PolyBooks: Chapter 1 - In Which We Discuss Books

Welcome to the first book discussion thread!

The "What are you reading?" thread seemed to garner a fair amount of interest, so hopefully we'll be able to have some decent conversation here.

I mostly created this thread on a whim, which means I don't have any big ideas for the format of the page. If you have any ideas for the title, header, or general layout, go ahead and suggest them in the comments. If you'd like, you could even email me some book recommendations that would be placed in the next thread. I'm thinking of making this a biweekly post, though it'll really come down to how crowded the comments get.

So, let's discuss books. Talk about your favorite genres and authors, ask for suggestions, and participate in various other book related activities. BOOKS.

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I recently finished up 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it. Book 1 was a nice exposition, and Book 2 was absolutely excellent, but Book 3 just felt overly repetitive and unnecessarily long for the amount of content it had. It felt fairly anti-climatic, and the ending seemed almost rushed, despite the slow moving plot.

So far, Murakami's works haven't clicked for me. The is the second novel of his I've read, the first being Norwegian Wood, and both of them focused too much on character development and not enough on the storyline itself. I'll still probably give another one of his stories a shot, so any suggestions would be great. I have Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World on my Kindle, so I'm thinking of going with that.

Currently, I'm reading Catch-22. The humor in it is absolutely excellent, though I'm beginning to hope an actual plot comes in before long. Seeing how it has a sequel, I'm assuming some sort of story will appear soon.

You may now commence discussion on books.