Palo Alto

The collection of stories called "Palo Alto" were in contrast to "Colorless" fairly unmoving. While both did show general apathy and reflection in their main characters Murakami did it in a more compelling and thoughtful way then James Franco. With Murakami's book the main character while depressed and somewhat apathetic was still somewhat likable, he had gone thru things that many people at Ringling might have, he used some dream-like sequences that could have been real or just the character's neurosis. While in Palo Alto its just shitty high school kids and their shitty high school problems to be quite honest. Some of them do bad things or have band things happen to them but there is no conclusion or consequences to these they just happen and end.

Murakami uses plain and simple writing to describe interesting subject matter, the dream sequences are very cool and surreal and the journey to find out what happened to his former friends and to discover what his color is, is a very enjoyable subject to experience. It gives the reading some incentive to keep on with the story.

But with Franco's novel the stories are not only written simply which is fine, the subject matter is so blah and uninteresting it was hard for me to want to read more of these stories. As where Murakami has dashes of surrealism and wonder to make the reader question whats the rules of the world and whats happening, Franco has very dry and stale stories that sound like a college freshmen telling people stories of their high school.