First good read this year

Just finished reading this novel (in two days) and believe it's the first good read for me this year (not that I've read that many books this year... although HP must count for three, right?)

The title of the book caught my attention, as certainly old, beat-up "Concise" Chinese-English dictionaries floated around my house as I was growing up.

The story is about a 23-year old girl who goes by Z (short for Zhuang) who leaves her rural China town to study English in London for one year. Loneliness drives her to move in and fall in love with a 44-year old Englishman, a bisexual vegetarian artist who has been a noncommittal drifter all his life.

The brief, 1-4 page chapters are written in first person, in "bad" English which gets progressively better, coinciding both with Z's acquisition of the English language as well as process of learning about love, heartache, independence, through cultural and language barriers.

Each chapter begins with a word and its dictionary definition, which also anchors and guides the story.

The jacket cover says that the author drew on her own experiences moving to London from China in 2002.

I laughed, I cried. Actually no, I chuckled, and felt sad. In a sense this is a classic coming-of-age tale, just with different circumstances. The characters feel very real, including the man, who she simply refers to as "you," as if she has been writing a long letter to him.

A bummer for me is that I actually thought of writing a novel in "bad" English years ago, and never got around to it. I think it makes for an interesting literary device. Of course it'd be much harder for me to make my "bad" English seem authentic... but perhaps I will still try...