I'd been wanting to read a Murakami for a long time, and plenty of my friends told me to start with this novel. It certainly did not disappoint. The prose and story have a pull that not many other books have; it's hypnotic in a way that made me never want to put it down and that also nearly made me miss many subway stops over the week it took me to read.

I wouldn't call the story 'enjoyable,' but it is good. It's melancholic and strange and heartbreaking, but beautiful all the same. It's about Japanese teenagers in the '60s, but it's telling that I recognize traits of these characters in some of the people I grew up with, or even people I know today. They're the Watanabes grown up a bit; I knew a Naoko who came out of everything okay. That's not to say these characters are generic--they are fully realized, but relatable.

On Friday evening I spent the train ride out of the city crying through the last few pages and trying to hide it from the other passengers. Reading this book on subways and trains was most fitting, in retrospect.

Completely immersed in the book from beginning to end - I find myself most attracted to books with that magical realism found in many Latin American authors. While reading, I was continually reminded of my favourite book, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. However, Allende's book is truly original, and I loved it. I can't wait to read more of her writing, as I did with GGM when I read One Hundred Years. A new favourite.

I don't even know where to begin this review... it feels like I just spent a month traveling across the globe, peering into the lives of many, many people. I'm not quite exhausted, however - I'm almost on the brink of reading it over again, not only to more closely notice all the ways in which Bolano intricately links the five parts of his novel with characters and recurring motifs, but also to immerse myself in the lovely, long sentences and dreamy tangents that make it up. And someday I probably will, and return to the characters I loved, the ones that scared me, and to the parts in which I smiled while reading, and those which made me cringe in feelings of fear and foreboding. Because in snippets, 2666 can be funny and mystical and positive - but overall, the story is sad, and by the final pages all those niceties seem nearly tragic in retrospect. I thoroughly loved the novel, and can't wait to come back in a year or few to read it again.

I received this book in the mail (thanks to Catapult!) and had never heard of it, but I soon dove in when I read that it contained nine stories set in Chile. I'm familiar with Chilean literature via Isabel Allende, Roberto Bolaño, and Pablo Neruda—but nothing contemporary, or released recently. I was not disappointed. A remarkable debut collection, demonstrating a confidence in cutting the reader's expectations of where a story may go, or what the characters may do.

I'm fond of unsentimental writers, and Flores explores her characters with an edge rarely written. That sharpness used to a heady degree while she's displaying these tales of economic strife, children's perspectives, families in transition, and deceptive illusions of who people say they are. Each story contains some memorable turn, though I think my favorites were "Forgetting Freddy," "Talcahuano," "Humiliation," and "Teresa." And the rest of them.

Something that looks so slight, and yet contains so much within—a physical description of the book but also its themes and characters. It’s hard to describe TENTACLE; Dominican writer Rita Indiana traverses so much territory and experiments with several mechanisms of storytelling and art. I’ll try though: the story flits through time, not only for its main character, Acilde, from a future after a devastating environmental disaster to the years leading up to it, but also from a personal journey in the body they are inhabiting. Their body, told in a mesmerizing passage (I think my mouth was agape), is transformed and a mission bestowed upon them: travel in time, prevent disaster.

The way in which Indiana approaches time travel was new to me, like so much of the way this book works. Indiana mines colonial history, queerness, modern art. It can certainly be confusing at times, but it’s also thought-provoking. Indiana has something here in terms of ideas though the narrative could have used a little more cohesion. I’ve never been one to look for the point A to point B kind of story, though, and I thoroughly loved the sci-fi adventure and visceral attitude of TENTACLE.

When I finished Ferrante's Neapolitan series in 2016, I knew I had to seek out all of her other novels. TROUBLING LOVE is the Italian author's debut novel, and (once again) I'm reading it last. I was a little nervous to read it, to afterward have no more Ferrante fiction unread.

"Childhood is a tissue of lies that endures in the past tense: at least, mine was like that."

It's fascinating to me how Ferrante's works seem to converse with each other across time. How a small detail in one book is a much bigger issue in another. How this novel, THE DAYS OF ABANDONMENT, and THE LOST DAUGHTER all seem to hint toward scenes and emotions that would make up her masterpiece in the Neapolitan quartet. Like all of her works, TROUBLING LOVE's protagonist, Delia, is a woman in Naples whose anger at the world is brimming to a rage. I'd say Delia's is the least subtle of Ferrante's women, as she narrates feverishly and at times in a way that seems meant to confuse the reader. As in, there's no time to explain: my mother is dead, her body was found in suspicious circumstances, and I have to deal with the mysteries she left behind in her death and my childhood—just follow my despairing journey. Though she would never invite you. I found the novel hypnotic and depressing, and I loved it. There were points that made me cringe, that made me angry, that made me think of the wisps of family secrets never revealed.

Stepping into a Ferrante book is always like stepping into a world where women's anger is on the surface and not hidden down. And I love it. Because she writes from first-person, the anger and attitude is clearly visible to the reader but not to those other characters in the story usually. That's something I've always liked about Ferrante's writing, that her protagonists are always feeling something that is not necessarily on display to everyone else... much like many women feel every day, because we have to be A Certain Way... (whether it's the #coolgirl or the perfect breezy mom or... you get it). This is why Ferrante is so great. And this book is good, and I will always read Ferrante, but it decidedly comes before her amazing work in the Neopolitan series. There are certainly foreshadowing elements of the Neopolitan Quartet (Lena, the beach, the doll are all motifs repeated in her later work...), but the translation sometimes is a little odd and took me out of Ferrante's powerful prose.

When I listened to this book in my car, my kid was in the backseat absorbed in her own world, and I was smiling and laughing at this deadpan voice set in Japanese society. And then, I was yelling things back at the audiobook, like "Keiko, don't do it!" and "okay, yes, woman, thank you." I warmed to the character (and the narrator that inhabited her, Nancy Wu) pretty quickly: as a girl she doesn't fit in, and her worldview isn't the same as everyone else's, though she knows it. She takes pride in her job as a convenience store employee, and her acute observations help her to navigate social expectations. I felt a kinship in the way Keiko would admire the clothes of a friend of hers, and shop in the same store; or change the lilt of her voice to those around her. I did this a lot as a new girl at school growing up: observe and assimilate. I grew out of it (did I?), but it's not a bad or nefarious routine on a small scale. And so she continues her particular way of life, and all is fine until Shiraha, a despicable man, starts working alongside her and they make a deal.

Keiko might not be 'normal' according to society, but the novel questions what is normal or if that social definition should be so constricting. This novel made my drive fly by, while also making me run the gamut of emotions from sadness to anger to happiness within a short time span. It left me with a lot to think about, too. I'm going to need more Murata books translated into English.