After Dark
LIfe is tough enough these days for Lydia Smith, licensed Para-archaeologist. Seriously stressed-out from a nasty incident in an alien tomb, she is obliged to work part-time in Shrimpton's House of Ancient Horrors, a very low-budget museum. she has a plan to get her career back on track, but it isn't going well. Stuff keeps happening.Take the dead body that she discovered in one of the sarcophagus exhibits. Who needed that? Finding out that her new client, Emmett London, is one of the most dangerous men in the city isn't helping matters either. And that's just today's list of setbacks. Here in the shadows of the Dead City of Old Cadence, things don't really heat up until After Dark.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
7mentions
3people
2014–2024years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 1Q84 is one of the ones I haven't read personally, so it's hard to say. I can just comment that all of the other Murakami works I've read really "hooked" me right from the beginning.
After Dark was my first and that was pretty much a "I sat down to 'read a few pages' to see if I wanted to read the book or not, and when I looked up I was 2/3rds of the way done" experience.
- Goldfinch is one of my favorites, so let me chime in as I’ve read during serious depression and understand the struggle.
- tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow
- 1Q84
- After Dark
- secret history (author of goldfinch)
- never let me go (bit sad-ish)
Note: I explicitly filtered my reads to be things I enjoyed during depressive states. Lots of other books I read during that period I didn’t enjoy/made depression worse
- The Harry Potter series remains the most enjoyable books I've ever read. The Pillars of the Earth comes close though.
Terrific sci-fi reads were Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Hyperion, Ringworld, and to a lesser extent A Deepness in the Sky. Also Excession, whose human characters are poorly developed and written but whose world-building and AI characters are amazing.
Terrific fantasy reads were The Time-Traveler's Wife, as well as The Name of the Wind and its sequel The Wise Man's Fear. The latter two have rather bad writing and TERRIBLE female characters, but the story is extremely engrossing anyway and some of the ideas are really original (the Cthaeh!).
Catch-22 was an amazing read as well. Watership Down, After Dark, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, and Blood Meridian all dazzled me.
Oh, and The Sandman, Watchmen, Maus, and Persepolis for graphic novels.
For short stories: MMAcevedo (https://qntm.org/mmacevedo), The Last Question by Asimov, The Library of Babel by Borges, and The Dead by Joyce (whose final sentence is my favorite of all English-language writing).
Lastly, The Design of Everyday Things changed how I saw man-made items.
Edit: I almost forgot-- Ecclesiastes, from the Old Testament. I am not religious and this work stands out strongly from all the other writings collected in the bible. It's a poetic work on finding purpose in a world that lacks any inherent meaning. Considered one of if not the most well-written book of the entire bible. Recommend the NIV translation.
- Interesting. I had exactly the opposite experience with my first Murakami. I was at Barnes & Noble one Sunday evening, grabbed one of his titles (After Dark) off the shelf, intending to flip through a few pages; and next thing you know the store is about to close and I'm halfway through the book. I bought the copy, drove home and finished reading it that night. I was hooked pretty much from the get-go.
- On that point, at least, I can agree entirely with Jones: I am always crushed by how many books I have not read.
So much truth here. The sad thing is, barring some Kurzweilian breakthrough in life-extension technology, none of us will live long enough to read all the books we might want to read. I often joke with people "I wish all my favorite authors would quit writing for about 100 years and give me a chance to catch up, and they just won't". But even the joke is silly, because IF I lived another 100 years, and IF none of my favorite authors wrote anything else in that time, I'd still not "catch up". In fact, I'd venture I'll still be further behind at the end, as NEW writes keep spring up as well.
You can't win, really. And since you have to make a choice based on something, I figure it might as well be pretty close to arbitrary. There are authors I'll never read, although perhaps not many that I would make a fuss over actively avoiding. But out of that list, there are probably plenty I'd enjoy very much, if I bothered to read them. Maybe I'd like some of them more than some of the authors I read now. But the bitter irony is, you can't really know if you'd like reading a book or... until you have already read it. sigh
I think the best most of us can hope for is simply to make it a point to try and be at least somewhat diverse in our reading, and take the occasional foray into unexplored territory. I did that a while back when I picked up my first Haruki Murakami novel. I'd heard of him, heard him mentioned by a lot of "literary" types, and assumed his work was probably snotty, pretentious "pat yourself on the back" stuff, and so put off reading anything by him for quite some time. And then I read After Dark and I was hooked. I've still only read two of his works (the other being Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki) but I'd now mention Murakami as one of my favorite authors.
I resisted reading the Harry Potter books for quite a while because "they're kids books". Once I read them, I found that they were very much worth the time. OTOH, I started Infinite Jest by DFW a while back, and I have been struggling to find any enthusiasm for reading this book. Should I continue with it just because it's so widely revered? Or should I read something I enjoy more instead? That's one of life's little conundrums. shrug
At the end, you just have to do the best you can. Nobody gets out of life alive and all that...
- Doesn't seem hipsterish at all to me.
FWIW, I wouldn't really say that any book in 2014 changed my life, but... if I had to name my favorite book of 2014 there's a good chance that I'd pick After Dark by Murakami. It was my first Murakami and I thought it was very good.
Murakami rocks.
