1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I know this was a bestseller, but I really don’t see it. Everything it was leading up to just sort of fell off at the end and left me wondering what the whole point was. That’s not a spoiler, you’d still have to read most of it to know what I’m talking about.
The good things about the book were the way Murakami caught me off guard a lot. He would throw something out there suddenly and there was nothing to hint at it before. I liked that a lot. Sometimes his powers of descriptions were good too, and the way he related people together when they were apart was also impressive.
The things I didn’t like about this book include that it went nowhere, that in the end there was no sufficient explanation as to why what did or didn’t happen…did or didn’t happen, or even why it would’ve mattered in the first place! That’s a HUGE flaw, not to mention a HUGE letdown! The book could have been cut down by about 1/3 – there were so many boring monologues that accomplished nothing and were totally unnecessary. There was also a lot of repetition, and even copy-and-paste repetition, as if the reader might not be smart enough to remember major things that happened. I could find no reason for that kind of repetition in those parts. I also felt that the large amount of descriptions of breasts, both from female and male perspectives, was more the author’s infatuation than anything else, and he was clearly writing some of his fantasies instead of accomplishing anything.
I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone.

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