This may be slightly cheating, as they’re both based on short stories, but After Yang and Drive My Car are both so massively better than their source material. Everything Alexander Weinstein writes feels pretty unremarkable to me as far as sci-fi goes, but After Yang builds upon his work beautifully. Drive My Car is especially astonishing as a work of adaptation in the way it takes a handful of middling (unrelated to each other) Murakami stories and stitches them together into one of the best screenplays of recent years. The screenwriters take the best elements of Murakami’s work and pair them with elements that fill in the gaps of his failings.

Lee Chang-dong’s Burning is another great adaptation of a Murakami short story, but the story that’s based upon may actually be my favorite of Murakami’s, and it’s one I feel stands alone much more strongly than those that inspired the Drive My Car film.

I don’t listen to redditors’ aggregate opinions on books, either.

Matt Haig. Well, kinda. The Midnight Library was okay, and it has enough good in it for me to want to read another of his. I’m glad I did, because I liked The Humans a ton more. His quirks just work better in that than in TML. I was like, “Okay, I kinda get your deal, Matt Haig.”

But I eventually got around to reading How to Stop Time, and it was really not good. Easily the weakest of the three. Whatever problems TML had, this one has in higher supply, and while that novel at least had its affecting emotional moments and the undercurrent of something genuine, this one made me feel close to nothing.

So I guess I’m glad I gave Haig a second chance, but maybe I should have stopped short of a third chance.

It’s really funny that people seem to be polarized into either the Piranesi camp or the Strange & Norrell camp. I seldom see people love both or hate both.

It kinda makes sense, the books were written decades apart and bear very little resemblance to one another, so you can’t make a judgment on one based on the other.