A Bruin and his book

Saturday found me driving westbound towards UCLA/Westwood Village, my old stomping grounds. My good friend/former roomie ordered some books on eBay and didn't realise that it got shipped to our first off-campus home on Roebling Avenue! (Note to self: DELETE all former addresses from eBay and other sites). Because I'm a good friend I granted Cezie-pants this favour plus I haven't been back to Westwood in a while so why not go down memory lane, right?

Got to our old house (ack, what have they done!) to find that NOONE WAS HOME! But it was kind of nice walking up the hill and up the Spanish-tiled steps and flashing back to our many adventures there (cue dream-like flashback montage sequence).

Decided to walk thru Westwood and check out the new shops and see which remain. Walked by the Novel Cafe, a place I never went to because I always preferred the French bakery/cafe, Elysee, across the street.


Spotted Ian over the hedge reading Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End Of The World. There are 2 narratives (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and End of the World) about 2 male characters who are going through the same changes. One later finds out that they are the same person. Dual consciousness. Half the chapters are set in Tokyo and is set in a futuristic world. Electrodes are involved and implanted in heads to decipher codes! Ian says it is very surreal with a touch of magic realism, one could say.

I found out that Ian is a fellow English Lit Major, but he is studying American Literature while I mainly focused on Brit Lit, though I did read American Lit in my Queer Literature and Modernism classes. He is entering his Senior year (the final stretch) and this book is for his Japanese Lit class, a course requirement for his major.

Normally he enjoys indulging in fiction. The classics, mainly. The last book he read was Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time.

Growing up he loved reading The Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card about a young boy with a powerful skill. He's bred to be a military genius and is to save the world from alien attacks.

If he could write a book of his own it would be a realistic fiction, with a touch of magic, about taking a journey to another city.


If you could write about a journey to another city, which one would you travel off to? How about a time period?