What Are You Reading??

I picked up Bill Bryson's 'A short history of nearly everything' at Nanjing's Foreign Language Bookstore. It is a brilliantly written and informative book. It is the only book that I finished reading and started it again from the beginning.
I guess a lot of the info is something we might already have a grasp on but it gives us a great insight in to how we can to know the things we do today. It also gives some back ground on the people who were behind these great findings/inventions/accomplishments/etc.

I paid 85RMB for it but I guess it would be cheaper on tabao/amazon.

Totally recommended:)

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/billbryson/excerpts.html#sunburnedcountry

China Rocks by Peter Baird

Otherwise known as our very own Decurso.

It's available for Kobo and just like Decurso himself it's cheap and easy to get.

China Rocks

Maybe Decurso can tell us how else it's available.

China Rocks by Peter Baird

Otherwise known as our very own Decurso.

Wonderful. I really enjoyed reading some of his blogs and I'd love to read the full book.

I just finished reading The Small Woman. One of my distant relatives loves this book and whenever I would see her, she would gush about it and how my life reminded her of it. It was actually made into a movie in the 1950s, but all the Chinese are played by white actors with terrible makeup..

It's about a naive British woman who travels alone to China in the 1920s as a missionary and ends up running an orphanage in rural Shanxi for some 17 years. During that time, she becomes fluent in the local dialect, flees from the Japanese, leads 100 orphans over the mountains to Xi'an, served as a "foot inspector" to stop the practice of foot binding and falls in love with a KMT officer. Seeing as I've mostly been reading history, political, and philosophical books (for the past few years..) it was nice to be able to pick up something with an actual plot that read very quickly. It's based on a true story. I thought it was interesting how as recently as the 1920s rural China seemed to be unchanged for some 500 years. Trying to convince my husband we should really hop down to Pingyao to see the old walled city over the upcoming holiday.

Mutineer's Moon by David Webber,
Born to Run by Stephen Kenson
and currently reading Teaching with Chopsticks.

I'm going through a load of Zizek that I downloaded ages ago

I love what he says although I am not so keen on his fetish for Lenin and Stalin, it's like he destroys everyone elses fetishism so well and then when he admits his own it's equally stupid, but I think that is why he is so famous because he is not aloof like most philosophers, he is very open about his own weaknesses

Taking a rest from zombie books at the moment, and discovered: The Good Son by Michael Gruber.

Islam, Pakistan, nuclear plots, a mother taken hostage, a son in the US special forces, and... JUNG! A cracking read thus far. The mother, a believer, an adept with the various languages, and a Jungian therapist, gets taken hostage, and the son, who happens to be both a US specfor AND a former mujahid of the anti-Russian jihad, hatches a plot to get the US to invade Pakistan. Not a Cold War novel.

 

The Whole Brain Writing Game, by Chris Biffle
http://wholebrainteaching.com/

"Death By Black Hole" by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Finding out I don't know duck about science.

Just started reading Felix Gilman's "The Half-Made World", a steam-punk alternative history novel set in a somewhat strange US.

http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/post/49379142505/science-fiction-in-china-a-conversation-with-fei

Does anyone know if any of the "three generals"--Liu Cixin, Han Song, and Wang Jinkang--are published in translation? Three Body by Liu Cixin seems like it might be interesting, but I can't find anything.

Just finished Gilman's novel and have now started Gail Carriger's series "The Parasol Protectorate", which can only be described as a Wodehouseian steam-punk vampire series.

The Parasol Protectorate ROCKS

Fat Years - Chan Koonchung.

Strangely organized for a novel. It's in three parts with the third being a very long epilogue (actually a very lengthy speech by one of the characters). Interestingly there's an artistic reason for that structure.

The story itself is so mild mannered, yet so, so disconcerting. It's set in the China of now and the last two years, the fat years of the title, have been very prosperous and deeply harmonious. But there's a missing month.


Imma start reading some more modern Chinese authors (in English). The story telling style is noticeably different to what I'm used to. Currently, looking at Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong (which may or may not be a straight up detective novel, but interesting because set in 1990s China).

The Parasol Protectorate ROCKS

Absolutely. Not only is the take on the whole vampire/werewolf aspect refreshing, the novels also stray away from the erotizised vampire, a concept I have disagreed with ever since reading Polidori's "The Vampyre", they are also refreshing in use of language and plot. There are so many examples of the wonderful humour in the first novel "Soulless' which I just finished but this is a rather smashing one: " Highland werewolves had a reputation for doing atrocious and highly unwarranted things, like wearing smoking jackets to the dinner table". Now that is good humour 

Heavily immersed in "Shantaram" by David Gregory Roberts the  Australian Gentleman Robber who broke out of jail and escaped to Mumbai I.can't figure out how much is autobiographical - I fear he loves himself a little too much although the story is pretty gripping.Descriptions of Mumbai a little hyperbolic now and then.