I'd read A Wild Sheep Chase and After Dark and found that neither of them was up to Murakami's Windup-Bird magic. But listening to Dance Dance Dance was. I don't think it was the fact that I was listening rather than reading. I think it had more to do with the theme of the haunted hotel --and the romance.
Talk about romance and sheep in the same sentence and you're liable to talk yourself into trouble, but I've always been fond of the BBC's rendition of All Creatures Great and Small and it was nothing less than the best thing I could have done to listen to All Things Wise and Wonderful --read by none other than Christopher Timothy, who played Herriot on TV. There's something about the combination of humor, landscape, hard work and social interraction in James Alfred White's best work that warms me cockles.
High hats-off also to Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao deserves every bit of praise and success --period.
