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Murakami's novel is set in contemporary Japan and involves crime, amorality, and magic creeping into an ordinary man's life. This is literature, not Stephen King, but when I finished it at 3 a.m. I had to leave the light on to go to sleep. Creepy!

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This crazy, hilarious, frustrating book is written as if it were a work of literary criticism, but pretty soon things degenerate into its "author" telling stories about ogling young men while playing ping-pong with them, and other oddball items only loosely linked to the poem supposedly under discussion. This is more of a literary puzzle than a novel, and if you're like me you might find that once you've solved the puzzle once the fun is gone from tackling it again.

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I loved Roy as a stylist here, and she's a great writer, but the story itself was so punishingly sad that there's no way I would pick this up again.

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I read this BEFORE the revelations that it is largely fiction (built around a real alcohol addction through which Frey went). I could recommend it to someone else as a work of fiction, but I felt so betrayed when the truth came out that I'm not going back again myself.

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I loved this when I was nine. And I'd recommend it to any spiritually curious child. 'Child' is the key word, though. "What if Jesus had been a seagull?" is not a question I want to hear posed to an adult. :)

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As of Dec. 23rd, I'm still in the middle of this enormous, exhausting, but also stimulating and often funny ENORMOUS (did I say it's enormous, too?) novel. I don't think I have the psychic strength to read all those pages twice, but reading them once is a definite pleasure. Not unlike climbing K2 or giving birth, I imagine.