Having now read three of his works — Kafka on the Shore, First Person Singular, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — some lukewarm opinions on Murakami.

A close reading of Kafka on the Shore: how Murakami's parallel narratives that never converge explore fate, memory, and the self — and why the irresolution is the point.

Steinbeck's retelling of Cain and Abel across California generations — the moral argument of 'timshel', and why the book's real subject is the capacity to choose otherwise.

Zamyatin's We — the ur-text that preceded 1984 and Brave New World — read as a mathematical argument for why collective happiness cannot be solved like an equation.

Notes on Westad's Cold War history, which reframes the conflict as a global struggle fought mainly in the Third World — and what this lens reveals about American and Soviet interventionism.