{"id":35787,"date":"2025-09-22T05:12:18","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T05:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/35787\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T05:12:18","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T05:12:18","slug":"rebecca-f-kuang-a-tale-of-two-cities-is-deeply-silly-camp-i-love-it-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/35787\/","title":{"rendered":"Rebecca F Kuang: \u2018A Tale of Two Cities is deeply silly camp \u2013 I love it!\u2019 | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

My favourite book growing up
Brian Jacques\u2019s Redwall (and all its sequels). All\u00a0I\u00a0wanted was to be\u00a0a\u00a0squirrel in the Mossflower Woods!<\/p>\n

The books that changed me as a teenager
I read China Mi\u00e9ville\u2019s Perdido Street Station and The City & the City when I was in college. I\u00a0had been falling out of\u00a0love with fantasy \u2013 I felt too old for Redwall, and I thought I\u2019d outgrown the genre \u2013 but Mi\u00e9ville\u2019s work opened the door to the enormous world of adult fantasy literature that grappled with the problems I was now interested in.<\/p>\n

The writers who changed my mind
I had never been wildly\u00a0interested in books that are primarily or even largely about romantic relationships, but in the past few years, works by Sally Rooney, Banana Yoshimoto and Mieko Kawakami have changed my mind. They\u00a0have opened my eyes\u00a0to the potential in\u00a0describing the subtle\u00a0shifts in any interpersonal encounter, and I\u2019m working out how\u00a0to do that in my own writing now.<\/p>\n

The authors I came back to
It took me a while to understand Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s brand of humour. I tried Pnin when I was in college and it just didn\u2019t work. I\u00a0gave it another try last month and I couldn\u2019t stop giggling. It also took me a while to find the charm in Victor Hugo\u2019s bloviating. In high school, I only read the bits of Les Mis\u00e9rables about the Friends of the ABC (I had a crush on Enjolras, just like everyone else.) Recently I read the unabridged edition, and I\u2019m old enough now to enjoy every rabbit-hole sentence about Waterloo, argot and the Parisian sewer system.<\/p>\n

The book I reread
David Mitchell<\/a> was my favourite author at college \u2013 I raved about The Bone Clocks to everyone I met. Cloud Atlas didn\u2019t work so well for me, but I recently reread both, and this time I was stunned. Cloud Atlas (and its woefully underappreciated film adaptation) is so gorgeous and life-affirming. It was nice to find Mitchell\u2019s writing is just as magical for me now as it was back then.<\/p>\n

The book I could never read again
I\u2019ve just bought a copy of Arnold Lobel\u2019s Frog and Toad Are Friends for my\u00a0friend\u2019s toddler\u2019s birthday party. But who am I kidding? I still love those books!<\/p>\n

The book I discovered later in life
It took me a long time\u00a0to\u00a0get around to Charles\u00a0Dickens\u2019s A Tale of Two\u00a0Cities, which I\u00a0only finished this summer despite my love\u00a0of his\u00a0other work. It\u00a0is overwritten, melodramatic, deeply silly camp. I love it.<\/p>\n

The book I am currently reading
Mario\u00a0Vargas Llosa\u2019s The\u00a0Time of the Hero, on the recommendation of my French translator. He\u00a0lives in Spain and also does Spanish to French translations \u2013 we bonded over our love of Borges, and he insisted I read Vargas Llosa too. I\u2019m also on an existentialism kick, so Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel and Albert Camus are high on my list. I\u2019ve only now found out that the animated film character Marcel the Shell is a joke about Gabriel Marcel\u2019s concept of the hard shell that closes us off to new possibilities.<\/p>\n

My comfort read
Anything by Ray Bradbury.<\/p>\n

Katabasis by RF Kuang is published by HarperVoyager. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My favourite book growing upBrian Jacques\u2019s Redwall (and all its sequels). All\u00a0I\u00a0wanted was to be\u00a0a\u00a0squirrel in the Mossflower…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35788,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-35787","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}