[DeepL Translation - needs review] 'I'm not interested in mere mortals. If any of these people are aliens, futurists, or psychics, come to me. That's all. Haruhi Suzumiya gave us a very outlandish greeting as soon as she entered the school. It's not like it's a science fiction novel. ......, anyone would think. I thought so too. But Haruhi was serious from the bottom of her heart. By the time I realized that, my daily life had already become supernatural. The winner of the 8th Sneaker Award ...
Short stories; not the best of the series but still a fun read
(Review date: Dec 2010)
This book is a collection of four short stories which fit chronologically between the first two books in the series. The unifying theme is "what is Haruhi going to do to avoid being bored?". The club enter a local baseball tournament; celebrate Tanabata; investigate the disappearance of the school computer club president; and go on holiday... In the interests of keeping this review short I'm going to only talk about the two stories I liked best.
笹の葉ラプソディ is perhaps my favourite of the four stories here. I think this is because it shows Haruhi in a more reflective mood rather than her usual hyper-genki personality. It also provides some of her back-story. The result is that this story feels integrated into the series arc in a way that the others do not.
孤島症候群, the last story in the book, is also the longest; at 120 pages it's about twice the length of the others. It opens with Kyon &co breaking into a room to discover a body. The fruit knife in the corpse's chest rather suggests foul play, and a body in a locked room in a mansion on a remote island cut off by a typhoon certainly sounds like the setup for a classic locked room mystery. The story does play fair -- if you're paying attention you have the same set of clues Kyon does and have the opportunity to work out what's going on.
As usual for the series, the narration is all done by Kyon, who is prone to cynicism, long-windedness and the obscure or bizarre metaphors and references. (The narrative voice is actually one of the things I like best about the series.) Vocabulary is mostly OK, but the length and twistedness of the sentences might give you trouble if your grammar is a little weak. I'd rate this as a more difficult read than your average light novel or (for instance) Yoshimoto Banana's novels, but not impossibly difficult by any means.
So if you like vaguely SF-ish light novels with genre-savvy characters then I think this series is well worth reading and deserving of its fame. You should definitely start with book one, though! On the other hand, if you're working through the series is this one to read or skip? All the stories here appeared as anime episodes, so if you've seen both 'seasons' of the TV series and want to move on to the books which cover new ground, you could skip this book. If you haven't seen the anime, though, this will all be fresh to you, and it does include some important plot setup for book four.
(I know I find "what happens next?" is a strong pull to keep reading. This book took me probably a month or so to finish even though it was one of the books I took on a couple of long plane journeys, because I already knew the plots from the anime. In contrast I ran through book four in less than two weeks...)