Reviews and Comments

I bought this book because someone had tweeted it was on sale at the Kindle store, and after reading it I'd say I have a love / relationship with it. It's almost impossible to read about relationships objectively as you filter it through your own experiences, so by the time I'd finished it I couldn't decide it was realistic or an overly romantic tale.

I didn't enjoy this as much as the first two books which set up the plot and its twists very well whilst this followed a trajectory that was more linear and left a lot of questions unanswered.

I was a bit sceptical about reading another Murakami book, I've read quite a few of them and found them great books but all too similar in their style and themes, however once I started reading the sample chapter I found myself hooked.

The two main characters, Tengo and Aomame, drive the book with the chapters alternating between the two. Most of the time the text is dedicated to character development but sometimes the plot starts moving quite quickly.

There was something very endearing about the relationship between the mother Harriet and her fifth child Ben. At times the trajectory seemed very grim but I wouldn't call it a dark book, somehow it simultaneously celebrates the best and worst in people.

For some reason I was expecting this book to be a serious spy novel but what it delivered was much better - a very memorable and British tale of farce in the secret service.

Picked up this book after attending a QA session with the author. I feel that both then and in the book, she is able to articulate the draw that Twitter has for people, in a way anyone can understand. As someone who uses Twitter on a daily basis some parts of the book really made me chuckle, whilst others such as the section on celebrities seemed unnecessary and just filler. Definitely going to lend the book to my friends who don't get Twitter.

This book grabbbed me early on with its writing style, a combination of myth and history, particularly the story of all the words and the people who had to clean them from the sky.

I wasn't so sure about the final part of the book that set was in modern times as even with the linking of characters it didn't sit quite right. Perhaps it warrants a second reading.

Very evocative language and well formed characters. The ending was quite cryptic but perhaps it's one of those books I have to read a second time round.