I thought the 1Q84 publishers were pulling the same trick and I was a bit reluctant to be a victim to clever marketing.
I first became aware of “The Amber Spyglass” being marketed heavily and being a very stunning looking volume. This reminded me of my experience of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” books. Clever heavily market Book Three and draw people into having to buy the previous two books. What about books One and Two? Oh, how convenient, they are available in a single volume. “Why”, thought I, “do people just rewrite other people’s stories? I don’t think I would enjoy reading just a rewrite of 1984.”Īlso, thought I, I’ve never heard of this book before and the first thing I see is Book Three. End of sermon.) There was mention of Orwell’s 1984 which left me with the, as it turned out, misconception that it was simply a re-write of 1984. Of course, some book blurbs can be equally dangerous in this regard. I believe the author has laid out the plot of his/her work in the way he/she intends the reader to discover it and that a preview of the plot is just something that can only remove an element of the pleasure to be gleaned by reading the book unsullied by prior knowledge. That is also why I try never to give anything other than the highest level plot information in the reviews I write. (I try to avoid reading reviews of books before I read the actual work in case they give away plot lines and spoil the work for me. Please tell me you can.)Īfter my initial attraction to the cover I read some of the online blurb about the book.
When I first became aware of 1Q84 it was the cover of Book Three that attracted me the dark background, the enigmatic title, “1Q84”, with a crow perched on the Q, and the title and the crow silhouetted against an image of a somewhat distorted moon, not to mention a smaller, green hued moon a short distance to the bottom left. I was not intimately familiar with Murakami’s work. How I got to that bottom line is a meandering tale of inverted snobbery, ignorance, misconceptions, clever marketing, revulsion, and susceptibility to beautifully designed book covers. Bottom line, I enjoyed 1Q84 Book One, Book Two and Book Three.
I’ve found another author who has a long list of books to his credit and I am now inclined to read them all.
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