I’m on sabbatical now, which ostensibly means having a bit more time to read things (technical and not). I’m not exactly burning through books but 2019 has already had a few good ones.

Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata): The book has a lot of critical acclaim but I can see many readers being put off by it: the story is pretty disturbing in the end. The narrator and protagonist is (I think) neuro-atypical, which comes across in the writing (I’d love to read some notes from the translator). On the other hand, it is also a critique of Japanese work culture, I think, although not the usual office-drone/salaryman/Aggretsuko type, which is refreshing.

Golden Hill (Francis Spufford): This was a really great picaresque with a lot of detail about early New York that made me want to tour around lower Manhattan with a copy of the manuscript to trace out some of the locations. There’s a twist (as always!) but I don’t want to give it away. Spufford, as usual, has a real ear for the language: although it took a little getting used to, I eventually settled in and it was a real page-turner.

The Ministry of Pain (Dubravka Ugrešić): A novel by a Balkan author living in Amsterdam about a Balkan refugee teaching Balkan literature in Amsterdam to (mostly) other refugees. There’s a lot about language and the war and “our language” as she puts it. The story unfolds slowly but I think the atmosphere and ideas were what I appreciated the most about it. The discomfort of addressing while not reenacting trauma is palpable.

Binti: Home and Binti: The Night Masquerade (Nnedi Okorafor) books 2 and 3 in a sci-fi trilogy. The world expands quite a bit beyond the first one and I thought Binti’s character arc was quite dramatic. I wish there had been more to learn about the other characters as well. But these books are novellas so perhaps I should do a bit more work to fill in the gaps with my imagination?

Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem (George Prochnik): A rather discursive biography of Gershom Scholem, who almost single-handedly (it seems) made started the academic study of Kabbalah which is interleaved with the author’s autobiography of moving to Jerusalem, taking up graduate studies, starting a family, and becoming disenchanted. I thought it was a stretch at times to relate the two, and I had no prior information about Scholem but I found myself almost wanting two books: a straight biography and a straight memoir. Both had their merits but the alternation made it a bit of a slog to read.