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I picked up this book from Borders because Tin mentioned that she'd read the series. But she didn't say anything about liking it, come to think of it. ^^ R teased that I am disappointed in her taste, which might be right, though I knew beforehand that as long as you hit Tin-sama's "weak points" - detective stories, communism, dead languages, books about books - you can write anything. This one is a detective story set in Communist China, with a T'ang poetry quoting detective and a subplot about squabbling intellectuals, so meets three out of four requirements.

The best thing about the book are the frequent descriptions of delicious Chinese food. Among the worst things are the thin characterization, weak writing, and poor treatment of women.

Characterization falters whenever the viewpoint shifts from Chen: especially when it shifts to Yu, his lieutenant, who gets an entire scene just so he can discuss how obligated he is to Chen (and restate some plot points from the previous chapter).

Meanwhile, the poor treatment of women, though not super obvious, is shown through the author's choice to make every unclaimed female character either a love interest, or a potential love interest, for Chen... or else the subject of a sexual scandal because, of course, any successful buttoned-down anchorwoman who is also running a successful private company, trading on the connections she's built up as an anchorwoman, is a candidate for blackmail once you discover compromising pictures of her with a senior Party member. You don't even have to feel guilty when she is murdered soon after your meeting, because she has made a "mistake" and deserves what happens to her. Of course, you don't judge her for her personal choices, but she was in over her head. *rolls eyes* (An Jiyang accuses Chen of focusing his attentions on her because she is a woman, while the high-ranking Party officials more central to his investigation are too difficult to pressure. She's right.)

The worst thing about this plot point is that Chen and An Jiyang are supposed to be old friends, and after approaching her in a friendly way, he finishes several courses of the delicious and expensive meal she treats him to (mmmmm) before bringing up the case. And then he goes straight into blackmail! That surely could have been handled better.

This was also disappointing because I'd been hoping that this book would have more insight into, for instance, the strange puritanism of revolutionary cultures (another character was once thrown in jail for "seducing women" i.e. being a popular young poet-stud who had lots of consensual sex in college). But no, the sexual prurience - and simultaneous extravagance, in these heady capitalist days - of the Communist Party is not really examined. It's just something the characters comment on a lot.

Bah. I don't really want to turn every book review into a feminist critique, I'd rather talk about other things, but the signs are present and bothersome. Maybe I will follow R's example and only read YA novels from now on.

What else can I say about this book. The only real insight I have gleaned from it, so far, is that in the 1990s in Shanghai a cultural shift was taking place, as more and more well-connected public officials took "second" jobs in the private sector to supplement their state-mandated incomes. And that while this happened, those people who had grown up in more Communist times screamed "corruption!" both in response to the actual conflict of interest, and in response to the betrayal of the equal society they'd been promised. Chen reflects that with so much money floating around, it's understandable that a police chief making as much as a janitor would want to find some way to cash in... but that's as far as he goes. At least Gorky Park had those pretend-intellectual exchanges between Cadres.

UPDATE:

Had lunch at a Chinese place, after being driven to distraction by descriptions of Chinese food. Lunch was cheap ($5 for huge portions!) but sadly, not very tasty. :( The roast duck was okay - a little salty. At the next table over, two women were eating delicious-looking steamed pork buns. I knew I should have ordered those instead of the dumplings.

My great-aunt Susan and I went to Brooklyn to see my cousin Sam's art exhibit.

( the moral of this story is that you should EITHER look up the directions yourself before going to a place you've never been before, OR make sure your phone is fully charged before you leave )

To make a long story short, we finally arrived at the exhibit, I said hi to Sam, and Susan was vocally skeptical of the artistic merits of his installation piece, which was going to be a stack of cardboard with paper whorls "buried" in it, like sediment layers, until the stack fell over, and then it became a metaphor for the artistic process. XD;;;

Trip highlight: every time we passed a Starbucks or a Macy's, Susan would exclaim: It's been Manhattanized! Brooklyn has been Manhattanized! To which I would say, but Susan, Brooklyn is a part of America...

When I told R this story, she said that the best thing about living in Brooklyn or Queens is that it frees you to consider all the events, restaurants, and neighbourhoods located OUTSIDE of Manhattan. Manhattanites have a very locked-in mindset, she says.

Did you know that the DOW dropped 1,000 points yesterday?

Wall Street Journal comments from Thursday

Wall Street Journal comments from today

Crazy.

From the articles and comments, this was either caused by fears over Greece defaulting on debt, or by a trader at Citibank typing "b" instead of "m", or by insiders taking advantage of automated processes to manipulate the markets, or by Obama's health care bill and the US National Debt (what?).

My limited, second-hand experience with computer trading is that a lot of algorhythms are actually very simple, brute-force things designed to e.g. sell a certain number of stocks wherever they'll get the best price. Maybe there was no "don't sell if the price falls below x" safeguard built in.

( Selected Comments )

And, finally:

This is going to be another pump on the bicycle pedal towards a double dip recession. If you think people are going to ignore news like this and run out to Macy's you need your head examined.

Actually I was planning to head over to Macy's after work, since there's a 60% Off Mother's Day Sale going on right now.

ayalesca lent this book to me. Thanks Aya!

Ignore the stupid pink cover, this is actually a great, substantive book that gets straight to the heart of overheated Southern puritanism, and to the process by which girls (specifically Southern girls of a certain era, but still partially true of girls in other times and places) are socialized.

The main reason to read this book is that it is very funny, and also impressively forthrightly sexual. The author wrote romance and erotica under a pen name, so this perhaps explains it. XD;;; Florence King has since become a conservative columnist, which is a shame.

R also liked the book, but was disturbed by the second half. She said: the author's parents seem to have been genuinely decent people, so why does the author fail to have empathy for people who don't capture her imagination? She wasn't like this as a kid: she recognized that her background was unusual and felt bad when she used people for her own ends. When did the sensitivity die?

(Answer: When her dream of translating French for a living died in University. This was coincidentally also when her dream of having an unassailable feminimity (because there's nothing more feminine than French) died.)

(R again: I thought the title of this book was a joke, but maybe she was actually serious??)

Anyway. Good book. Author shouldn't worry so much about not being a lady, since she does appear to have taken after her grandma (the family elitist), after all.

EDIT: I think the problem specifically is that King loathes and looks down on everyone who isn't as intellectually sharp as she is, but never acknowledges that everyone else didn't have a 24-hour live-in tutor (her father, who is self-taught the way Ben Franklin is self-taught). She not only does NOT give her father the credit he is due, she also adopts her grandmother's sense of superiority, though she is more fair about it (King loathes all of humanity equally).

I honestly think... not to try to "fix" her personality too much, because obviously it's been working for her, and anyway anyone who tries to tell her that she should have more empathy for others can be accused of being a soft-headed huggy bear - but I honestly think that if she could have acknowledged the huge advantage she got from being her father's daughter, she could have found room in her heart to understand the intellectual failings of others.

Still, she might not have turned out quite so misanthropic if the forces of the world (growing up poor, and a girl, in the South) hadn't been aligned against her. I mean it must be infuriating to be told that you have an advantage over others when you have been denied everything you really want for your entire life.

/psychoanalysis

Summary: I read Collapse by Jared Diamond, and then I watched How to Train Your Dragon from Dreamworks Animation SKG. Hilarity ensued.

The premise of HTTYD is that Vikings have been living on a small, isolated, difficult island for 300 years and have never before now learned how to adapt themselves to the native fauna - namely, dragons. Having just read an account of Viking society in Greenland I can totally believe this. ^^;

For instance, did you know that the Greenland Norse didn't eat fish? This despite the fact that many died of starvation each winter, and fish is modern Greenland's number one export. The main reason given by Diamond for this stupendous oversight on the part of the Vikings was the difficulty of changing the way things were done in a conservative, hierarchal society which was made more conservative and hierarchal by the tough conditions on Greenland - experimentation could be deadly, and going against the chief and being cast out alone into Greenland's arctic winter was guaranteed to be deadly. And, indeed, it is the chief's son in HTTYD who is the first to attempt, and succeed, in establishing another way.

However I am reluctant to extend this connection much further, since the opposing force on Greenland was the Inuit to the North, and the way for Vikings to have had a productive, cooperative existence with them would definitely not have been to have tamed them and made them into pets. XD;;

I think the setting is supposed to invoke Iceland more than Greenland, anyway, with the volcanoes and dense forrests. Another thing I learned from reading Collapse is that Iceland's forrested slopes concealed a hidden ecological weakness, in that once the trees were removed the topsoil - light, volcanic ash - was simply blown away, leading to the moonscape-like slopes you see today.

In other words, a small, isolated island would not have supplied enough trees for the Vikings to have rebuilt their village out of wood every time parts of it were burned down in dragon attacks, approximately every other day, nor would the slopes have supplied enough grass for the numbers of sheep they would have to have kept in order to have survived through the winter, with half of them being carried off.

I have also learned from Jared Diamond's other book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, that it's not very likely that humans would have run into a wild species as easily tamed as the dragons are here. In HTTYD, dragons have the personalities of housecats**, but we've spent thousands of years breeding cats to make them that tame.

Patently ridiculous science-based criticisms aside, I liked the movie. :) It's an obvious geek empowerment fantasy, with the main character even having the nasal geek voice. But the many different designs for dragons and the focus on (cartoon) Viking psychology, Its Strengths and Weaknesses, make the movie fun. The script is smart and has just the right amount of foreshadowing/repeated jokes, and the lesson that the best way to solve problems is not to hit them over the head with a hammer, but to actually observe what is there, take notes, and then act according to what you have observed, is a good one for kids, I think.

**Or at least the main dragon, with the most personality, has the personality of housecat. He also has no snout, which makes him irresistably cute to humans, of course, because the flat face makes him look more like us. ^^v