Motifs (edited)

This weekend, I finished reading Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood.

It was, as Steve said, an unsentimental love story. Fortunately for me, I didn't feel like throwing it at the wall. I did, however, cry nearing the end of the book.

I wonder, because it is not very clear to me.. does Watanabe end up with Midori then?

I liked the book, and I'm glad I read it.

For a girl who is perpetually restless, wants to see the world, do a gadzillion things, and try virtually everything once, I can be surprisingly inert.

I haven't read many books over the past few years. And for about six, seven years now - I have been stuck in a kind of literary, philosophical, and emotional limbo.

Throughout these years, only a few books spoke to me and resonated with my own life and feelings.

A quote from one of the books "Unbearable Lightness of Being" (not the most appropriate one, but somewhat relevant):
"When people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs . . . but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them."

I sometimes don't know if I am in limbo because of the books I read. Whether, I let the motifs in the same books I read delineate the boundaries of my world.

And so, I think my obsession with the same few books is stunting me. My inertia is unhealthy - I have a tendency to eat the same food over and over again, or re-read the same author, books, genres. In that way, I get stuck in a rut. It is only when you challenge yourself that you grow. It would have been too easy to have picked up another Milan Kundera book (I have only read "Unbearable"), but I deliberately bought books of authors I had never read before. I wanted to introduce new motifs into my musical composition.

And, what I really wanted to say is, I'm glad I did that.