April was a whirlwind — flights, long drives, and stolen hours in unfamiliar cafés flipping through pages while waiting for the sky to clear or chasing the next sunset. Travel kept me moving, but books kept me grounded. While I’ll be sharing some overdue travel stories soon — Patagonia, the Chilean steppe, and that one surreal sunrise in El Chaltén — this month’s reading leaned introspective. I finished Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami and Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon, and despite their vastly different formats, the emotional overlap was surprisingly deep.

At first glance, these two books don’t belong on the same shelf. One is fiction — seven stories about men grappling with absence, yearning, and quiet existential grief. The other is a motivational manifesto for creatives, filled with bite-sized insights, sketchbook doodles, and bold, underlined mantras like “Be boring.” But under the surface, both books circle the same questions: What do we do with loneliness? How do we make sense of ourselves when connection — romantic, creative, or otherwise — falters? And how do we turn that emptiness into something meaningful?

In Men Without Women, Murakami weaves together quiet, melancholic narratives of men left behind — by death, by divorce, or by the slow erosion of intimacy. These aren’t dramatic heartbreaks. They’re subtle unravelings. A man continues his daily routine after his wife’s betrayal, unsure if the betrayal matters more than the routine itself. Another man lives a life of self-imposed solitude, only to be undone by a memory that refuses to fade. There’s an ache in each story, but it’s never loud. It lingers, like fog.

Murakami’s men are not emotionally articulate. They drift. They cook pasta, go for drives, listen to jazz, and think — endlessly. And in this stillness, they mirror the kind of creative introspection Kleon champions in Steal Like an Artist. Kleon’s core idea is that nothing is truly original — all art is born from observation, influence, and remixing. To create, you have to observe. To observe, you have to slow down. And when you slow down, loneliness often becomes the backdrop.

Kleon talks about embracing solitude, leaning into boredom, and collecting scraps of inspiration wherever they land — from conversations, memories, other people’s work. In a way, the men in Murakami’s stories are doing the same. They sit with their own silence. They replay old relationships like found footage. They try to make sense of their inner lives, not through action, but through reflection. Both books suggest that solitude isn’t something to escape from — it’s something to be mined.

There’s also a shared reverence for the mundane. Kleon writes about building a “bliss station” — a physical and mental space to create, uninterrupted. Murakami’s characters create their own versions of this: quiet apartments, habitual routines, long drives with no destination. These are not escapes from life, but ways to process it. Both authors seem to say that the ordinary, when observed closely enough, becomes extraordinary — or at least, true.

Reading these books back-to-back while traveling made their themes even more poignant. There’s a strange kind of aloneness that comes with constant motion — surrounded by strangers, rooted nowhere. Murakami’s stories felt like reflections in train windows: ghostly, intimate, and transient. Kleon’s book felt like a guide to capturing those reflections and turning them into something you can hold onto.

So while April didn’t give me the space to read much, it gave me the perfect headspace for these two books. One taught me how to sit with loneliness; the other taught me how to make use of it. Together, they reminded me that creativity and connection aren’t always loud or obvious — sometimes they show up as quiet echoes, waiting to be noticed.

More on the travels soon. For now, I’m unpacking — luggage, photos, and stories alike.