Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

Murakami. Short stories.

That should be enough to either send you directly to Barnes and Noble today or to make you run away in horror.

You love him or you don’t.

He is definitely not for all tastes.

If you are still scratching your head, I will add: Twilight Zone. But a deeply thoughtful Twilight Zone. Like it had been written by Dostoevsky.

I am in the love-Murakami group. I never read books this slowly. I started it sometime this summer and here I am, in September, just now finishing it. Sadly. Did not want to finish it.

The Guinea Pig Diaries by A. J. Jacobs

202. The Guinea Pig Diaries by A. J. Jacobs

You know who Jacobs is. You’ve probably heard about him, even if you didn’t read his book. He’s the guy who read all the Encyclopedia Britannica, A to Z. He followed that up in his second book by attempting to live by the precepts of the Bible. I will never forget the chapter where he decides to take up stoning the sinners.

This new book also falls into the genre of what I call Challenge Books. I like these. The woman who visited a different church each Sunday for a year. The couple who traveled around the world and tried different foods every where they stopped.

In The Guinea Pig Diaries, Jacobs tries nine small personal challenges. These are challenges we might have contemplated, but would actually be difficult to take on for a lengthy period of time. And the results are funny, so funny that I should caution you not to read this at home on a Saturday while your spouse is there (as I did) as you will drive your loved one insane reading the really funny parts aloud to him.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

201. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

We had a hurricane roll into our world a year ago. Though it was no Katrina, it spun off tornadoes that destroyed Sonic and ripped out an apartment complex wall. Power was out in some spots for a month and tree limbs and smashed road signs and broken fences became part of our everyday life.

So I was eager to read Zeitoun. In the past, I’ve been disappointed with narratives about hurricanes; with the exception of Isaac’s Storm and Sudden Sea, hurricane storms often turn into a boring chronology of the events of the hours as the storm passes through.

Zeitoun was as well told as a novel. The characters the author chose to use in the book were a heady mix of do-gooder and flawed human being. Eggers takes us right into the storm with the characters.

It will be on my list of best reads of the year.

Travels With My Aunt

200. Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene

Who in the world could use a big shake more than the stodgy Henry Pulling?  Henry never married and spent his life locked up behind the safe and tedious walls of a bank.  Then, at his mother’s funeral, Henry met his Aunt Augusta and he was sent spinning out into a world he never knew existed.

Graham Greene is that Graham Greene, he of The Power and the Glory and Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American. So Travels With My Aunt is a totally different Graham Greene. Every chapter had me. I now have a new gloriously inspiring role model for my last years.