2020: Overall blah for my first foray into Murakami's extensive collection. I've had 1Q84 sitting on my shelf for a while now, and I'm looking forward to diving in, but I think Infinite Jest is going to be my quarantine book of choice.

Somehow, every woman that Toru comes across wants to sleep with him, and enjoys his company more than their own boyfriends. EVERY ONE OF THEM, including the 19-years-his-senior caretaker of his dead best friend's ex-girlfriend (!!). It's pretty preposterous in my opinion, in addition to it being pretty statistically impossible that so many people connected to each other commit suicide (here's looking at you, Jeffrey Eugenides).

I find it hard to believe that this is meant to be the book that propelled Murakami into stardom. I have no interest in mobbing him after finishing this novel, but I am not so defeated that I'm not going to pick up another one of his books. The writing was lovely, the plot very boring, and the conflict improbable. This book's number one redeeming quality is that it is the source of one of my all time favorite quotes.

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading you can only think what everyone else is thinking." - Haruki Murakami