Last week I’ve been on a short vacation at the Baltic Sea with my parents, my sister and her family. As I’m quite addicted to reading fiction books whenever there’s an opportunity, it was no question whether I would take a book with me. The question was more which and in which format. Normally I would take my Kindle Paperwhite which I use for most of my fiction reading. But with children and a dog around, I decided to take a paperback with me. You can toss it into a corner and even sit on it if you feel like it. And if it gets torn it’s not as expensive to replace as a Kindle. Looking at the paperbacks in my bookshelves that I haven’t read yet, I finally decided to read “A Wild Sheep Chase” by Haruki Murakami.

I’ve read some books by Murakami during the last few years and whenever asked I’ll say that for me Murakami’s books are like the movies of David Lynch. They are weird and often while reading you don’t understand what’s going on. Most of the time they are pretty slow books. So there isn’t much suspense driving you to read on and find out what’s going to happen next. The thing that keeps me reading those books from cover to cover is a mild sense of curiosity of what strange idea he’ll come up with next. And then the writing is very well or more correctly what the german translations I’m reading — as I have no clue of Japanese — succeed to preserve is well written. I like those strange dialogs and those strange protagonists having them.

Like with any other book by Murakami, it’s rather pointless to give a summary of the book. At the center is a guy who’s made to look for a sheep by some mafia boss. But that’s not why you would want to read it or “After Dark”, “Kafka On The Shore” or “Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World”. It’s just because they are very satisfying reads.