My New Book!

My New Book!
My New Book!

Friday, September 20, 2024

September 20, 2024: Summer Reads: Yellowface

[I didn’t get to share my usual Beach Reads series earlier this summer, so I wanted to make up for it by highlighting a handful of the many amazing novels I read as I worked to return to pleasure reading over the last few months. I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, from any genre, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

Each of the books I’ve highlighted so far this week is in one way or another what I would call “serious”—that doesn’t mean that they’re not also damn funny (both McBride’s and Yu’s in particular) or page-turning (Walter’s and Ward’s in particular), but that they deal with profoundly serious historical and cultural themes and are without question Literary Fiction (note the capital letters). Whereas Yellowface (2023), the newest release from the acclaimed fantasy novelist and East Asian Studies scholar R.F. Kuang, is more of what I’d call “pulp fiction”—a work of biting satire that ultimately becomes a page-turning thriller, and with a delightfully unreliable first-person narrator whom we can’t help but love even if we also hate her quite a bit. If all of that makes it seem like Kuang’s novel is serious fun, then I’ve done my job and made the case for this along with all of the week’s pleasure reads.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: What have you been reading?

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