>>11
Thank you
(same poster as 4, if you belive me)
I tried Gibson's novels (including Neruomancer) and sure, it's cool at first but he tends to get too tied up in techno-babble and ends up giving his stories a sleek and cold aesthetic feel to it. After a while, I ended up stop reading his novels because of this. It made me feel like all of his characters were the same and his stories as dull.
Murakami on the other hand delves deep into human emotion (usually from a male's standpoint) and heart while still employing a sci-fi or anime style or flair to some of his works.
Now, I too have read "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" (My first Murakami book to boot!) and what grabbed me from the get-go was not just the sci-fi settings or the japanese traditions that were inter-woven into the storyline but his capacity as a writter and his imaginative style.
I won't ruin it here but in his novel, "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" he introduces us to two stories from the very begining. One is of a man living in our world and the other is of someone living in a fantasy world.
While first reading, you presume that the two are completely un-correlated but as you delve deeper and deeper into the storyline, you begin to see just how inter-woven the two actually are. I had to read two times not just to fully understand it but appreciate it even more so than I did after the initial go through.
Simply put, I can not praise this novel enough. It's no wonder the New Yorker magazine praises his works so much!