It’s easy to fall into the mentality that if we’re going to take time to read, we should kill two birds with one stone—spend time with books that spell out how to get from “Good to Great” or become “indispensible.”
In this mindset, we lose sight of the fact that sometimes only fiction can illustrate the most important lessons in life in a compelling way that leads us to self-reflection and a greater awareness of who we are. These conclusions are not suddenly dropped on us like cluster bombs, but develop in the days and weeks after we’ve turned the final page.
At the beginning of January, I set a goal to read 52 books in 52 weeks. No sweat, right? After all, in 3rd Grade I managed to read over 100 books and own the Book It! Challenge in the process (the motivational power a personal pan pizza holds for an 8 year old still amazes me). While most of my peers were still reading Pee Wee Scouts, I tackled Robin Cook’s Outbreak. In hindsight, I’m not sure what my teachers thought about my mom’s parenting skills (I mean, who lets a 10-year old read A Time to Kill?) but having had the freedom to read whatever I wanted made me a life-long lover of books.
There was a point in my life where I felt guilty for taking the time to read fiction; that which didn’t directly tie into honing my personal strengths or keeping up with the latest in consumer behavior. As part of this challenge, I’ve given myself permission to read anything and everything that piques my interest. There are few things in life I enjoy more than spending an afternoon at Borders, which is where I stumbled across my latest read, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.
What The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caufield is to adolescents, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’s Toru Okada is to twenty-somethings. In the first chapter, Toru explains:
“I had quit my job at the beginning of April—the law job I had had since graduation. Not that I quit for any special reason. I didn’t dislike the work. It wasn’t thrilling, but the pay was alright and the office atmosphere was friendly…Not that quitting would help me realize any particular hopes or prospects…If I stayed with the firm any longer, I’d be there for the rest of my life.”
His journey to eventual self-actualization continues through a chronicle of stories that run the gamut from suburbia in modern-day Tokyo to a zoo in World War II Japan. Unlike fiction authors who beat their intended “lesson” into your head with brute force (Ayn Rand, anyone?), Murakami is subtle. His writing is graceful, at times surreal, and elegantly powerful.
One character, a self-proclaimed “prostitute of the mind” named Creta Kano, explains:
“Whatever the process may have been, the fact remains that at the end of it, I found myself in a whole new container. And once I had passed through the deep confusion…I sought to accept this new self as something truer—if for no other reason than that I had been enabled to escape my profound numbness, which had been a suffocating prison to me.”
Murakami beautifully leads us to the realization that our most important and profound self-discoveries can come in the most unlikely of places.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has stayed with me since I finished it nearly a week ago, and already I know it’s a book I’ll read again and again.
Are there any works of fiction that have given you a new perspective on where you are in life?
