Long Awaited Book Reviews

"Dance Dance Dance" Haruki Murakami

The narrator is a fairly successful freelance writer. He doesn't particularly enjoy it but he is good at it. This life is interrupted when he begins dreaming of an old girlfriend. Feeling that she is calling out to him he heads out to the last place he saw her, the Dolphin Hotel. The hotel is now upper class but the narrator senses the old hotel underneath. After getting a message from his guardian angel he heads back to Tokyo. There he becomes the friend/guardian of a 13 year old psychic, befriends a depressed movie star, becomes involved in a murder and finally learns the fate of his old girlfriend.

This is my first book of 2007 and it was a good one. You can't really go wring with a Murakami. I loved this book. Murakami has a way of making his words flow. This book is the sequel to "A Wild Sheep Chase". It does refer to the events of that book quite a lot so it is worth reading first. Both involved a mystery. The first a missing friend and this one a missing girlfriend and a murder to sold. It wasn't just about that though. It was about living life or taking control of life. 6 months down the line I will probably change my mind though. Murakami's books have that ability.

"A Widow For One Year" John Irving





This books is spilt into three parts. Each part shows a window into the life of Ruth. The first begins when Ruth is Four. Her father is an author and illustrator and her mother is still mourning the death of her sons. Her parents are separated although they share Ruth in a strange domestic arrangement. Her father then highers a young boy as an assistant with a striking likeness to the dead boys knowing exactly what the result will be.


In Part two we meet Ruth again. She is now 36 and is a successful author. More successful than her father and the young boy assistant. Her personal life is another story as she still struggles in coming to terms with what happened in the past. It is at the height of her success that she once again meets the young boy assistant (now not so young) and they strike up an unexpected friendship.


In part three Ruth is a mother and is publishing her first book in four years. On a book tour she returns to her place of research and finds something she didn't expect to find. Now only one thing is missing from her life.


After reading "The Cider House Rule" I was a little disappointed with Irving. I didn't like any of the characters and therefore i struggled with the book. This one though has brought me back to Irving. I enjoyed the book from page one and the characters were more real. It is one of those books where despite some of the things that happen it is still a nice story. Or maybe it is the ending that makes it a nice story.
"On Beauty" Zadie Smith

Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps are both respected in the same field of work. Their opinions are so widely different that they feud. Yet to the reluctance of Howard and Monty their families are brought together again and again. these men who have very different families and beliefs find that they have more in common than they think.

The part of this book I enjoyed the most was reading about the lives of Belsey;s children and wife. They all have very different personalities which leads to clashes. The fact that they all love each other is very clear. The title can be applied to most aspects of the book. The beauty of art, the beauty of family and friends. The beauty of being different.

I have read some reviews of this book which say that it was difficult to get into and a little too long. I didn't find this at all. In fact I felt that the book itself a little too abruptly. I wanted to know what happened next and would have happily kept going.