![]() He makes his way down a long flight of stairs and through the gloomy corridor of a basement he didn’t know existed. (Who isn’t?) The librarian directs him down the hall to Room 107. Our nameless young hero returns two books to the library: “How to Build a Submarine” and “Memoirs of a Shepherd.” Naturally, a reader of such books wants to check out some new ones, and, after all, his mother did tell him, “If you don’t know something, go to the library and look it up.” Now, he’s eager to know how they collected taxes in the Ottoman Empire. ![]() ![]() Murakami’s plot might seem a gross-out, but the story is amusing enough for 10-to-13-year-olds and sufficiently resonant to appeal to adults with an affinity for fantasy. A fun children’s novella, released in Japan in 2008 and now cleverly designed and illustrated by Chip Kidd, “The Strange Library” is kin to Salman Rushdie’s “Luka and the Fire of Life,” although it’s considerably shorter with far less mythology. ![]() In his second book this year, Haruki Murakami, author of the recent “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,” strands a nerdish boy in the basement of a strange library with an old man, a shape-shifting girl and a man clad in sheepskin. ![]()
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