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A simile for this part is like being in the eye of a hurricane: everything that came before is drown and destroyed, what lies ahead also gets swallowed up by the storm, and yet there is a breathless calm that everything in your immediate vicinity is as it should be. More likely a turn of convenient plot points from an author four fifth through the novel and has to remove the haystack Professor so that the story ends.

Like Captain Kidd’s supposed treasure map, one can guess at the truth buried beneath the lies both the Kid and Professor tell, but without a clear sense of location, the readers are skimming the surface of what seems to be whale-shaped island and its two smaller isles. Maybe the Kid just wanted to show off his favourite DVD and just imagined a mature-enough hook-up to follow, as in so much of the media he consumes.

Shines a little more light on the Professor, with his backstory, current relationship and plans to protect the Kid from outside interference, to make him out to be a crusading benefactor. But the Kid is probably right to be skeptical of the Prof’s plans just as Gloria (the doctor’s wife) is wary of the time he is committing to this project. Is sociology really going to rescue the Kid like an abused dog or parrot?

Kind of a slipshod way of narrating a story, with present moments followed by flashbacks or rambling thoughts about minute details. On the other hand, it explains how the Kid got from the library to the causeway to work and back to his tent in time to meet the Professor. Seems like all the other bits explain why Kid is where he ended up but like Banks’ opinions on God and good and evil that are naïve yet on point.

The complicated and cruel reaction to the puppy love (with lots of heavy petting) prove that Xio has no hope of finding peace and presence from her family. Mami rages with rice, Papi shames with swears and Twin dreams of departure. All because her hands and lips were on a guy rather than at prayer. And worst of all when Aman gets a chance to step up and protect his bae, he skates back to be a bystander not boyfriend.

For all of Ms Galiano attempts to free X’s poetic mind, it is really Old Scratch winning the day in the form of a man (really just a boy with an anagramic name) to distract X. And no sooner has she started to fumble around sinfully with her boy than she finds out how Twin has got himself all boycrazy too, with a white devil to top everything off. Can imagine many Mami’s mira muchachaa are soon to follow.

For the first of my book-a-week resolution, I’m getting a fast-forward view of a teenager growing up in Harlem, too fast for her family and friend, who wants to hit pause on her Catholic confirmation. Two alternatives become available to her: boys and slam poetry. This fictional account is proof that Acevedo went with option B but for pre-poet X the ball is still up in the air for any baller to grab at and go with.

The last few chapters go to the strangest lengths to finish off these Strange tales: sailing across interplanetary space with an increasingly omnipotent jerk. The Better Angels and even plural pronouns are hints enough that all would not end well for Shandar’s cosmic conquest. For a first time in decades Fforde concludes one of his long-running series with a hopeful and imaginative send-off for a first-person self.

A risky move, having the author Fforde make an appearance in his own work, but achieved with the same wit and inventiveness that make all of his novels such a treat. And more than just coming up with a scheme for galactic conquest, he goes on to show how important a balance Jennifer, Tiger and Shazine have between their moral stance and a willingness to throw off caution when faced with most outlandish circumstances.

Really enjoying the tick-clock tension-setter and surprised by how quickly things got twisted together. Jennifer is one dragon down (maybe), facing off with an exponentially powerful foe (assuredly) and her only royal ally swapped out for a sinister sister (unexpectedly). Yet all these elements will have their enantiodromia as with the worriers poised to become warriors against a soulless sorcerer and pretender king.

Enough of a set-up to establish the stakes, the Sorcerer’s Conclave concludes that there is not much of a chance for success, and yet Moll’s sudden appearance demonstrates that odds can always be calculated in a more effective way. Whatever the outcome might be, Jennifer will foil Shandar’s elaborate scheme, but won’t be around to celebrate or appear in another sequel after she unravels her mysterious origin.

Picking up the story after a lengthy delay, seven years or so since The Eye of Zoltar, I am glad that there are plenty of footnotes and time to catch up with the previous events. Much of it silly and poking fun at the strange change this world experienced in the in-between times. So far, the noble deeds of the main two orphans, plus the grace of an ignoble uncrowned queen, will fight off their mightiest foe.

The charmed lives of Hornby’s main protagonists take a hit in the second half, revealing the dire costs of their overly-productive careers. Prince has enough recordings stashed away in a vault for two albums a year for the next couple of centuries, and Dickens large volume of novels is only superseded by the vast amount of adaptations across various media. Neither seemed happy, leaving me to wonder why they did it.

An odd couple to pair together, but Hornby proceeds with his life-long expertise in pop culture as he charts the early hits and speculates on what makes them such unique, productive geniuses. Every so often, he attempts to loop himself (and surreptitiously myself) into this illustrious club, the dream of anyone who places one word in front of another over and over again with minimum hours for popular art consumption.

The final three stories in this collection represent the bulk of Murakami’s stories (all the published ones I’ve now read plus the novels I still need to get through): “Last Lawn” really a forlorn everyman figuring out aloof women, “The Silence” a repressed memory shaping an entire life, and the titular “Elephant” being an unsolved mystery with the right amount mysticism to become another Tokyo story.

Partially a primer for those truly unfamiliar with zazen and other Buddhist practices, mostly a philosophical discourse that uncovers the Zen in everything, how what we know and how we act are part of the bigger picture that traps us in unproductive habits. A far cry from that other Suzuki who focuses on satori, Shunryu knows how important yet asserts that all these practices are, after all, nothing special.

The wordplay can either be delightfully nuanced as to barely be noticed, as in “A Window” or grating and obvious like “TV People” or “A Slow Boat to China”. These last two seem to be an idea stuck in Murakami’s head that he writes through, and “The Dancing Dwarf” starts out that way too until it gets into its icky Super-Frog-like climax to reveal there is much more going on in such straight stories.

A very sudden 180° on “this battlefield of remembrance” (p. 200) where the long-developing romance ends and a more meaningful fling takes its place. Clearly Yocchan’s story is not so much about reconciling a grieving mother with the remorseful spirit of her father, or finding the right person to do it with, but the unseen connections people have with places even in her case where two selves continue to battle.

Is Shintani-kun really Yocchan’s father’s ghost? He shows up right at the time an otherworldly visits should have happened, and apart from her Mum and Michiko’s wry sightings, nobody else seems to notice this helpful soul. Even the Woman from Ibaraki gave her ominous news telling of a possible incestuous relationship. Might play out like a familiar Detective Story movie with Sixth Sense twist.

I’m speeding through a book that is taking its time getting into the story, almost as if the narrative exists in another world from the familiar everyday. Imoto only visits his daughter in dreams while Yoshie’s dreamboat guy magically appears in her cafe and safe adopted town. Even her Mum has moved on, but the prevailing sense is that Yocchan is stuck in a cozy in-between while life goes off in other directions.

Banana takes her time establishing the setting of Shimokitazawa before barely even touching the plot. In a way, it is refreshing to understand the love for a quite corner of Greater Tokyo that may not be as fictional as the Zawa Zawa movie (maybe such a film exists?) suggests. On the other hand, the inside flap did mention ghostly connections between father and daughter, and at 1/4 the book, he’s ghosting.

The special Murakami-ish brand of frustrated male-female relationships come to the fore with this set of three stories. “Barn Burning” puts the flighty gal in the fridge so that the author gets to know her rich boyfriend. “The Little Green Monster” shows how patient housewife might snap. And “Family Affair” reveals a sexually-charged yet chaste brother-sister combo with another Haruki hallmark: spaghetti.

The sequence of stories alternate between aimless rambles, yet again, and intense insight, the better one being “Sleep” and “Lederhosen” - the former being a nightmare becoming a dream come true for a literate housewife, before snapping back into a different nightmare; the latter a straightforward yet fascinating unraveling of a marriage when a wife finds a random man to measure her husband’s hiking shorts.

Some of these early stories have the vague traces of other stories that were reworked or, frankly, greatly improved upon. Someday I'll get around to reading the Wind-up Bird Chronicle to give the first story an accurate assessment, but the rambling, unfocused narration of "the Kangaroo Communiqué" was enough to signal that this collection is going to be the longest set of short stories that I will ever read.

A drawing room discovery and a denouement that almost undoes any of the consequences of this fatal issue, I am pleased to see that there a sense of completion for the character who finally gets a curtain call before bowing out. Antarctica become a battleground, the ends of the earth, to defeat the big bad Peregrine with the oldest trick in the books: literally the first thing comic book readers saw Doctor Strange do.

No surprise that the mystical tales that began in the pages of Human Torch and the Thing would end in such a supremely strange way, with the Ditko-era Doctor brought forth to investigate his own present-day murder. Callbacks and cameos abound, but with a sense of finality that truly ends dear Doctor Strange in all dimensions, even having an impact on cinematic adaptation that lost the spirit of the original.

Noticing the patterns and their progression through the last half of hexagrams became more revealing than the divinations that still seem hit or miss with successful outcomes. How many shapes are the inverse of preceding ones, and like storytellers staring into the fire, these cracks in turtle shells represented by lines on yarrow sticks (and ink on the page) cycle back to Hexagram 1 but not onward to deeper aspects.

The stuffy, play-by-the-rules grammatical airs of Strunk got cleared away somewhat with the willy-nilly aesthetic breeziness of White as the pragmatic professor was replaced by his staunch student. Much of what they both list extensively are lessons I sort of recall hearing about since grade three to my second year of college, but never really imagined I would need to know in detail and now with this book, I don’t!

Reading each hexagram in their ordinal arrangement makes sense, even if the success or misfortune values seem to be arbitrarily assigned. I am still a bit unclear, however, with the moving lines and how the commentary interprets a different outcome based on unbroken and broken lines. The stacking of trigrams paints a much clearer picture than any mystical Taoist aphorism or Confucian fortune cookie oracle ever could.

Closing out this volume with chapters on individuation and the therapeutic importance of the mandala, Jung summarizes whole decades of his work while leaving things open to continue in his second volume Aion. Showing some evolution of his idea for the collective unconscious based upon what his patients presented, he also records the trauma of life in Europe just before WWII and its hateful misuse of alchemy.