What Are You Reading??

I've been reading 'La Peste' by Camus for almost 2 weeks and I can't knock it but it's very difficult to enjoy. I want to finish it but I think I have a lot to go through....

I was burning through books and this one just slowed me right down, I dread going back into it, it's not really fiction..

Ditch it. LIfe's too short for books you're not enjoying.

I'm slowly chewing my way through a heavily annotated (at least an 8:1 annotation to original text ratio) version of Marco Polo that I downloaded from Amazon.

Beat the Reaper turned out to be a fast read, and as promised, familiar, yet darkly zesty enough to be worth it.

Currently starting in on Reamde by Neal Stephenson. Annoying start with sudden, story-obscuring narrative leaps, but it gathers steam well. So far it has, well--everything. A misdirecting hero, paeans to Iowa, a MMORPG, an indistinctly British Columbian and Chinese background, a Seattle setting, and now some Russian mafia.


Interesting tangent: the casual references to Google by name in novels these days. Google isn't part of this story per se, just part of the background because, I guess, it's part of our background. Then again, maybe it's product placement. Starbucks gets mentioned too, like in a movie.

How's that for media suspicion! When a western movie features actual product names, you wonder what commercial motive outside the story drives it. But when guerrilla filmmakers use them, the references add something to the stories.

Quote from: kitano on July 24, 2012, 04:01:59 AM

I've been reading 'La Peste' by Camus for almost 2 weeks and I can't knock it but it's very difficult to enjoy. I want to finish it but I think I have a lot to go through....

I was burning through books and this one just slowed me right down, I dread going back into it, it's not really fiction..

Ditch it. LIfe's too short for books you're not enjoying.

Finished it, I like challenging books and I do get something out of them even though they are not always fun to read....

Trying to read Rant by the Fight Club writer guy.. I normally love his stuff but this one is kinda making me sleepy every time I read it.

just got the mother of all Amazon shipments (how am I going to fit all of this in my luggage to go back to China??!!)

anyway, so this is my reading for the next year or so:

Catching Fire: How cooking made us human

Mafia State - Luke Harding (guardian reporter gets chased out of Putin's Russia)

Robert Huges - The Fatal Shore (about the transportations to Oztralia)

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee  - Dee Brown (I figure I should know more about this era)

The Scramble for Africa - Pakenham (ditto)

Daniel Kahneman - Thinking Fast and Slow (recommended by people far smarter than I)

Will the boat sink the water (can't remember Chinese author's name - think this was recommended on this thread a while ago)

...

Dinstinct lack of fiction  . This from a man who spent his teens and twenties reading, studying, teaching and writing literary fiction. I guess I just want to KNOW things now.

Fatal Shore and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee are both "keepers"

I assigned Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to my history students for summer reading. Definitely a good choice.

I'm reading a memoir called "Home is a Roof Over a Pig" written by a woman, Aminta Arrington, who moved her entire family (husband and 3 kids) to Tai'an.

for a China memoir it is ok. Reading between the lines I get the feeling she might be a missionary, but she never says so outright. She also has a somewhat irritating tendancy towards amateur ethnolinguistics/etymolgy with regards to Chinese characters as well as a way of doing the whole "He Qing (pronounced Huh Cheeng)" thing that some authors do and I also find it annoying. The book was probably written for people who have not lived in China for 10 years so I'm trying to give it a break on that account. I think she also suffers from a bit of the sophmore syndrome -- has a few years in China under her belt, thinks she's got it all figured out. She makes a remark at one point about how the Chinese "respect their ethnic minorities." Huh? And she is blown away, blown away I tell you, when she visits this lady's home and discovers that not all Chinese people are poor.

All that said though, the book is not poorly written and a lot of her experiences will ring true with long term expats. As a parent it is kind of interesting too reading her experiences raising her kids in China, sending them to kindergartens, etc. Worth a read I say.

Yeah, I'm like you TLD in that I'm pretty hard to please when it comes to China-reading, which is why I was so pleasantly suprised by Peter Hessler's Country Driving. I had wrongly put him down as a sort of Bill Bryson-esque hack.

I have Oracle bones ready to be taken back to China with me.

Glad to hear you all approve of my buys!!! Cheap as chips on amazon  

I can only agree with Fozzwaldus, there is just something awesome about history books. As for works on China, I have been ploughing through some of those myself this holiday.
For those who has an interest in the Golden Age of Shanghai, Robert Bickers' "Empire Made Me" will knock your socks off. It is essentially the story of one man, Maurice Tinkler, who worked as a constable in the Shanghai Municipal Police Force between during the early part of the Twentieth Century. Bickers also wrote one called "The Scramble for China" which documents the coming of and role played by us laowai in China between 1832 and 1914.
"Fatal Shore" is awesome. I recommend reading, if Aussie history tickles your fancy, "Austtralia" by Frank Welsh and "The Commonwealth of Thieves" by Tom Keneally too.
For a better understanding of the tumultuous years between the fall of the last emperor of China and the rise of the glorious republic, the autobiography of Pu Yi, "From Emperor to Citizen" and the memoirs of his English tutor, Reginald Johnston "Twiligight in the Forbidden City" are both excellent, albeit bear in mind that, as they are not banned in China, there is a good chance a lot of the information has been made to be deliberately inoffensive to the Chinese cencorship authorities.
The last book, so far, I would like to recommend is the giant tome entitled "Europe" by Norman Davies. It is, essentially, a tour-de-force of European history that will blow your mind 

The story in Reamde has now caught a plane to China:

Sokolov had never been a spy per se, but he had undergone a bit of training in basic spycraft as part of his transition into private commerce. Spies were supposed to have a strong intuitive sense of when they had been noticed, when someone else’s eyes were on them. Or at least that was the line of bullshit that the spycraft trainers liked to lay on their students. If true, then no Western spy could tolerate even a few seconds’ exposure to a Chinese street, since that internal sense would be setting off alarms continuously—and by no means false alarms. If they had dressed up in clown suits, strapped strobe lights to their foreheads, and sprinted out into traffic firing tommy guns into the air, they would not have drawn more immediate and intense scrutiny than they did simply by entering this public space as non-Chinese persons. Sokolov could only laugh. He had thought it might be otherwise, simply because Xiamen had such a long history of contact with the outside world.

@ETR - I'll get the Europe book for my mum - she's been studying Greek and Roman History in her spare time (even taking Freshman courses in Trinity College Dublin!) and I get the feeling she'll want to know what comes next! 

This is a dangerous thread. I think I spent $200 US stocking up my Kindle last month. My intellectual horizon has been raised. No more Jack Reacher. Currently I am invigorating my mind with "Why the West Rules -- for Now: Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future", by Ian Morris.

Dangerous indeed...knowledge is expensive...just bought all 11 volumes of Will Durant's "The Story of Civiliation" for my kindle...pricey, pricey...

I'm reading "The States", written by me. Find in signature.