During COVID in 2020, Tamir, then reading only business and self-help, joined a book club. After Neil Strauss's online club chose Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Tamir proposed it to his group. He listened on audiobook, baffled at first, and finished it on a long walk, pulling out his headphones thinking 'What the hell just happened?', the first time a book had given him such sheer wonder as an adult.
Where it appears 1
Connections
Told by
Mentions
More stories from this episode
- Salih finds Killing Commendatore at 30
In April 2018, stressed and just past 30 after years of rushed business travel, Salih used a birthday bookstore voucher from his family. On a bright spring day he opened the prominently…
- Sad goodbye to the shadow
Salih read Hard-Boiled Wonderland in winter and was left sad and melancholic by the shadow's hard goodbye at the end. Tamir reads the passage aloud and Salih recalls the narrator staring at…
- Building a channel from old hard drives
Drawings online weren't enough for Salih, a visual person frustrated that so few Murakami novels have been filmed. He went through years of his own footage on his hard drives, combined it…
- Murakami's epiphany at the ballpark
Tamir retells how Murakami, who ran a jazz bar with his wife, had a flash of inspiration at 30 while watching his favorite (and long-losing) baseball team, which went on to win the league…
- The Literarisches Quartett blowup
On the German TV show Das Literarische Quartett, one host called the intimate passages in South of the Border, West of the Sun 'fast food' writing. The others shouted that she was prudish…
- The 1,000-page German Wind-Up Bird
Salih shows Tamir the blue German edition of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, retranslated from Japanese in 2020 at over 1,000 pages vs. the 607-page Jay Rubin English text, with whole chapters…
