“I expected this one to be weirder. You see it on lists of unusual books, books with atypical structures like House of Leaves or something, and it probably doesn’t live up to that sort of expectation.
It IS a fun, short version of Murakami’s version of weirdness. I still prefer The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle because, even though it’s long AF, maybe even long AQ (Q being further into the alphabet than F), the length brings you into the weirdness more slowly, more piecemeal, and that works a little better for me.
As someone who has worked as a librarian, I will admit that I have, in the past, thought of scenarios along the lines of slicing off the top of someone’s head and sucking their brains out. But never a patron who came in with an odd question regarding an obscure piece of knowledge.
That’s kind of what librarians dream about, that patron who’s like, “Can you tell me about books bound in human skin?” And I’m like, “Bro, I’ve got resources for you.”
So it was a little backwards because I mostly fantasized about trapping in a weird dungeon those patrons who were very annoying, who were often there to do something like ask me to order the files on their computer for them, not so much the patrons who had interesting queries.
AND, further, those patrons who I may have hired a sheep man to feed them donuts in their cell, usually they had less knowledge than I did, at least about whatever we were discussing, which is why they were in the library, SO I’m not sure if I can drink their brains and get their knowledge.
It’s kind of like…you know how you’d hear shit like, “warriors would eat the hearts of their enemies to gain their courage”? What if their enemies were cowards? Would that be a way of defeating them, you send in your most cowardly villager, they get captured, their heart gets eaten, and now all the warriors are pushovers?
Not that I’m so smart. If a spooky librarian ate my brains to gain my knowledge, it’d be a curse. They’d be like, “Why do I now know the number for the Denver Post Classifieds from the early 90’s is 825-2525?” “Why do I know the jingle for a toy called a Skip-It, and that the very best thing of all is that there’s a counter on this ball?””