The Nature of Things

I've had this book in my reading queue for many months but just hadn't been able to work myself up to reading it. I was daunted by my experience with the author's previous book, the Booker Award-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings .  That one was a very difficult read for me. Did I really want to sail those waters again? Then on the very day that I finally decided to start reading, news came that the book had been longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for fiction. Black Leopard, Red Wolf , in case you haven't heard, is a quite surreal fantasy, the first book of a planned trilogy. It is set in Africa in an undesignated time and it draws heavily on what one is to assume are African myths. (Not being well-versed in those myths, I don't feel qualified to judge.) As in his previous book, James uses a lot of language for which I could find no reference or definition, and, once again, one is to suppose that the words have their root in African languages, but th...

What an ordeal this book was to read! Many times while perusing its 700-plus pages, I asked myself why I was bothering. But, true to my code of finishing what I start, I persevered and, in the end, felt somewhat vindicated, although I can't pretend that the rewards were really commensurate with the effort required.   Jamaican writer Marlon James' book was the 2015 winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. At the time that it came out, I read many glowing reviews of the work. Intrigued, I added it to my reading queue and, finally, here at the end of 2016, its turn came up. Even though I knew the broad outlines of the story and the author's method, I was clearly not prepared for what I was undertaking. A Brief History of Seven Killings begins with the run-up to the attempted assassination of Bob Marley (referred to as the Singer throughout the book) in January, 1976. It continues through the political unres...