Book: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
May 13, 2009“All I can see is the ground three yards ahead, nothing beyond. My whole world consists of the ground three yards ahead. No need to think beyond that.”
- Haruki Murakami
I was sent What I Talk About When I Talk About Running a few months ago by Matt but because of my uni work I didn’t get round to reading it until the beginning of the month. As it turns out I got through it in 3 days, it’s very short.
Classifying the book, in as much as putting it into a genre, is surprisingly hard. It’s autobiographical but only covers very select moments of his life, and then the concentration is generally on the author’s thoughts, either at the time of in retrospect, and not what actually happened. I suppose ‘memoirs’ would be a better description.
Spending my non-running time reading about running.
So what is it about? Well, running, to an extent. Murakami talks about starting to run to keep fit and his goal of running a marathon every year. However, these aren’t particularly in depth and as much time is spent talking about running as it is spent on various other topics which seem to randomly veer off at a tangent from the main narrative, consisting of anything from the unhealthiness of being an author to his LP collection. The book is set on two seperate timelines – the year or so spent writing the book, and Murakami’s adult life – though this second one isn’t always in chronological order, which makes following it slightly harder than you might anticipate.
It’s worth noting that the book has been translated from Japanese to English, but not by the author, and so sentences seem stilted and every now and then a word will appear that really doesn’t fit (probably a bit like this blog). Combined with the fact that Murakami often goes off on a tangent and it’s not the easiest flowing read.
Overall, it’s quite interesting, but reads more like a personal journal than a book about running and so I can’t help but think that the only people that would want to read it are those that know the author, or the small subset of running authors.
I was seduced into buying it by it’s sexy cover and afterwards I had to justify it by giving it to someone as a gift.
[...] Week: w/c 18th May Book: Born to Run May 27, 2009 I was determined not to let the previous running book I read – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running – put me off from reading another. So I [...]