Here is the reading I have been doing in honor of it being an election year:

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer.

Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few by Robert B. Reich.

Sisters In Law: How Sandra Day O'Conner and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World by Linda Hirshman.

Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda For Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Looking back at my review for Kafka on the Shore, I feel like I understand the novel better having more Murakami experience. The WInd-up Bird Chronicle is my favorite book of those I have read. It is less violent and seems more psychological and has a tidier conclusion than the other two novels.

It opens, of course, with the search for a missing feline. The feline belongs to a couple, Toru Okada and Kumiko Okada. An essential bit of information here is that the cat is named after Kumiko's brother, whom is detested by them. Of course there is a cat psychic (Tokyo must be full of such) whom Toru is supposed to work with to find the cat, but it turns out that they (the cat psychics are a two sister team) play a larger role helping Toru to reconcile to his wife's sudden and unexplained disappearance.

Toru's attempts to understand what led to her departure and how to get her to return take up ~600 pages, perhaps not for the faint of heart. There is a significant strand of story concerning the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria which I admit I knew nothing about. What the book does best is to describe the psychological process of understanding using dreams and "real" characters as manifestations of aspects of people. At least, that is how I am choosing to interpret the book.

Muriel Spark

 A friend passed along two books to me by Muriel Spark. I thought they were interesting although stereotypically British.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was the better of the two.  I thought it was surprisingly (since the outcome is know from the beginning) suspenseful. The setting is a girl's private school in Edinburgh where one teacher, Miss Jean Brodie, tries to mold a group of girls into a clique. The main narrator is Sandy, and she "betrays" Miss Jean Brodie to the school administrators. What is interesting is exploring the recollections of each girl about that period of their lives, especially Sandy's. Understanding her motivation is what keeps one reading to the end.

The Only Problem is a darkly humorous story. It is also much less interesting to read than TPOMJB. In its attempts at being funny I found it hard to relate to or take seriously. I didn't feel sympathy for any of the characters as they were all equally bad. Bad in the superficially realized, this is an archetypically-chummy-wealthy-British-man-living-abroad character. This is his best-friend-from-college-chum who wants to help his wife get a divorce. Add lots of improbable events in, without allowing any real emotion or connections to be created and you get the story.
Muriel Spark is a talented writer and TPOMJB reminded me, because of the repetition, of Stein. Although she was writing after Stein, perhaps benefiting from her influence.

A Chess Story

Stefan Zweig published this short story in 1941 as "Schachnovelle." It is set aboard an ocean liner sailing to Buenos Aires. The narrator, whose motivation is curiosity about the chess mind, sets out to entice the famous fellow passenger Czentovic to play a chess game. Czentovic, we are told, is a chess master who lacks both social and intellectual skills, but has an innate talent for chess. Cz's entire life story is revealed to the reader and then the narrator sets out to see Cz at play. This requires strategy but once Cz has been induced to play a game against the narrator and other passengers they lose the game. Then during the second game a mysterious man appears and suggests winning moves they can make. The group of amateurs win. The narrator, intrigued, follows the mystery man. Mystery man relays his story, as follows:

He, Dr. B, was a monarchist banker in Austria when the Nazis arrive. He was imprisoned, and interrogated for months. During this time he started to break down and was desperate for something to focus his mind on so as to withstand the interrogations and remain sane. He, luckily, steals a book of famous chess games from a jailers jacket. He studies this moves, until they are memorized then he makes up new games in his mind. He does this for months and finds it quite useful as a way to focus his mind and retain sanity. Then he decides to play both sides at once, white and black, and his mind  compartmentalizes. He suffers a breakdown, and a fever and finds himself in a hospital. His doctor diagnoses him with a chess mania and suggests he not play again. The doctor also diagnoses him as insane and so he escapes from the Nazis.

Back on the cruise ship Dr. B plays another game against Cz. This time Cz antagonizes Dr. B with slow play and Dr. B starts to regress into "chess madness." The narrator, tells Dr. B to not regress and Dr. B, losing the game exits.

It is a good story, psychologically accurate, and intense (compared to Stein it is dated though). The author Zweig and his wife, Lotte Altmann, committed suicide in February 1942 due to the dismal future prospects.

A little Stein

Gertrude Stein, writing in the first half of the last century, experimented with words, phrases, and sentences. In Three Lives the writing is not so different from the psychological modern style of writing, but Tender Buttons pushes the boundaries of word meanings to an extreme. To me Stein's writing seems less dated, and more contemporary, because elements of her style have come to be used widely.

"Three Lives" consists of three unconnected life portraits, "The Good Anna," "Melanctha," and "The Gentle Lena." "Melanctha" was the most interesting of these and the lengthiest. The woman portrayed is complicated, difficult and ends sadly (as do Anna and Lena). The conversational style is deceptively simple and much information is conveyed by the repetitive language.

"Tender Buttons" is what?

"This cloud does change with the movements of the moon and the narrow the quite narrow suggestion of the building. It does and then when it is settled and no sounds differ then comes the moment when cheerfulness is so assured that there is an occasion" (pg. 298).

I do not claim to understand. It is readable, but pointless, as far as I can understand it. Although, those with a background in literature probably have more interesting things to say about "Tender Buttons" than I do.

1q84

A central characteristic of Murakami's 1q84 lies in its place and time. The book begins with Aomame exiting 1984 Tokyo and entering 1q84 Tokyo, though she does not realize the transition immediately since the new universe is only infinitesimally different than the Japan of 1984. Aomame and Tengo alternately narrate each chapter and the connection between the two of them is gradually revealed.  Morality does not restrain Murakami characters. This is a mythic novel (as is Kafka on the Shore) in which nothing can be taken as first presented. Sex is not merely sex, but can serve other purposes, personally and in society. Family may or may not even be family.

Aomame does notice that police are wearing semi-automatic pistols instead of revolvers and thinks that she has simply missed the news. For the reader, this change signifies a more militaristic Japan than that in the world Aomame came from. Later, when Aomame acquires a gun, she is advised that "'According to Chekhov...once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired.'" Interestingly Murakami does not obey this precept, which he puts into a character's mouth. Neither Aomame's gun, nor the police guns are used, which demonstrates that Chekhov is incorrect. Perhaps Murakami just wanted to demonstrate that Chekhov could be wrong, or perhaps show that reality is more complicated than a Chekhov play. Chekhov is mentioned prior to this, when an excerpt about the Gilyaks from Sakhalin Island is read aloud. It is an ethnographic description of a way of life, and Gilyak interaction with Russian explorers/colonizers. 

One note about the English translation - the title is 1Q84. When it would look better as a lower case q - 1q84. That looks more like 1984, which would be more fitting.

Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood

My favorite pregnancy book for the beautiful writing style and informative value is Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood. It is written by Sandra Steingraber and the first part is organized according to folk names for the monthly moons. It begins with the "old moon" and ends with the 9th "harvest moon." After which the book concludes with several chapters on the experience of new motherhood. Pregnancy books tend to be organized according to a nine month calendar which can be very repetitive for anyone who has read more than one so the labeling of each month with a different name was a nice change.
What is unique about Steingraber's writing is that she does not just detail the development of the fetus. Instead, she discusses development and how it can be negatively effected at each stage of fetal development. This is unusual as most books about pregnancy avoid topics that are not necessarily under a pregnant woman's control.

The driving force behind the book seems to be  not only to bring awareness to environmental pollution, but to change the plane of conversation about ecological degradation. Steingraber poses her question to her husband,
 '"Why is there no public conversation about environmental threats to pregnancy?"'
 and a more structural question 
'"Why does abstinence in the face of uncertainty apply only to individual behavior? Why doesn't it apply equally to industry or agriculture?"'

The answer given is that pregnancy is personal whereas industry and agriculture are public. To provide people with the information that Steingraber is giving is overwhelming. A pregnant woman can not do anything to change the state of the ecological environment so really it is better not to talk about it. Let women obsess about what they can control. It makes sense that our culture would encourage women to worry about how much coffee they are drinking. Many women already keep track of what they eat for dieting purposes. So making pregnancy and environment a personal issue prevents women (and people in general) from advocating for environmental protection and remediation.

This is one of the few pregnancy books which has a message that could be meaningful beyond pregnancy, and beyond one's first pregnancy. Because most books about pregnancy after one's first pregnancy are for me, beyond tedious.