And the converse may also happen: The book inserts itself into your consciousness. Whatever happened during that month gets woven into the experience.

A very long book can even come to define a kind of personal era, albeit a short one, a piece of time that you can look back on and remember as having a particular texture: from the global (ups and downs in the stock market, political unrest) to the personal (what was going on at the office, the songs that were on the radio). Instead of life getting in the way of reading, the reading starts to get in the way of life. You sneak away from this or that, steal a few minutes here and there, find opportunities to get a few more pages in. If the book is good, you look forward to spending time alone with it. The point is that when you read a book as long as 1Q84, you don't just read it: you live with it for a while. For argument's sake, let's assume it would be closer to a month, a month in which a typical person might take 30 showers, eat 90 meals, spend maybe 200 hours at work. In fact, if you happen to have any of the following: (i) a television, (ii) access to the Internet, (iii) one or more children, (iv) regular bathing habits, or (v) gainful employment in a job where your responsibilities do not include getting paid to read books, it would probably be difficult to finish a book this long in a week, or even two. MOST PEOPLE CAN'T, or at least don't, read a 925-page book in a couple of nights.

1984 haruki murakami