Dancin' with sheeps

So, apparently Dance, Dance, Dance could be thought of as the fourth installment of Haruki's first novel series.  I know that Hear the Wind Sing was used as inspiration, or as the basis for A Wild Sheep Chase, and apparently 1970 Pinball is there too, but I was a little confused of where the symbols and characters had come from when I started reading Dance Dance Dance.

Sometimes I think Murakami is a bit of a one-trick pony, reusing the imagery of other books, the solemn lonewolf character who has strangely attractive girls fascinated by him (in this case, a 13-year-old music-loving girl), but sometimes I'll reach a paragraph, take a step back and look inside, and really marvel at how he brings his worlds to life.  He can focus on a smell, a stray thought, a mundane task - always bringing them back somehow to the story or the character's development.

As risqué as it is, the friendship with the 13-year-old girl, Yuki, is probably the most beautiful aspect of this story.  As with all Murakami's enticing females, there is a melancholy about her that can never be accessed directly as she simultaneously accepts the adult world and clutches to her innocence.  This becomes heaviest when she starts referring to the protagonist in past tense, "You were such a nice guy."

You don't know whether this premonitient (not a word) of someone's death, or the inevitable disentanglement of their lives.  At some point, the protagonist must start taking life seriously and stop driving around with 13-year-olds, while Yuki must at some point enter the real world as a young woman.

obligatory Science book interalia

Didn't really go into this book with any preconceptions. It has been sitting on my science books shelf for quite a long time... must have been longer than 4 years. It's really the story of Science that lead from Newton to Maxwell. The history is told in a somewhat roundabout way but is still quite fascinating. Some things irritated me - I thought it was generally good form to not focus on Newton too much as having invented the calculus but rather attribute it to both he and Leibniz - at least that Leibniz should be mentioned in the first sentence... It resolved reasonably well in this respect. Another thing that I know is inevitable in a pop-book dealing with theoretical physics is the incongruence when it comes to the level. Sometimes notions like commutativity, the square root etc, are laboured upon as if the book were written for 10-year-olds, and then the laws of electromagnetism are merely brushed over.

None-the-less, this probably to do with my comfortability in these types of mathematical concepts, and my ignorance when it comes to physics. Overall, I was pretty interested while reading this book and am glad to have added it's general gloss to my mathematical history vocabulary.