Murakami reading list: Books mentioned in 1Q84

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1Q84 is Murakami’s most ambitious work to date. In this work, he mentioned Anton Chekhov’s experience in writing the book about Sakhalin Island, which is a remote island in Russia, and the Gilyak people residing there. What stayed with me is the passage saying that despite the paved roads, the Gilyaks still chose to walk on the side of the forest.

I thought that Chekhov’s experience is somehow similar to Tengo’s writing career. He still agreed to rewrite the Air Chrysalis amid the risk. Gilyaks walking the unpaved road is like a metaphor for the characters (Tengo and Aomame) deliberately choosing wrong decisions. Don’t you think that Murakami is a master storyteller?

On another note, they say that the best place to read Marcel Proust’s masterpiece is while in incarceration. However, Aomame reading the volumes of In Search of Lost Time in her safehouse is one thing that I remember the most in this book.

Here are the book titles mentioned in 1Q84:

• Kojiki – O no Yasumaro (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• The Tale of the Heike – Lady Murasaki (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• Little Red Book – Mao Zedong (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• 1984 – George Orwell (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• Nichomachean Ethics – Aristotle (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• Sansho the Bailiff – Ogai Mori (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• Abe Ichizoku – Ogai Mori
• Sakhalin Island – Anton Chekhov (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• The Golden Bough – James George Frazer (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (Amazon, Bookdepository
• In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• Macbeth – William Shakespeare (Amazon, Bookdepository)
• Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell (Amazon, Bookdepository)

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Also Read: Books mentioned in A Wild Sheep Chase

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