After reading River Town, I decided to move on to another book about China – this one about the “return of religion after Mao” (according to the book’s subtitle). One thing I noticed in River Town was that while people didn’t like to criticise Mao Zedong overtly, they were rather willing to admit that he… Read More Book Review: The Souls of China by Ian Johnson
I had a business trip to Suzhou and Shanghai and was too ambitious about how much reading time I had, which is why I started River Town in China but finished it in Singapore. River Town is a memoir of Hessler’s two years in Fuling, a small town on the Yangtze river. Hessler was there… Read More Book Review: River Town by Peter Hessler
“Myths are the darkest and brightest incarnations of who we are. They slip into our dreams and underpin our reality.” I can’t quite remember how I found The Library of Legends but I was swept away by this heartbreaking novel that expertly melded historical fiction and folklore. Set in 1937, during the second Sino-Japanese war,… Read More Book Review: The Library of Legends by Janie Chang
This sounded interesting when I read the synopsis on Netgalley. Faces in the Crowd is a collection of thirty six short stories by Feng Jicai, all located in the port of Tianjing. While I entered this collection with high hopes, hoping to get to know some unusual and delightful characters, I found myself unimpressed. Perhaps… Read More Faces in the Crowd by Feng Jicai
After struggling through Soul Mountain, I was more than ready for a slightly easier Chinese novel to read. So when Warren suggested Qiu Xiaolong (thanks again, Warren!), I immediately went to the library and borrowed one of the books that sounded interesting. Enigma of China isn’t the first book in the series, so I’m probably… Read More Enigma of China by Qiu Xiaolong
In June, I managed to meet one of my AC friends – a really fun meeting, even accounting for the fact that we had to catch up on about 8 years of news in two hours. And during the meeting, he recommended me two books. One of them was Soul Mountain. To be honest, if… Read More Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
This was one of the books that I bought for my birthday! I’ve been meaning to read up about tea in China, but the library doesn’t have many books about it. I found this book after some googling and it sounded good, so I got it from Book Depository. Subtitled “a religious and cultural history”,… Read More Tea in China by James A. Benn