[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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