i just finished natsuo kirino's out, a book which i have always wanted to read. it was disturbing. it immediately reminded me of sidney sheldon's tell me your dreams, which i read like more than 5 years ago.

maybe it was because i was just an impressionable teenager then; but whatever the case, tell me your dreams set the benchmark with regards to the genre of crime fiction. i haven read such fiction in a while, but it was difficult to find another one which made me really sit and read through the entire book like tell me your dreams had done to me.

out and tell me your dreams are of course very different books. but the impressions both left on me were on that same level.

and sometimes you just wonder why is it that the "first" always seemed to have been the best.

like how the subsequent sheldon books i read hadnt had the same effect as tell me your dreams.

you can't really say that it is harder to "live up to expectations", because in this example, tell me ur dreams wasnt like his first book or something.

then maybe you can say in a way it is fate. beginner's luck. the very first book you pick up of his is that book, the one for you, as there would be otehrs for other people. maybe that is how it is.

or maybe the first will define the ideal. how things should be. which is not really very good, because it makes us have this fixed idea of how things should be. imagination should be boundless.

or maybe i am jsut talking crap.

but in anyway, coehlo's the alchemist is really very nice. it's my 3rd coehlo book, and it's just as impactful as the first, which was the devil and miss prym, and the second, which was by the river piedra i sat down and wept.

murakami's south of the border, west of the sun was great too. as had all of his books that i read so far.

4 books in a week. that kind of adrenaline, that kind of feeling in may is coming back. or was it april?