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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17803.After_Dark?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="After Dark" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1178063629m/17803.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17803.After_Dark?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">After Dark</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3354.Haruki_Murakami">Haruki Murakami</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2261318?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 5 of 5 stars<br/>(My full review of this book is larger than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find it at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].) <br/> <br/><i>"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper."</i> <br/> <br/>There are lots of people out there, myself included, who believe Japanese author Haruki Murakami to be the creator these days of some of the most beautiful dialogue currently being produced on the planet; and after coming across an example like the one above, how really can you not agree? For years a well-known secret among the Western world's literary hipsters, it was not until Murakami's embrace by indie heavy-hitter McSweeney's at the turn of the millennium that he acquired a mainstream following within English-speaking countries; now that his work is getting more and more known, however, there are more and more people now aware of what a magical and sometimes almost perfect thing a Murakami novel is. I'll admit right off the bat, for example, that I'm a big and longtime fan of Murakami myself; that before today's review I had already read four of his thirteen books now available in English, and in fact love his work so much that I've named one of my past Macintoshes after him. (See, anytime I acquire another Mac, I rename the hard drive after a writer I really admire, so that I can tell them apart when linking them together as an in-home network...and, um...er, never mind.) <br/> <br/>Murakami's latest English novel, then, the slim but still deeply strange <i>After Dark</i>, becomes this week my fifth full-length novel of his, and in fact... <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/147289?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>