Don’t let me borrow your books.

Okay, do let me borrow them, but maybe not ones that have crazy geometric things going on with the front cover.  Otherwise, this might happen:

Sorry, Anastasia.  I did fix it!

“Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” was the first book by Haruki Murakami that I read despite years of walking past them in bookstores and meaning to pick one up.  Anastasia told me it was “fantastic” but that it left her and our other friend who read it “super disoriented.”

I think that’s an entirely accurate description.  It’s not a feel-good book really in any way, but we should read those once in a while.  Life isn’t all puppies and butterflies, after all.

The story basically follows Tsukuru through two periods of his life — late teens/early 20s and his mid 30s.  The events and experiences of the earlier time play heavily on the latter as he tries to deal with how his close group of friends suddenly cut him off for reasons he could not begin to figure out.

Murakami really brings out the book’s central theme during a conversation older Tsukuru has with a woman he is dating named Sara.

“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them,” she says, in a phrase that gets repeated a few times later on.  “If nothing else, you need to remember that.  You can’t erase history, or change it.  It would be like destroying yourself.”

No matter what he does or what face he slaps on to face the world, what happened in the past never changes.  Tsukuru has so much that doesn’t go his way, and yet, he accepts everything as either blameless or his own fault.  He has a way of being sadly optimistic that straddles the line between looking to immediately move on and a thinking akin to “what can I do but accept it?”

A few people have asked me if I would recommend they read this book.  It’s really well written and grabs you in a certain way, but you have to be prepared for the mindset it leaves you throughout.  So maybe?

I was late enough to the “Divergent” series that all three books were very much out by the time I started, meaning I was already quite aware that people disliked the third one.  I now completely understand why.

In a world with no “Hunger Games” maybe “Divergent” would have an easier time, but by comparison it’s hard to ignore the flaws.  What’s great about the plotting of the “Hunger Games” is the way the drumbeat of action builds as the series goes along, especially with the way we get taken back into the games so early in the second book.  I finished those needing to immediately jump into the next one.

With “Divergent,” the story gets really bogged down with setting us up for action, basically flipping the second book from the “Catching Fire” model to being mostly the lead-in for a tiny bit of action right at the end.

I have a bigger complaint with “Allegiant,” the final book in Veronica Roth’s series.  Main character Tris narrates the first two, but suddenly shares those duties in book three with Tobias.  And really, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.  I get why she did it in the end.  But the execution is annoying.  In many dual-narrator stories they alternate chapters and have distinct voices, making it almost unnecessary to even label who is doing the talking.  You just know.

That was not the case in “Allegiant.”  I can’t tell you the number of times I was seven pages into a chapter and the narrator said something that made me realize it was Tris when I thought it was Tobias (and vice-versa).  Part of the problem is that they spent so much time doing similar things in the first two books that mentioning things from the past didn’t differentiate who was talking at all.

My other issue with this story was the amount of time Roth spent building up a romantic jealousy angle in the beginning and then letting it fizzle away to nothing.  Given all the pages that involved people sitting in a room and talking, and all the hot-and-cold behavior of Tris and Tobias from one page to the next, it might have been interesting to have some dating drama in this story.

It wasn’t the train wreck I was expecting from the reviews I heard, but certainly not my favorite book or even close to my favorite in this series.

I will give Roth credit for making me laugh when Tobias goes to basically kidnap Tris’ brother Caleb, who is not a nice guy and makes poor decisions like trying to flee people who are a lot bigger than him.

Tobias ends up knocking down Caleb, sending him face-first into the floor.  The effects of this event are evident when Tobias drags Caleb outside and another guy sees them.

Zeke: “Why’s he bleeding?”
Tobias: “Because he’s an idiot.”
Zeke: “I didn’t know that idiocy caused people to start spontaneously bleeding from the nose.”

If only it did.