Read/reading: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling.

I read a book in a day. God. I haven’t done that in a while.

This was a bit The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in terms of its exploration of quite difficult subjects through fairly innocent eyes, but it still didn’t condescend. It deserves to be popular, but for good reasons rather than… Twilight reasons.

It’s tough to write about books like this (modern classics, as this apparently is, already suffer from massive overexposure) but I think I’ll be thinking about it for a while. The surface themes aside, this novel had things to say about coming of age that other coming-of-age novels struggle to articulate, and the protagonist feels like a laundry list of teenage quiet kid tropes, but in the sense that it’s immediately accessible for a lot of people. He still feels real.

It’s a bit trigger-y, though it always deals with the subject matter well, and it’s incredibly easy to get through. But… hmm. It’s very good. I’ll be interested to see how the film deals with certain aspects. It gets pretty dark.

Rowling, I have heard good things. I know you’re just an up-and-coming writer with not much experience in the publishing world, but I hope you don’t disappoint.

Read/reading: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.

Okay, so Perks doesn’t quite qualify as “silly”, but it’s a bit lighter reading.

Things Fall Apart wasn’t quite what I was expecting. On the one hand, there’s a clear winner by the end (white people, having fun), but the book focuses more on the journey to that point. It seems more like a clash of cultures than an express judgement on colonialism, and that came as something of a surprise; having heard this exalted as the first true postcolonial text, that it contained some degree of nuance was refreshing to see.

I never really studied postcolonialism over the course of my degree, so I’m necessarily ignorant on the subject, and therefore can’t judge how true-to-life this book is. There are some very ugly (I was going to say primitive, but that would condescend) attitudes towards women on the side of the black protagonist and his village, and an almost casual attitude towards violence - I won’t spoil the explicit details, but a number of deaths occur throughout this novel, and the vast majority are committed by Nigerians against Nigerians.

It suspends judgement, though, and maybe that’s what the postcolonial literary movement needed - not something that took an explicit position, but one that just laid out a surrogate for the colonisation of Nigeria in bare terms. In that respect, it’s impressive. And wonderfully written, but that almost feels like an afterthought.

The idiosyncracies of teenagers are going to seem very superfluous after reading this.