THE AMBIDEXTROUS LIBRARIAN

NORWEGIAN WOOD (Haruki Murakami) Murakami is a strange reading experience.  If you like solid, fast-paced realism with a clear, satisfying ending - Murakami is probably not for you.  If you like something a little more gossamer and ethereal.  Something that floats around the edges of magical realism, or perhaps dips its toes lightly in a pond of peculiar every now and then - you will love Murakami. Having said that, Norwegian Wood has no magical realism in it at all (sorry about that), but it still embodies that floaty, misty, breathy (how many adjectives can I insert here?) mood of his writing.   Norwegian Wood is a tale of a boy and a girl making their way gradually into adulthood.  One tragic event from their past keeps them joined, yet also keeps them apart.  Set in the late 60's amidst the urban mass of Tokyo, Murakami still manages to take this landscape and puff wistful. lonely tendrils down it's back alleys and dormitories.  And yet the ...

After a minor interruption to service, I'm back and I've installed an upgrade! For those of you out there who may actually read this blog (the one or two of you, hi Mum), life has been more than a little busy of late and has interfered with my ability to read, and to blog.  Basically, I have been experiencing a career crisis.  Actually that's a bit dramatic it wasn't really a crisis (I just like the familiar-sounding alliteration), it was more that I really didn't like my job.  Don't get me wrong, my colleagues were AWESOME and that counts for so much in a workplace, but as a new Librarian, the job itself was probably as unchallenging and backward as it could get.  A career cul-de-sac.  A dead end.  A career coffin.  A place of final rest. So what was the position?  It was at a school.  A lovely school of a certain educational philosophy that was rather anti-technology and fairly set in its ways.  I sort of knew this when I started,...