Currently re-reading "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" by Haruki Murakami. A non-fiction account of how Murakami has identified himself a runner throughout his life, written honestly and hilariously. This narrative of thoughts throughout his life may be held together by a constant desire to run, however the story itself is enjoyable regardless of personal thoughts on the subject of running itself.

I personally enjoyed reading how he went from being a poor student to starting a successful jazz club, working from morning all through the night, eventually deciding to start writing for an hour or two after his long nights. He also describes the first time the notion of becoming a writer crossed his mind, as an idle thought while drinking a beer and watching a baseball game in Japan. It's his personal reflections throughout the story, told in such an informal way that really make it an enjoyable read.

Murakami also writes about his tendency to commit himself to what seem like arbitrary goals, not in a competitive way, but for his own reasons. Reading about his resolution to live this way exposes how he may have come to cultivate his popular writing into the novelist he is today. "I'm the kind of person who has to totally commit to whatever I do. I just couldn't do something clever like writing a novel while someone else ran the business. I had to give it everything I had. If I failed, I could accept that. But I knew that if I did things halfheartedly and they didn't work out, I'd always have regrets."

I also appreciated his honesty, describing at one point smoking sixty cigarettes a day, "all my fingers were yellow, and my whole body reeked of smoke. This can't be good for me, I decided. If I wanted to have a long life as a novelist, I needed to find a way to keep fit and maintain a healthy weight." 

My favourite part of the book is when he decides to run in Greece, from Athens to Marathon, as a nod to the original marathon, only in the dead heat of the summer, for an interest article in Runners World magazine. He describes running along a commuter highway, encountering dead animals, including a cat that is, "totally flat, like some mis-shapen pizza, and dried up." His enthusiasm for the run quickly turns to desperation for an ice cold beer, then anger towards basically everything he can see, "angry at the sheep happily munching grass in an empty lot next to the road... who needs this many sheep, anyway?" The photographer in the van snapping shots of him suggests that he quit, as most of the subjects don't actually finish their runs, but he refuses to quit. Eventually finishing, Murakami writes, "I sit at a cafe in the village and gulp down cold Amstel beer. It tastes fantastic, but not nearly as great as the beer I'd been imagining as I ran. Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness."