In my review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I called it Murakami's Ulysses. I did not mean this as a disrespect. It's not unreadable like I remember Ulysses being when I tried to read it, but it is as reference-filled, just as long, and just as packed with meaning (as my friends who have read it tell me). Just because a book is dense doesn't make it obtuse or pretentious. Just because it's long doesn't mean the writer is overly verbose. Both of these are proved by this novel.
I just may go back and try to read Ulysses again. Well, after I finish The Crying of Lot 49 that is. Pynchon trumps Joyce these days.
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see, I thought Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was dense but I liked it. (Her Teaching a Stone to Talk was 100 times more enjoyable though.) I know our book club hated her latest, Maytrees... would you call that one dense? If you read the first 30 pages of PATCreek, you'll see what I mean. But, the image of the water bug sucking the insides out of a frog kind of got me into it. If she saw that, I thought, I bet she's seen some more cool stuff!
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