What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Cover What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
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Genres: Nonfiction

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

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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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What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
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