What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
What a delightful read! I love his fiction, having read "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle" back in the '90's when it was first published, followed by a couple of his other books. I have been meaning to catch back up with him and read his more recent books that I've seen and heard about many friends reading, but I hadn't gotten there. Two days ago, I came across this book on a friend's coffee table and started reading it. I put it down only to eat and sleep. Luckily, this was a weekend. I didn't know Murakami was a runner! A triathlete! As he writes about in this book, a kind of memoir-plus-runner's realism guide - plus-novelist meditation on how writing and running mix, there are a lot of similarities (at least for him) between distance running and writing novels. It's a fascinating and fun read, including his dour honesty about his own abilities, which I both appreciated and found funny. This is a quick read, and as with his novels, well worth the time invested. He even explains how he name
...s the book, which inspired me to read something else I've been meaning to read for a while - read this book to find out! If he writes a sequel, about his 10+ years of running and writing since this was published in 2007, I'd read it in a heartbeat. Perhaps a very slow, runner's resting heartbeat, but a relatively quick measure of time nonetheless.
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My first book by Murakami, so I can’t compare it to his other works.
Interesting read as a runner, but not a book I feel compelled to recommend to fellow runners. Rather, it is a book I’ll be sure to recommend to writers. The book is a collection of essays that function together as an ode to running while also explaining the writing process.
Ultimately, interesting read - I just finished a 30 hour audiobook biography about the oil tycoon Rockefeller, so this book was a welcome change of pace.
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