Reading trails and memory lapses
I decided earlier this month to pay more attention to how I discover books that I’m interested in reading. There’s evidence of that on my TBR page. Just last week I was reminded why I started to do that. I received a notice from the local library that a book I had requested — Novelist as a Vocation, by Haruki Murakami — was at the desk waiting for me to pick it up. I had no recollection of having requested this book. In fact (I’m now embarrassed to say), I had no idea who Haruki Murakami is or was. I wouldn’t have given this memory lapse a second thought twenty years ago or even a decade ago. Now that I’m at a certain age, it does give me pause. But I set that concern aside, at least for the moment.
I did wonder, though, just why I had requested the book. So I decided to ask my former self about it. I searched through my almost-daily journal entries. And I found this in what I wrote on the first day of the year:
Working through the RSS feed, I find this recommendation from James Cash (in emacslife):
Novelist As a Vocation - Haruki Murakami
Non-fiction collection of essays by the great novelist I grabbed in a used bookshop. Really enjoyed it, interesting and inspiring. Certainly makes me want to read more of his novels too!
Just requested it from BPL.
Reading that journal reminded me that I’d learned a bit more about the author and the book and decided that I might want to read it. Yet another plus-1 for journaling. But there’s a bit more to this story. As I said, when I saw that I’d requested that book I knew nothing about the author. The afternoon after bringing it home from the library, I read this in Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book Tiny Experiments: “Haruki Murakami wrote his first two books while running a jazz club” (p. 67). Just a passing mention. A striking coincidence. After noting the coincidence, I moved on with the reading.
This morning, however, it happened again. On page 156 of Elissa Altman’s book Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, I learn that “Haruki Murakami runs a daily 10K in the afternoons when he’s writing a novel.” What’s that line from one of those Ian Fleming books? “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” I’m starting to think I’ve been dumped into an Anki-like spaced repetition routine in which I’m to learn the name of this novelist. I’m trying not to think that everyone gets put into this routine when they reach a certain age.
