Haruki Murakami, OxyContin and Other Letters to the Editor
Credit.Jim Stoten
To the Editor: I really appreciated David Means’s review of Haruki Murakami’s new story collection, “First Person Singular” (April 25). Means is a good guide to discovering and appreciating Murakami’s oeuvre. And if you’ve never read any of it until now, this pithy collection is a good entry. But you either get Haruki Murakami or you don’t. And if you don’t like this one, you won’t like anything else he wrote either.
Murakami is that rare, once-in-a-generation writer who manages to either completely engross you in his world, at least in his abstract and arcane (but quite openly modern) musings on it, or to completely turn you off from turning even another page in any of his books. To me, “First Person Singular” was an opportunity to immerse myself yet again into his deftly woven magic.
I will not miss this year that is ending | Letters
Updated Dec 30, 2020;
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This year we found more than 317,000 families to cry for, millions more who lost everything, and a year of plagues that never ended.
I will not miss the fear, the heartache or the abject terror. I will not miss wanting to hug someone or shake their hand but being unable to do so. I will not miss trying to show joy through a mask. This has been a year without touch, without promise, without a democracy coming together as one to defeat a common enemy.
It was a year in which the world changed, and not for the better; we still did not accept those who are different from us, or cannot be us. It was a year of hatred and anger, Black vs. white, police vs. citizens, hate vs. love, truth vs. fiction, and politics vs humanity.