DNF: "The Black Book" by Lawrence Durrell

"This party of yours. An elaborate piece of self-gratification. You must always take it out of somebody, mustn't you? Life is one log revenge for your own shortcomings."
"You've been reading the Russians," I said. Nothing else. It was furiously annoying.

I found this book virtually unreadable despite some enjoyable flashes of wit, as in the quotation above. Every time I picked it up again, the page my bookmark was in looked unfamiliar and I had to re-read a couple of paragraphs in an attempt to re-orientate myself. I gave up around page 64, as I couldn't see that it was likely to improve.

Book 95: "After Dark" by Haruki Murakami

"I'll probably be back here around five in the morning for a snack," he says. "I'll be hungry again. I hope I see you then."
"Why?"
"Hmm, I wonder why."
"'Cause you're worried about me?"
"That's part of it."
"'Cause you want me to say hi to my sister?"
"That might be a little part of it, too."
"My sister wouldn't know the difference between a trombone and a toaster oven. She could tell the difference between a Gucci and a Prada at a glance, though, I'm pretty sure."
"Everybody's got their own battlefields," he says with a smile.

A short book, whose events take place over the course of one night. So soon after reading "Grotesque", it was strange to read another Japanese book, featuring both a young woman who is jealous of her beautiful sister, and illegal immigrants from China. However, although Mari Asai is insecure, she is not so insanely jealous of her elder sister Eri as the protagonist of "Grotesque", and her meeting with the tomobonist Takahashi and the women who work at the Alphaville love hotel seems likely to be a turning point in her life.

To start with I wasn't sure that the story was going to go anywhere, but as soon as Kaoru appeared and asked Mari to interpret for a Chinese prostitute, I began to enjoy it, and at a couple of hundred pages long, it is well worth a few hours of your time.