Been waiting for this...maybe a bit more...

I'll be getting to this sometime in the future, but time is tight...

The team that Murakami has at his American publishing house is simply phenomenal. This dust cover has cellophane windows that show the colors and subway map design underneath:

This is a beautiful artifact and Murakami's most sexually charged and possibly most complex narrative structure to date. I'm not done, but it is actually quite small. It isn't a normal size, especially for a hard-back book, but I don't have a good enough comparison picture yet.

Coming Soon...

December 12th, 2014...

Too, too excited...check me out!

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage: A novel

Just thought I'd leave this here.

Released today, but I've been stuck in Portola.  Plan on picking it up tomorrow.

Trout Shoes

I thought of you when I saw this, Norm...

The baseball All-Star game happened just recently (literally yesterday as of this post), and for the All-Star game, the bosses loosened the rules on what ball-players could wear in regards to shoes and cleats. It seems like a silly concession, but it looked like so many players just love neon colors that the decision would be considered a success by those bosses.

Currently in baseball the best player is also one of the youngest, a giant of a young man playing in the outfield down here for the Angels. His name is Mike Trout. Instead of neon cleats and shoes, he wore:

Rainbow trout colored baseball cleats...

At the Cabin

I'll have more to say on this some time later...but:

And:

Cuteness...

Missed it...Happy Birthday to the Norms

I missed both of you boys on all of the sites...

Happy Birthday Norm (III) and Happy Birthday Norman (IV)! I hope, Norm, your travails along the rails were as enlightening as I imagine the zen-like time could be.

I'm looking forward to seeing you two in a few weeks, up at the Cabin. I have a small writing project I'm working on to leave up there...a somewhat fictional gonzo treatment of a week in the life of a, eh, resident T.

Norman, Chilling--eyes on the sea-bass...

Until next time...

Discovery at Powell's, the King of America's Independent Bookstores

I'd read plenty about Powell's Bookstore in Portland, Oregon. It's the de facto King of the American Independent Bookstore. Once we'd decided to go to Portland, this was one place I really wanted to visit.

In a later post on the regular blog I'll be going into some more detail about the discoveries at Powell's, but until then, Norm, here's something that you may appreciate:

These guys have a rare-book room, but this was definitely not found there. The cover art and the ad-copy inside are pretty neat.

I'm not sure how Powell's stacks up against Manhattan's the Strand...

I need to think about that with some more depth, but I certainly never saw anything like this chilling on the shelf in New York.