But the fruits of the Saudis’ research and development in this sector will inform technological progress in other nations as well.“Maybe the net-zero carbon equation might not be reached,” Taylor says. But at the same time, Taylor saw a nation striving to become a global leader in renewable energy technologies.Some of that investment is intended to offset emissions associated with continued oil production. The kingdom isn’t giving up its hold of the global oil market – far from it. “It was just kind of hard to believe.”Some of what he found confirmed his skepticism. An inquiring schoolboy stops by on the way home from class, returns some library books ( How to Build a Submarine and Memoirs of a Shepherd) and asks for reading on a subject he says has just popped into his head: tax collection in the Ottoman Empire.Īn unfamiliar female librarian sends him down to room 107, 'a creepy room' where yet another strange librarian (a bald man this time) hands him the requested volumes - then conducts him to a secret space, behind a locked door and down a hall to a labyrinth of corridors, where a small man dressed in a sheepskin puts him in a cell under lock and key.Today’s lead story almost didn’t happen.When Taylor Luck, the Monitor’s Middle East reporter, heard that Saudi Arabia was attempting to “go green,” he was intrigued – but dubious.As the world’s second-largest producer of oil, Saudi Arabia is “often seen as the spoiler to progress on climate,” he says. Murakami sets his story - newly translated from Japanese by Ted Goossen - in a realm of words, an unnamed city library.

'The library was even more hushed than usual,' we read in the opening sentence (the entire book is set in a typeface called, appropriately, Typewriter), calling attention to the fact that we're in for a special event. How?Īs if the work of Japanese fiction master Haruki Murakami weren't strangely beautiful by itself, his American publisher has just put out a stand-alone edition of his 2008 novella The Strange Library, in a new trade paperback designed by the legendary Chip Kidd. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Strange Library Author Haruki Murakami and Ted Goossen

Murakami the strange library