Shelfology Book Pairing

A Memoir

by Haruki Murakami

From the best-selling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and After Dark, a rich and revelatory memoir about writing and running, and the integral impact both have made on his life. In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Haruki Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he’d completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a slew of critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and—even more important—on his writing. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and includes settings ranging from Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvellous lens of sport emerges a cornucopia of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs and the experience, after the age of fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in distance running.

by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy plumbs the depths of human degradation in Child of God, his most brutally violent, shocking work. From the author of Blood Meridian and The Road.1960s, Tennessee. Lester Ballard is a violent, solitary and introverted young backwoodsman, dispossessed on his ancestral land. Homeless, indulging in voyeurism, he is accused of rape.When he is released from jail, he begins to haunt the hilly landscape - preying upon its population, unleashing his impulse for sexualised violence.Commonplace humanity becomes grotesque and, as the story hurtles toward its unforgettable conclusion, McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with empathy and lyricism.'A powerful and talented writer, able to elicit compassion for his protagonist however terrible his action' - Sunday TimesPraise for Cormac McCarthy:'McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute' - Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' - Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series'n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' - Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain