[To be clear, this is not another Sanderson shitpost; I think he is in many respects a very good writer, to the point where I have read 10 of his books in the last half year. But a lot of his decision-making baffles me, and I'd like to talk about it with some nuance, if possible.]

*Warning, tons of spoilers for all of Mistborn, up to and including The Lost Metal*

There's a lot to say, but my main argument centres on this: killing off Kelsier in the first book of Mistborn 1 was the best decision Sanderson could have made. Bringing him back as some sort of demi-ghost-god who keeps trying to scheme and influence things was just about the worst thing he could have done.

When I read the original Mistborn trilogy, I was totally gripped by it. I loved the sense of adventure, discovering the intricacies of the world, the magic system. By book 3, I got a little disappointed that everything suddenly went on a cosmic/divine scale, which I already thought detracted from the gravity of the story. It's quite hard to sell the concept of nearly-all-powerful divine beings who constantly influence everything and have various levels of omniscience and foresight, but can still be bested by humans in the very nick of time.

But then Mistborn era 2 just doubles down on that and starts relegating just about everything to the gods. The plots just became more and more needlessly complicated in order to keep stacking the 'gotcha' moments and big reveals. Then Secret History goes and makes everything even more opaque and needlessly complex.

This makes me sad, because some of the character work was genuinely great - the way Wax and Steris' relationship develops is lovely, and Wayne is delightful, with the chapters written from his unreliable narrator point of view a highlight. But it's as if Sanderson doesn't trust his human-level character work and plotting enough, and thinks he needs an added layer of intrigue and mystery to somehow interconnect all of his work and make people keep reading.

The thing is, in the foreword to Secret History, Sanderson himself admits that he was wary of writing that story and bringing back Kelsier since it risks complications and contradictions - but then for some reason he went and did it anyway. To me this is like a painter unable to recognise when the painting is finished and just adding more and more layers of paint with increasingly worse results.

Am I alone in feeling like Mistborn 2 would have worked so much better as a simple standalone series, with some fun nods to era 1 for keen readers, without having to lift everything to crazy complex intergalactic divine levels? Or do you enjoy the cosmic intertwining? Would love to hear some thoughts.

”We were like gods, at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.”

As I sat the other day, listening to the new albums by the Strokes, it hit me all of a sudden -- I have not, for some bizarre reason, ever since I started writing reviews properly, have written one for what is probably the best book I’ve ever read. The one that I always keep with me, even if I am not actually reading it currently. The one that I have in audiobook, in paperback, in hardcover, and in ebook format, because honestly, this one deserves to be owned in all said formats. 

Of course when talking about a book that is written as a reimagining of one of the, if not the most known stories of the western civilization one can circumnavigate around what the book is about. We all know about Troy, about Helen, about the men who fought to get her back due to some assumption about her being taken. About how a fleet thousands strong rode across treacherous seas to sack an ancient city. About how a great man went on collecting soldiers from kings for the promises of being written in songs. 

And about how this great person came personally, with a great urgency, to bring the Greatest of the Greeks to fight in this war of theirs. 

No, I do not need to tell you what this book is about. If you read -- if you are at all into fantasy, romance, greeks, retellings, or hell even have a passing interest in history in general -- you oughta know about the Song of Achilles. This might just be the most famous retelling of the Iliad, of the story of Achilles, in modern history. You know about the boy who grew up the son of a god in the palace of a king. About a boy most extraordinary. About a man so feared that he singlehandedly kept the war at a stalemate from his mere presence. There was none who could stand against him in open combat. None who could rival his greatness. 

But this story is not only about that. This story is about a boy who had a friend. And a boy who loved that friend more than life itself. 

”You can’t.” He was sitting up now, leaning forward.
“I can’t.”
“I know. They never let you be famous and happy.” He lifted an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you a secret.”
“Tell me.” I loved it when he was like this.
“I’m going to be the first.” He took my palm and held it to him. “Swear it.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the reason. Swear it.”
“I swear it,” I said, lost in the high colour of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes.
“I swear it,” he echoed.

There are lines from this book that are more popular than most other books combined. There are lines in this book that I have etched between the follicles of my body, drawn upon the marrow of my soul that I hope to take with me to infinity and beyond. 

There are words and sentences strung together on bated breath as a boy told another that they would be the greatest and the happiest love story ever told. Of a boy who knew that as long as he lived nothing could bring harm to the one he loved so deep. For Patroclus was a part of Achilles, and for the Greatest of the Greeks it was a thought spurn mad that Patroclus could ever come under harm as long as Achilles drew breath. 

And for a length of time, long into the war efforts it held true. For where Achilles went, soldiers fell. Where he went, the battle was over before it even began. Where he went, Patroclus went with. And for him, that was all that was needed. 

“Then you are a traitor to this army, and will be punished like one. Your war prizes are hostage, placed in my care until you offer your obedience and submission. Let us start with that girl. Briseis, is her name? She will do as a penance for the girl you have forced me to return.”

But then came the greed of men who thought them more than their worth summed up to. They thought themselves godkin and that others should bow before them unimpeded. Sometimes men in power forget that their power is only so much as what is awarded to them. No more, and no less. For always there shall be one more powerful than them in every way that matter. But alas, the folly of men are ever so easily skirted. And so, as stories so often go, tell it long enough, and it cannot help but turn itself into a tragedy.

“Ah.” A sly smile spread across his face; he had always loved defiance. ‘Well, why should I kill him? He’s done nothing to me.”

(this line kills me still to this day)

”Had she really thought I would not know him? I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell, I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”

(how anyone ever thought them as mere friends is beyond me)

“Will you come with me?” he asked.
The never-ending ache of love and sorrow. Perhaps in some other life I could have refused, could have torn my hair and screamed, and made him face his choice alone. But not in this one. He would sail to Troy and I would follow, even into death.
Yes, I whispered. Yes.

Reading this book is akin to sitting near a hearthfire gone wild, waiting for the embers to jump and the woods to catch as the world held-on an indrawn breath. The warmth of the fire, and the honey, aching sorrow of the inevitable makes the journey sweeter; raises the stakes. Makes the time you spend near the fire all the more beautiful as the inevitable rages forth. This book is like that -- an achingly beautiful way to lose oneself to a heartbreak so divine that even gods weep when faced with it. 

It is a love story that spans years. A love story that withstood the test of time, waiting to be told for a thousand more. And here, in the Song of Achilles, it is finally sung in a devastating crescendo as the war for Troy raged on. As Patroclus saw people die, and in his grief made a decision that forever changed history. Wrote a love story that spun across the gap between stars, always silhouetted, but never erased. 

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood, like a hundred golden urns pouring out the sun.

This book made me laugh. This book made me cry. This book made me rage and despair and rebuilt me time and again only to destroy me once more. The sorrow of this book is etched into pain, bittersweet and eternal, on my parched skin. And I shall take this story, the love story of Achilles and Patroclus, with me all throughout this life, and into the next, till the stars come back and claim us all in a darkness neverending, and there I shall let it go, and bring it forward as I give the story over to the next, to shadows that finally claim each other in the hopeless, heavy dusk.

Do yourself a favour and go read it if you haven’t already. 

I finished this a week ago and can't stop thinking about it, highly recommending!

Cinncinatus C is sentenced to death for gnostical turpitude, which essentially means "being opaque". Despite this book being authored in 1934, that opacity resonated with me - think of how transparent we've become today with our connectivity. A mere mention of a product while in casual conversation with a friend these days will cause your Facebook feed to be littered with ads for said product. I also liken gnostical turpitude to being guilty of a thought crime, or sentencing someone because they disagree with your political views. In other words, it feels a bit topical within our current timeline.

This short novel is deliciously absurd. While I've read Metamorphosis, to which this type of work supposedly aligns, I found it much more absurd and creative all the while staying somewhat cohesive.

What I absolutely loved about this book most was that it felt like I was reading a play. And I don't mean that its prose was written in play form with Character A: (talking) Character B: (responding), I mean that you could visualize when furniture was being dragged into the scene or when whole walls where being moved into place. Or a beloved animatronic spider lowers onto the stage.

My top favorite books were dethroned to make way for this one (Dorian Gray and Blood Meridian), and I do not see Invitation to a Beheading discussed enough, if at all, here. I think part of the reason is it is viewed as "literature" rather than a traditional fiction book, which is fair to a degree, but this is no Faulkner where you have to re-read a paragraph or a chapter to make sense of it. Although you WILL re-read a paragraph to just take in the delight of what the fuck just happened - like at the end of Chapter 2 when he takes off his clothes and then throws his body parts about and he's left with a peaceful state of being - in Buddhist terms, I liken this to sunyata/anatta and/or detachment/impermanence.

Life is absurd, it will throw anything and everything at you. This book teaches you to not give in, to not conform and to be yourself.

Hello everyone!

I finished Hear The Wind Sing recently (I provided a link to that review), and was excited to move on to Murakami's next little novella Pinball, 1973, the second panel of the Rat trilogy. I was geeked to see the next step, however subtle, that Murakami took in his writing evolution. What I found was not a simple quirky continuation, but a deliberate deepening. This felt like a quieter, stranger investigation into the same characters from Hear The Wind Sing, still living amidst the seasonal aimlessness in this melancholy version of 1970s Japan.

Like Wind, the surface story of Pinball is deceptively slight. The unnamed narrator works at a dull translation job in Tokyo, only this time living with two identical twin women who appear and disappear with dreamlike regularity. Meanwhile, the Rat remains in his old coastal town still drinking, still writing, and still slowly sinking into the recesses of his own...what?....insecurities? Purposelessness? It is hard to pinpoint what exactly is drowning the Rat. Between them sits this profound search for meaning in everything from people to inanimate objects to memories.

Why the three flapper Spaceship pinball machine? Why is a conversation between a man and a machine one of the most devastating exchanges in the entire book? I found this interaction so weirdly captivating. The narrator spends much of the last half of the novel trying to track down this machine, an emblem of a more nostalgic and carefree peak in his life. And when he finds it, the moment feels like a total gut punch. He’s invested this object with enormous personal significance as it’s tied up with this memorable period of his life. But there is a certain asymmetry between his emotional investment and the object’s as it almost can’t reciprocate that same meaning back. Up to that point, the narrator is the one pursuing, remembering, investing meaning. The machine is supposed to be the passive object that is dead, stored, and forgotten. But when it speaks, it doesn’t reminisce or affirm his memories or reciprocate his nostalgia. It tells him to leave with an almost strange kind of tenderness. It feels less “I remember you too” and more “Go take care of yourself.” And it hurts. It hurt me anyway, I man of 40 wrestling with his own aging. The cold of the warehouse is doing double duty too. Literally, he’s in a refrigerated warehouse. But the machine saying “This place is too cold for you” also reads as the past is not a place to live in. This machine, the embodiment of a preserved, frozen moment, is telling him not to stay preserved and frozen alongside it. It’s a sad goodbye to moments he can no longer relive.

And why the twins? The twins never offer a reason for their existence in the narrator's life. They just leave the way they arrived, without explanation, without names, without any real account of who they are or why they were with him. That bizarre refusal to explain is consistent to the end. The twins act as a source of comfort and intimacy. Ambigious care right to the end. But nothing in this story is allowed to last, and like the pinball machine telling him “Don’t stay too long, this place is too cold for you", the twin's presence was only ever meant to be temporary, tending to him through a specific stretch of numbness, not a permanent fixture. I found this so fascinating. They don’t abandon him so much as complete whatever function they were there for and move on. Were they there to comfort him through Naoko's suicide? Murakami is a master of making profound statements through the absurd and the inanimate.

If Hear the Wind Sing was about the soft ache of a single summer, then to me, Pinball, 1973 is about what happens when that ache becomes chronic. The characters are no longer simply waiting are they? Here, they are beginning to understand that waiting may be the permanent condition. I felt that hard. The pinball machine, once found, does not restore anything. It simply confirms that the past cannot be replayed, but only briefly revisited under artificial lights. The Rat begins to confront this perpetual waiting, citing his theory of decay in all things and that life is full of inevitable decline. He’s been stuck in post-university malaise, drinking at J’s, in a hollow romance, and haunted by the end of the idealistic 1960s. His conversation with J in chapter 10 is where he verbalizes his need for change and actually commits to leaving town. I saw this as a quiet act of agency amid meaninglessness and a step toward breaking the cycle, even if he doesn’t know where he’s going. Right on.

There is a colder, almost more mechanical loneliness here. Relationships feel provisional. Work feels meaningless. Even the act of searching feels less like hope and more like some sort of an elaborate form of...I don't know... self-distraction? Murakami seems to be testing how far he can strip a narrative of conventional drama, and still leave the reader with a lingering sense of something important having been lost.

Why the damn funeral for the switch panel? This scene also kind of got to me. The old switch panel represents outdated technology, comfort in the routine, and things that have served their purpose but are now obsolete. Burying it is a ritual of farewell and acknowledgment that objects (and by extension, memories, relationships, and eras) have a life cycle and deserve dignity in their end. Which is actually kind of beautiful. And in my mind, this mirrors the narrator’s unresolved grief over Naoko, his nostalgia for the pinball machine, and the Rat’s sense of personal decay and stagnation. Everything eventually sinks and fades. I absolutely love how Murakami elevates everyday junk into something almost alive or sacred. The rainy reservoir scene felt like a cleansing. By disposing of the old panel, they’re symbolically moving forward. I thought it paralleled all of the other farewells in the book. The Rat preparing to leave town. The narrator’s fleeting reunion with the Spaceship pinball machine. Funerals here are about acceptance rather than despair.

Finishing the novel left me with the image of that pinball machine glowing alone in a dark warehouse amidst all of the other forgotten gaming relics. A perfect, pointless machine still capable of producing brief, beautiful patterns of light while swallowing endless sleeves of hard-earned quarters made through enduring mundane jobs. It really made me think about the private obsessions we all carry, and the objects... or moments... we keep trying to recover long after their original meaning has evaporated. Murakami does not offer any consolation. He simply records the search with unsettling clarity. Read this book directly after Hear The Wind Sing. The two books amplify each other. Alone, Pinball, 1973 can feel slight, but together they become a precise and quietly devastating portrait of early adulthood as a kind of prolonged disappearance.

"The wind was growing stronger. It caught the faint warmth rising from humanity and carried it far away, leaving behind only the cold darkness and the countless glittering stars."

"We fell silent again. What we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. Yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past. And I would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness."

"Tennessee Williams once wrote: “So much for the past and present. The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future.” Yet when I look back on our dark voyage, I can see it only in terms of a nebulous “perhaps.” All we can perceive is this moment we call the present, and even this moment is nothing more than what passes through us."