Winter First Moon of the New Year
Had to have our business meeting this morning because I was gone yesterday. After that, a nap and I started Murakami’s 1Q84. Just a bit of the way into it, but I’m liking it already. It’s set in 1984 Japan and seems headed in a surrealistic or magic realism direction.
At the moment I’m reading more literary books. I like them, too, though my leisure reading tends more toward horror and fantasy, thriller and mystery. Reading has raised me, given me mentors when I rejected them in the waking world. Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and Leo Tolstoy in particular helped shape the lens through which I view the world, what I have chosen as important and unimportant.
When I read them, I read almost exclusively literary books and then only classics. That was my 20’s and early 30’s. Isaac Bashevis Singer, too. These men, of northern European and Russian roots, have a somewhat bleak and hard-nosed view of life. While a life is nothing to trifle with, it also reaches into the dimensions of the mystical, the supernatural. How you get there may differ from others, but those realms are real, too.
Those realms can transform this one, make it new and at least different, perhaps even better.
