I have always been a big fan of Haruki Murakami‘s writing. He creates wonderful characters who inhabit fascinating worlds. I think IQ84 is one of my favourite novels but I haven’t come across one of his I didn’t like yet.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is different. It’s not a novel, really; it’s a memoir of sorts, but it focuses on his running, almost to minute levels of detail. It’s still got the beautifully constructed prose, and it works so well even with Murakami describing the minutiae of lacing his shoes and the long and tedious training runs.
I guess it is a common interest. I could relate to what he was saying about his running habit and what it did for him. For his mind, his thought processes and the way he lives his everyday life.
I feel the same, in a way, about digital. I’ve always been drawn to digital things, and it used to drive my parents a little crazy. I was the geeky kid with thick glasses sat in front of an Amstrad. In the late 1980s, there was no question when you had a geeky kid sat in front of a computer in his spare time – your kid was a nerd.
The Internet entered the mainstream in the late 1990s, just when I was doing my undergraduate degree. In the same way as I felt a kindred running spirit years later reading Murakami’s book, I felt like the Internet opened me up in college to people who were like me and had those similar interests in the power of digital.
I can remember accessing Netscape Navigator for the first time and a fellow student at college showing me how to use a search engine and then to use a URL. I did some writing for a website soon after, with the implied reward of a digital camera (which never arrived) but that didn’t matter. Seeing the words I wrote on this wonderful new resource for the first time was something that stayed with me forever.
What people think about now when they hear the word “digital” is different. They might associate it with a watch, or a computer or just a display. The raw potential power behind the word “digital” is no longer there for so many. It’s nebulous and without meaning. It’s put before terms like “network” and “transformation” to give it some edge, but all that does for most people is relegate it back to its geeky ancestry.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is not about changing people’s minds about running. It is not a manifesto on the virtues of jogging. It is for me, most of all, a writer’s tribute to something unremarkable yet unremarkable; remarkable to him because of its power in his personal context but unremarkable to millions of people around him who do not see that power. I see our digital world in somewhat the same way.
