I stopped writing because I had to finish Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is a title I still don’t understand. I hope something was lost in translation.

Anyway the book was captivating and very enjoyable.

The protagonist’s obsession with himself threw me off in the beginning, especially, as I said, coming from Hugo’s broad narration in Les Miserables, but in the end the story and ideas therein were more than worth putting up with the narrator. In fact by the end he’s like an interesting friend.

There are a lot of fantastic elements in the book but the writing is very confident and so they come off as realistic.

The plot wasn’t full of twists and turns but he creates suspense by interspersing two worlds from chapter to chapter and making you wonder how they are connected. The worlds draw nearer and nearer to each other as the book goes on so for the last two-thirds of the book nothing else in life mattered but getting to the end.

This is why I don’t read as much as I’d like to, or watch TV, because I just can’t stop till I get to the end.