What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami
There’s nothing tremendous, startling, or even revelatory about Haruki Murakami’s latest book. The whole exercise is too pointedly modest for that. But it’s a likeable and often rewarding excursion into the writer’s experiences as a runner.
It’s also, perhaps inevitably, about Murakami’s life as a writer, since for him, the two are neatly intertwined. So much so that he claims to have come to regard running as ‘both exercise and metaphor’.
Cheesy metaphors are the stock-in-trade of the self-improvement industry, and so it is perhaps inevitable that Murakami takes the opportunity to dish out more than a few life-lessons. ‘On the highway of life, you can’t always be in the fast lane’, is one unfortunate example. But it’s not all so bad, and in fact, as a pep-talk (perhaps I was in need of one) I found this book pretty effective.
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