with everyone, her face assumed an unnaturally strained, ugly expression as soon as she looked in a glass.”

Don't miss The Rumpus interview with Malcolm Gladwell

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (760 pages)
Plot: Everything is connected. You’re not paranoid if you’re right.
Worth reading?: Yes.
Do you have a prayer of understanding it?: No, except for the songs and the dirty jokes.
Internet celebrity analogue: Nate Silver. You need to be a megadork to even pretend to keep up, or you can just sit back and watch the man work.
Factoid: Main character Tyrone Slothrop’s name is an anagram of “sloth or entropy.”

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (773 pages)
Plot: Titular heroes measure lines, arcs, Venus. Much faux-archaic Spelling, Capitaliz’d words, and Punctuation,— historical figures,— characters named Aunt Euphrenia and Revd Cherrycoke, talking dogs, mechanical ducks,— &c.&c.
Ranking: Pynchon’s best novel, believe it or not. M&D’s friendship is the warmest, richest relationship in his books; the eighteenth century is just as complex and wacky but not as dark as the twentieth.
Factoid: Pynchon designed the cover and chose the perfect font for the & himself.
Funniest joke: Mason meets Amelia, dress’d in all black from Boots to Bonnet because she’s in New-York, where other Customs prevail. Like many feisty urban teenagers she says “like” all the time, but, being of the 18th Century, she instead says “as”: “I’m, as, ‘But I like Black!’”

Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1,499 pages)
Of the books on this list, the most: evil.
Plot: Alas! [back of hand to forehead]
Most ludicrous aspect: It’s all in letters, even the action scenes. As in: Dear friend, While I sit in my Room the Seducer approaches! He is burst through the door! He has almost reach’d my writing desk now!!! Etc.
Why it matters: By far the most popular and influential early novel. All American sexual, religious, and emotional sentimentalities were invented in this book. Really. That’s how twisted it is.
Worth reading?: Fuck no.
The one awesome detail: Our heroine, drugged and raped while unconscious, feels sinful anyway and longs for death. The rakish characters wonder what her problem is. She pre-orders her own coffin, carves little flowers and verses of poetry all over it, and keeps it in her bedroom, “near the window like a harpsichord”!

The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil (1,770 pages)
Title: Coolest.
TMwQ’s name: Ulrich.
Plot: It’s 1913 in Vienna and they are trying to plan peace celebrations for the following year because they don’t know World War I is about to start. Also, there’s this slacker. And a serial killer named Moosbrugger.
Point: Irony, and not in that scare-quote finger-bunnies way. Everything is an utterly misguided failure and they don’t know it but you do.
Takeaway: Committee work is exactly like doing nothing with your life.
Edition: Try to get the two-volume hardcover boxed set, with Musil’s big ol’ head spread across the spines.
Tip: Skip Part III and the extras (all of vol. 2).

A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (2,948 pages)
Plot: You go about your business, you meet and do things with people, and you never know who will turn out to be important or unimportant in your life until much later.
Of the books on this list, the most: quick and pleasant. Each vol. takes only a few hours. Lots of hilarious titles of imaginary books by the fictional characters.
Also the most: deeply social, interpersonal. The characters’ lives are tuned to everyone else’s. The most English. Excellent use of the pronoun “one.”
Example: The narrator’s true love (vol. 2) disappears from his life. She comes up to him years later (vol. 10) and “wanted to take another look at a former lover or—far more probable, when one came to think of it—was curious, as ladies who have had an inclination for a man so often are, regarding the appearance and demeanor of his wife.”
Opposite of: Near-anagram Saul Bellow. Powell aristocratically loathes living by the will; Bellow exults in rascals with schemes.
Line to use at cocktail parties: “It was Widmerpool!”

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (3,294 pages)
Is it really as good as everyone says?: Yes. Literature’s great cathedral of the human imagination.
Summary in ten words or less: Spazz can find happiness only in his own head.
Volumes: 2 is the best. 5 and 6 are the worst. 1 and 7 are great. When you put it down for a while—everyone does; it took me 14 years to finish—pick it up where you left off, don’t start over.
If you can’t handle 3,294 pages: “Overture” and “Combray,” the first 200 pages, are the length of a normal novel. Those chapters alone give pretty much the whole Proust experience.

**

See Also: Anti-war Poetry and the Oxymoron of Liberal Fathers

See Also: Rick Moody’s Rumpus Music Blog

See Also: Margaret Cho’s Bottom To Top

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