I read the beginning of The River of London by Ben Aaronovitch. Actually, I didn’t know about the author at all. But as soon as I found information that he had worked on Doctor Who, I came to feel close to him because I learned and watched the TV series last year and was fascinated by it.
The River of London also fascinated me with sentences studded with humor. The author didn’t use some difficult literary technique but composed sentences with a lot of humor caused by the choice of words, which makes the readers read the book more even if they can’t understand the settings in first few pages and feel bad about it.
On the other hand, Neal Stephenson used a lot of similes and metaphors. That technique attracts the readers’ attention. In Anathem, there is no explanation to us of what is happening (told) at the beginning. However, humor caused by the literary technique makes the readers keep on reading.
Both of the works are very interesting even for Japanese, but it seems to be difficult for me to translate them into Japanese if I am a translator. Humor is closely connected to the culture and it is not easy to express humor to people who don’t know the culture at all. So I really want to know how the sentences are translated, but to my disappointment, they haven’t been translated yet.
I'm glad you noticed the humour in the books. I don't think I particularly mentioned it in class for Stevenson, but it is important. In fact, for an enormous amount of modern fiction, humour is an important element. The books are good even without the humour, but humour raises them a level higher. Like you, I wonder about the translation, but, as you say, not yet done.
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PS I agree, Wuthering Heights is immensely difficult.