I've never actually read Murakami but I was bought this because of my 22 year long frog phase and it was as good a place to start as any, I suppose? Charming and absurd, although I don't think it explored its premise quite as well as it could have. I think also in this case it's somewhat carried by the excellent design and illustration by Seb Agresti and Suzanne Dean; another instance, I think, of a publisher wanting a new novel out by a bestselling author... but since they haven't actually written a new novel, since you know, novels take time, they just whip out a short story they previously wrote and repackage it in elaborate fashion to make it a gift book (Bloomsbury did it last year with Susanna Clarke's The Wood at Midwinter). Still fun but not substantial.

Amusingly dry for a book about... well, Eros, but I missed reading theory and it's good to read some academic stuff from Carson, having only read her poetry so far. I especially liked the bits which looked at the comparison between the spoken and the written word and how the ancient poets and philosophers would have understood it and how that then contributed to their understanding of eros and how they expressed that... and it actually ended up making me understand a few things that I never quite understood at uni, which is a bit late but never mind lmao. I should probably reread this if I ever get around to reading philosophy because god knows I've never handled Sokrates and he was in this a LOT.

I often think Pratchett's standalones (Monstrous Regiment and The Truth especially) are some of his strongest, so it's not really surprising that this didn't break the trend. Discworld novels are always a lot denser than they tend to be portrayed ('haha funny fantasy novel' does not particularly cut it) and this was especially dense, full of theological ruminations and philosophising about the clash between idealism and realism. The philosophers, the believers and the atheists all got to be both right and wrong at various points, which felt both fair and that it was a product of how rigorously Pratchett explored belief systems, and as a result it is also probably one of the best Discworld books for illustrating exactly what people mean when they say Pratchett was very angry as a writer and a thinker. Lot of righteous anger in this one. Tight, coherent, and it was more classic fantasy in its own right than a lot of DW tends to be. Weirdly, or perhaps not, it reminded me of the Tombs of Atuan and I think it would be a lot of fun to read these two in dialogue with each other.

(On the other hand though, I did really enjoy the massive send up of ancient Athens, which was basically feeding itself because he hardly made anything up. Just repeated information.)