It is spring already and I haven’t uploaded my annual “Books I read in”-piece yet! My only excuse is that ever since November, my daughter and I have taken turns in being ill with colds, flu, migraines etc. etc. At the moment we are both well, though, so here is the blog-post:
In 2015 I read (or re-read) thirty-eight books, mainly novels, short stories, non-fiction and anime in the languages English, Danish and a tiny bit Japanese. No German, French, Swedish or Norwegian this year, I am sorry to say! I didn’t have any books published myself in 2015 because I had a very difficult year with much illness and knee surgery etc. so I didn’t get to write anything. Instead I concentrated on reading, especially books by the two authors Ursula K. Le Guin and Haruki Murakami.
When you see my list of books read in 2015, you
may think that I am a big Haruki Murakami fan, but I am not. Some of the first
books of his that I happened to read were “A Wild Sheep Chase” and “Dance,
Dance, Dance”, which I found quite good so I kept on reading, hoping that the
rest of his works were just as good, but they weren’t.
The problem is that when you
have read one book by Haruki Murakami, you have read them all. His protagonists
are always very ordinary men in their thirties, living in Tokyo. They usually
have a job that involves writing (author, journalist, publicist or the likes)
and they have always been married, but either they are divorced or their wives
have mysteriously disappeared. They all have a cat with a fish-name like
“Herring” or “Mackerel” and they all have an underage teenage girl as their
sidekick. Sometimes she is thirteen, sometimes fifteen, but she is always crazy
about this ordinary, thirty-something bloke and dying to sleep with him (!!).
The protagonist then experiences something highly supernatural, which he finds
very annoying and he just wants to go back to his boring old life. On top of
that Murakami is extremely sexist, as in his opinion all women are spoiled,
unfair, paedophile, sex crazed weirdos who act and talk like women in porn
movies, including enjoying lesbian sex although they are straight. It is quite
awful, patronising and humiliating to read, especially when you’re a woman, I
suppose. Worst of all, the books are long and repetitious and outright boring,
but I kept on reading and eventually it paid off.
It turned out that Murakami
has written two very good books, namely “Kafka on the Shore” and “Hardboiled
Wonderland and the End of the World”. They are very different from the rest,
“Kafka” because the protagonist is a teenage boy and “Hardboiled Wonderland”
because Murakami introduces a second world situated in a very unlikely place.
They are both wonderful novels, I think.
As for Ursula K. Le Guin, I first started reading
her Wizard of Earthsea series when I was about sixteen, but I found it ever so
boring, so I gave up after the first volume. Now at the age of fifty-three, I
went back to it and just loved the entire series! I guess the sedated narrative
pace suits me better now than in my youth and besides, it is plain to see that
- just like Jill Murphy’s “The Worst Witch” series, Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s
Game” etc. - the series has been a major inspiration to Rowling’s “Harry
Potter”.
Furthermore, I appreciate Le
Guin’s way of building worlds much more now than then, because it is done in
much the same way as I have always done it myself when I write. In that way the
works of Le Guin remind me of the works of Jorge Luis Borges, as they are both
very meticulous in building fantasy worlds, right down to describing the
contents of the books in the fantasy libraries and how to read the maps of
worlds that don’t exist, just like I do! I didn’t quite appreciate Borges until
recently, either, by the way.
Regarding Le Guin’s books, I
love the entire Earthsea series and I am very fond of her other books as well,
so I’ll continue reading her in 2016. Anyway, here is a complete list of the
books I read in 2015. I hope it will inspire you to read a couple of books
yourself:
Bergan, Ronald: “Film”
Dick, Philip K: “Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?”
Dick,
Philip K: “Filmatiserede noveller”
Ditlevsen,
Tove: “Barndommens gade”
Enomoto, Toshiya: “Japan”
Hollinghurst, Alan: “The Stranger’s Child”
Ishiguro, Kazuo: “Never Let Me Go”
Ishiguro, Kazuo: “An Artist of the Floating
World”
Ishiguro, Kazuo: “Nocturnes. Five Stories of
Music and Nightfall”
Jensen,
Thit: “Den erotiske hamster”
Kirino, Natsuo: “Out”
Le Guin, Ursula K.: “A Wizard of Earthsea” (book
1)
Le Guin, Ursula K.: “Tales from Earthsea” (book
5)
Le Guin, Ursula K.: “The Compass Rose, Short
Stories”
Le Guin, Ursula K.: “The Farthest Shore” (book 3)
Le Guin, Ursula K.: “The Left Hand of Darkness”
Le Guin, Ursula K.: “The Other Wind” (book 6)
Le Guin, Ursula K.: “The Tombs of Atuan” (book 2)
Le Guin, Ursula K.: “Tehanu” (book 4)
Murakami, Haruki: “1Q84”, book 1
Murakami, Haruki: “1Q84”, book 2
Murakami, Haruki: “1Q84”, book 3
Murakami, Haruki: “A Wild Sheep Chase”
Murakami, Haruki: “After Dark”
Murakami, Haruki: “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and
His Years of Pilgrimage”
Murakami, Haruki: “Dance, Dance, Dance”
Murakami, Haruki: “Hardboiled Wonderland and the
End of the World”
Murakami, Haruki: “Kafka on the Shore”
Murakami, Haruki: “Norwegian Wood”
Murakami, Haruki: “South of the Border, West of
the Sun”
Murakami, Haruki: “Sputnik Sweetheart”
Murakami, Haruki: “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”
Murakami, Haruki: “Wind/Pinball. Two novels”
Murakami, Ryu: “69”
Nakamura, Shungiku: “Junjo Romantica”, vol. 17
Nye, Robert: “The Late Mr. Shakespeare”
Ōe, Kenzaburō: “The Silent Cry”
“Unyttig
viden” (ed. Michael Ebert & Tim Klotzek)
