What Are You Reading??

"The Dangerous Days of Daniel X" by James Patterson.
Not typically a Patterson fan but it was lying there, and I was bored...

My teacher read us The Good Earth in class in grade 8.  Tremendous.

I read another Ender series Book by Orson Scott Card.  Always terrific.  I'm here at the Bookworm tonight, so I'll grab a few novels for the holiday.  Maybe I'll finally tackle the biggest hole in my reading, Moby Dick.

I also picked up a book called "Shanghai Baby" which was apparently banned and burned in China. Should be an interesting read.

I'm 20 pages from the end. I know how it ends, and you will too, 20 pages into the beginning, but it's a light read-a summer read-a read at the beach if only Lin'an had beaches.

The original book was banned because of sex and drugs and rock and roll (well, the first two). The English version can be found everywhere now as the book is completely apolitical. It seems that only English translations of heavily political books (eg. Mao-The Untold Story, and many "slash lit"books) get the censors kibbosh. Still, publishers like to push that aspect--banned in China.

If you liked Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz's vision version of NYC in the 80's, Wei Hui's "Shanghai Baby" reflects that ethos, shifted 180 degrees (more or less) to Shanghai in the 90s. Lots of product placements - LV bags, Sonic Youth, Park 97, etc. Lots of artists, hangers-on, but with Chinese characteristics (some bits about the family, cousins, Sichuan food, fascination with foreigners).

I lived in that area (Shanghai/Suzhou) during the time she wrote it and in fact I recognize a few places in her story and was present at a few incidents she mentions in the book so to me, reading it has been a bit nostalgic. Kind of like re-reading McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City" takes me back to the 80's in the U.S.

I read "Shanghai Baby" as nostalgia. Others, more recent to China might read it in a different way. Either way, it's a good read. And she (or rather her translator) can occasionally turn a good sentence.

P.S. Can literature only 10 years old be nostalgic?

Hi everyone

New to the saloon and this is post numero one. Thought I'd pick something weighty and important to kick things off with.
While I'd like to say that I'm reading something intellectual and worthy like Dostoyevsky or Kundera I've read far too much of that lately so good to read a bit of slush. I'm part way through Elizabeth Kostova's 'The Historian' a (so far) decent and well written update of Dracula. Rationing it as I'm in a town with no English bookstores (damn you lucky Suzhou people)

Welcome afairman!  Pop over to introductions and tell us more about yourself. Especially about your name!  Affair-man  , a fair man (as in handsome ), a fair man (as in just )  .... 

I just finished reading My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates. The book is based on the Jon Benet Ramsey murder case, but told from the point of view of the older brother. It was really heavy and more than a little disturbing, but I loved the way she wrote it, the very unconventional narrative.

Speaking of Shanghai Baby, Wei Hui wrote a sequel to it, Marrying Buddha, which was not nearly as good as Shanghai Baby, in my opinion. The main character has moved to the States and a lot of the book takes place there, and it seems that without the Shanghai backdrop the author sort of loses something.

A similar book if you liked Shanghai Baby would be Candy, by Mian Mian, and then Beijing Doll, by Chun Sue, both of which which are also heavy on the sex, the drugs, the rock and roll, and the supposed controversy. They all have the same sort of "banned in China" shock appeal, and I guess they are not what people -- especially the folks back home -- expect from Chinese writers, so they've gotten attention for sort of being, according to their Western publishers, some kind of voice for disaffected Chinese youth.

Well, I did finish Shanghai Baby that week. Finished as expected. But then I found the movie based on the book in the local DVD shop. The movie's beginning picks up where the book ends (she shows up at her German lover's door in Berlin one morning) and then works backward from there.

The book is better.

Then I dove back into what I had started before summer began - "Lady Orchid" by Anchee Minn. It was hard slogging when I first got the book. I was an Anchee Minn fan before I came to China - Red Orchid, Katherine, etc. This one disappointed me at first (early summer) because it's a first person retelling of the story of The Last Empress (aka Lady Orchid, aka Cixi). After taking a break from it for the summer then getting back to it, it's not a bad book from the viewpoint of seeing the end of the Qing Dynasty from a very different viewpoint-the VP of Cixi herself. You have to work at it a bit because it uses the Wade-Giles format rather than Pinyin, but after the true but vacuosness(is that a word) of Shanghai Baby, it was a nice break to read the pseudo-historical, but equally vacuous words and thoughts of the Last Empress as rendered by a formerly interesting writer.

I think I'll spend my autumn re-reading the collected works of Lu Xun.

If you haven't tried Xin ran, I would truly truly recommend.  The Good Women of China,  and China Witness are amazing books and NOTHING vacuous about them!!!

Xin Ran's The Good Women of China was my mid-summer read this summer (between Lady Orchid in June and Shanghai Baby in September.

I was in Nanjing at the time so it had resonance. My Nanjing friend, who has been teaching there since 1995 or so, lent it to me. I had Xin Ran's Miss Chopsticks with me (my read previous to Lady Orchid) and Miss Chopsticks resonated even more because it was set in the 2000s. So we swapped. We each finished our swapped Xin Ran's before July was out.

I ahven't read Miss Chopsticks, so I'll look for that.  But I also have her Sky Burial.  It was interesting, but the other 2 were fascinating because of the real history and real stories of life.

Well, I did finish Shanghai Baby that week. Finished as expected. But then I found the movie based on the book in the local DVD shop. The movie's beginning picks up where the book ends (she shows up at her German lover's door in Berlin one morning) and then works backward from there.

The book is better.

Then I dove back into what I had started before summer began - "Lady Orchid" by Anchee Minn. It was hard slogging when I first got the book. I was an Anchee Minn fan before I came to China - Red Orchid, Katherine, etc. This one disappointed me at first (early summer) because it's a first person retelling of the story of The Last Empress (aka Lady Orchid, aka Cixi). After taking a break from it for the summer then getting back to it, it's not a bad book from the viewpoint of seeing the end of the Qing Dynasty from a very different viewpoint-the VP of Cixi herself. You have to work at it a bit because it uses the Wade-Giles format rather than Pinyin, but after the true but vacuosness(is that a word) of Shanghai Baby, it was a nice break to read the pseudo-historical, but equally vacuous words and thoughts of the Last Empress as rendered by a formerly interesting writer.

I think I'll spend my autumn re-reading the collected works of Lu Xun.

I was also a big Anchee Min fan before coming to China. Her older stuff (Red Azalea, Becoming Madame Mao, Katherine) is much so better than her newer books about Cixi. I didn't mind the first Empress Orchid book, but she followed it up with a book -- The Last Empress I think it was called, about the latter half of Cixi's life and it was pretty dull. What I did like about the two books was that she sort of tried to reclaim Cixi as a heroine, rather than doing the predictable villainess thing. It is sort of a feminist re-telling of the fall of the Qing dynasty, supposing that Cixi was villified at least in part due to the politics of the time and because she, as a woman with so much power, was a convenient scapegoat. What I like about Anchee Min is that she takes risks with her work, even if she doesn't always pull them off.

She is apparently coming out with a new book about the life of Pearl S. Buck sometime next year and I'll definitely be reading it.

Following up, I engage a lot in stories and books where I can see the place. Xin Ran's China in Miss Chopsticks, I could see this summer.

Lu Xun wrote 70 or so years ago, but I have visited Shaoxing and lived for a week on the street where he lived.

When I lived in Suzhou, lo those many years ago, I used to take a copy of Lin Yutang's translation of Six Chapters of a Floating Life to the nearby Can Lan Ting (Blue Wave Pavilion)-the setting for the story- and spend the afternoon there reading it.

Before I came to China, I read Zhong Chang's "Wild Swans" as most FTs have before they came here. By absolute coincidence, I ended up in the small city where most of the main action takes place. I realized that about a week before I left, but wondered how much was true.

My first view of that city was as I emerged from the train station after flying to Beijing and catching an 8 hour overnight train there. As I emerged from the station, I was greeted by the same image she ended that book with - the giant hotel across the street. Living there, I saw the things she wrote about and people living there told me things that meshed. From then on, I was fanatic for books by Chinese authors that involve realism, realia, real stories, and real people.

Xin Ran, Wei Hui (in her own way), Lu Xun, Lin Yutang, and Zhong Chang (pre-Mao) strike that chord in me.

Oops, right. Red Azalea, not Red Orchid. It's sitting on my bookshelf and the first of her's I read 15+ years ago.

I'm finishing the later Cixi story now - Lady Orchid. I haven't read the first one - Empress Orchid. I knew of it, and briefly thought I should read it first before Lady Orchid, but Lady Orchid appeared at the local Foreign Language Bookstore last spring so I snapped it up and started in on it.

I recently discovered her husband's blog and, though he doesn't talk much about her other than to mention his wife is a famous writer, he seems to be a complete tool. He's trying to write books using historical references and I think it's rubbed off (or been rubbed off) on her recent works. So my respect for her drops every time I read his blog.

Finishing off Eric Flint's Ring of Fire II, an anthology of tales arising from his 1632 stories.  Also have Simon Green's Shadows Fall on the go, as my bedtime reading.

Next up?  Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals...freshly arrived from Amazon.com

Just stumbled across this website yesterday: http://www.51eng.com/en/

It's a bookstore in Shanghai that will deliver COD to 21 cities in China. Shipping is free if you order at least 200 RMB of stuff. They don't take credit cards; your only choices are COD or wire transfer. See the website for payment and shipping options as well as which cities they'll deliver to.

They seem to have a pretty good selection of stuff across genres, and are able to get real, back-home textbooks (at real, back-home textbook prices).

I haven't tried them yet, so I can't vouch for them but the COD option protects you.