The Day the Sun Died, by Yan Lianke: I was initially distracted by some stylistic devices that never ended up working for me (repetition, ironic insertion of the author/his other works into the story). The repetition and some of the other verbal tics may be mainly a translation issue – not an issue with the translator but an issue inherent in translation – but my Mandarin is nowhere near good enough to say, even if I had access to the original (my Mandarin is, in fact, only almost good enough to read 3/4 of a tweet posted in Mandarin by a poet the other day, which ultimately read “You can get lost from me” (the character for the verb “get lost” was not in my repertoire). Per the introduction to the novel, one doesn’t have to know Yan’s other works in order to enjoy this one or understand the references, but the description of those other works made me want to put down this book and find those…I was somewhat more invested in the story as it progressed, but the repetition really never worked for me.
The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami: I moved this to the top of the stack after getting a notification from the Brooklyn Public Library that it was due in three days. Three days? It’s already been a week and a half? And…it’s on hold by approximately one million people, so I can’t renew it. The same timeline happened with Marlon James, but I got lucky and was able to renew even though I think I remember that book having an almost as long wait list. I didn’t attempt to read this in three days – I only had…zero days once I finished The Day the Sun Died, which I was in the middle of when I got the notice. The daily fine for a book is 15 cents, and the library is a good place to donate to. When it was finally time to open the book, a receipt from the previous reader fell out – apparently they accrued $1.35 while finishing The Other Americans, which cheered me. I really enjoyed this, in particular the setting. Multiple-viewpoint novels can be tricky to pull off, but this one works – maintaining one main character while focusing enough on the others that they feel worthy of their own narration, even though for a few characters it’s only one or two short chapters.
Sabrina and Corina, by Kali Fajardo-Anstine: My feelings toward this gorgeous collection might be epitomized by me telling my boyfriend, by way of description, “I love EVERYTHING about this book except that the cadence of the title means I have the Bananas in Pajamas song in my head now.” “I don’t know what that is,” he replied. “I’ll spare you,” I said. Love, everybody! I’ll take the bananas and their pajamas coming down the stairs, chasing teddy bears, whatever, if that’s the price of admission for this book. I’ve really loved collections bound together by place recently (these are set in and around Denver), and although there are no links between or among any of the stories, they feel very cohesive (which is not necessarily even something I require in a story collection, but it adds to the magic of this one). I read it really quickly and probably would have read it again if it weren’t due back at the library…
(Side note: three of the National Book Award finalists – Sabrina and Corina, The Other Americans, and Disappearing Earth – are either story collections or novels without a singular narrator…just an interesting note!)
Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James: The only troubles with this book were: 1. it was nearly overdue by the time I started it; 2. it is 600 pages long. That was problematic not so much for my library fines as for the book’s weight, which made it a less than ideal candidate for a subway read. Then, truth be told, I was distracted by The Dry for a day and have only just begun this. More to come when I finish…
The Dry, by Jane Harper: I started this before Black Leopard, Red Wolf, because I had it in eBook form and my Kindle weighs almost nothing (it’s slightly alarming to me still how light both Kindle and MacBook Air are; I am always certain I’ve left one or the other somewhere when they’re actually right in my purse). I first heard of Harper on a Twitter thread, where someone compared her to Tana French but in Australia/Laura Lippman but in Australia, and that was enough for me to seek out all three of her books. And lo! They do fill the French/Lippman void, and now there are two more Harper novels out there for me to read after this one. Harper-Lippman-French is a great triumvirate of brilliant female mystery writers (I tried to come up with a way to not make that sound reductive – because so often assigning a genre beyond fiction carries the whiff of “but not literary,” yet going out of your way to note that a book is literary can sound as if you weren’t expecting it to be – but they are all mysteries).
