Episode 821: Jealous Of Murakami!

It seems that connecting Eunoia Review to NetworkedBlogs really does help to increase traffic. Either that or it's just another random spike in visitors. I suppose I'll be able to tell once tomorrow's visitor count is tallied at the end of the day. So I managed to finish the review in the afternoon for Vol. 2 of I'm Afraid of Everyone. It's an interesting effort, especially how the layout interacts with the text. I might have made too much of that aspect in the review, to be honest, but it really is one of the strongest aspects of this literary magazine. Here you can buy hard copies, or get the PDF if you're skint. My review copy's a PDF, and I think the monochrome design of Vol. 2 actually looks really good when you're reading off a screen. In addition to completing the review, I also finished after the quake, and am therefore now very jealous of Murakami for having written those stories. My favourite was definitely 'honey pie', partly because the central protagonist is a writer, but also because it happens to capture a fear I myself occasionally experience, which is that years from now, my life is going to turn out less satisfying than I imagined it would be. Murakami's short story ends on an ambivalent note that strikes me as ringing truer than the straightforward happy ending that the characters clearly could have been set up to have. It's a shame I don't have time the rest of this vacation to read a couple of his full-length novels, although I believe the Library does have a couple of them, so maybe I'll do that when I get back to Warwick...