And yes, these aren’t reviews, but I’m around half-way through, and somewhat disappointed. There is a particular quality in her writing that even in her best works feels somewhat unclear, as though she knows the story she is telling perfectly, but it doesn’t quite make it to the page. In her works that succeed, this is merely a background hint, but in Daughter of Elysium, it’s unfortunately very clear.

Perhaps it’s a mix of characters being too archetypal, and so failing to act outside these roles; at other times it’s their behaviour, for which I feel strangely excluded from their motivation. Also too, despite drawing elegantly from microbiology and genetics, the gap of nearly twenty years shows. Perhaps this is an unfair criticism, as writing genuine science-fiction – that is, fiction which bases itself on plausible science – is the hardest genre to not become hopelessly, laughably old-fashioned or completely wrong in. Altogether this creates the uncanny air of reading something that doesn’t seem all that creative or inspired.

Not to worry, still only half-way, with another one yet unread, and it’s always worthwhile reading an author’s problem children. (And I still have a daunting pile of Cantonese and Chinese history to get through …)

Joan Slonczewski – Daughter of Elysium

It was Charlie who caused me to discover Joan, when she guest-blogged there, and The Highest Frontier was my book of the year last October. I since got through Brain Plague, and decided in the best tradition of gluttony that the only sensible course to follow was to acquire as many of her remaining books as quick as possible.

I also needed a small break from reading all things Canton.

My original idea in writing about what I was reading was to write before I began, so this would be a short document of my reasons and expectations for reading. Being a glutton, I finished this some time Saturday morning. Fie!

So, I write from behind.

I was somewhat anxious about this one, as aspects of Joan’s feminism as well her age places her squarely in 2nd wave territory, and all the nasty essentialist separatism that goes with it. Equally though, she is a Quaker and a microbiologist, and I would say both at very least annul any corporal nationalism inherent in a ‘feminist utopia’ based on separatism.

Still, A Door to Ocean was written in the latter days of that wave, and years before gender theory and people like Anne Fausto-Sterling, so I was prepared to experience sourness. Luckily not. It’s not as weirdly sublime as Brain Plague, but nonetheless has that same beauty, poignancy and glorious inventiveness, and characters whose personalities float around in my thoughts for weeks and months.

Joan Slonczewski – A Door into Ocean

In a quite sporadic and unplanned fashion, I’m managing to read my way into Canton and the south of China, which I hope eventually will cause me to arrive at a book or books that does justice to the history and culture of Canton and Lingnan. Starting with rice seemed like a good idea.

Seung-Joon Lee — Gourmets in the Land of Famine

So I, without knowing all this until I read the introduction, have found myself landed with Jin Shengtan’s 1641 version, with his commentary and missing the final 30-50 chapters (depending on which previous version one might refer to), by way of J. H. Jackson in the ’30s, who prudishly omitted some of the more creative language, which was then re-edited by Edwin Lowe. This translation though isn’t as well-regarded as the Sidney Shapiro one (something I wish I’d bothered to find out before carting it home).

Shi Naian – The Water Margin

So much of what is written on China is in fact only a small part thereof — Beijing as China, Shanghai as China, the eastern core. Other parts of the country are so distant as to be other countries, and despite the ongoing Han homogenisation programme, these other parts still retain their individual histories.

Paul A. Van Dyke’s The Canton Trade seemed like a good place to continue, after reading Julia Lovell’s The Opium War a few months ago, and now, more than half way through reading, I can say he hasn’t skimped on thoroughness.

Paul A. Van Dyke — The Canton Trade

Last Friday, he was awarded the medal by the Staatssekretär, and following that, a long lunch and many drinks with a large group of friends and family.

I am very happy for Christian to have all his work recognised — for Werner Bab and “Zeitabschnitte”, for Gunter Kroemer and “Bedrohtevölker” — and for him to receive the recognition he is due.

And at the end of the month, he departs for South America with a camera.

Christian mit der Staatssekretär

Christian und Verdienstkreuz

Joan Slonczewski I discovered through Charles Stross, when she guest-blogged there, and her The Highest Frontier was my fiction book of the year this year. Getting hold of Brain Plague took longer than expected – much longer than reading it. I stopped in a café on the way home last night and began two hours there, devouring another third when I arrived in bed, and finishing it off in bits and pieces over the course of today.

A comparison with China Mievillé’s Embassytown comes to mind. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to hold off before ordering en masse the remainder of her books.

Joan Slonczewski – Brain Plague

My reading has drifted eastwards from Central Asia and Afghanistan (at least until Poetry of the Taliban is published) to arrive once more in China, and a China I am embarrassed to say I have neglected. It is easy to read on a subject such as these and follow the grand narratives – politics, culture … the longue durée, and yes, these matters are intriguing, essential to an initial general understanding, and can even consume one’s entire inquiry for years. It is also easy to unintentionally fail to consider nuances in these, to partially or wholly miss entire facets due to the relative unimportance they are afforded, or to only perceive them in a particular context, an aside to the central theme.

I am careful to say also, that these absences do not, by their being brought to the fore, constitute a ‘truth’ in opposition to the other, they do not substantiate themselves as the ‘real’ story. Merely, they provide another way of regarding things. Equally though, they should not be reduced solely to this regard; they are not symbols, representations or stand-ins for a singular agenda. They exist in and for themselves, without which any understanding can only ever be said to be partial and conditional.

That my reading is lately drifting from Central Asia and those western borders of China is in part because there is scant new to be said, when what is being said is either traditional generalist or filtered through the narrow gaze of America’s incoherent imperialism, both of which fail comprehensively on the subject of women. (And framing women as variously marginalised or emancipated in a dialectic centred upon the Taliban, pre- post- or during, is not equivalent to a proper attention given to the subject.) I would certainly read anything from the region of the likes of Susan Mann or Gail Hershatter, but with the exceptions of a couple of monographs have so far been experiencing disappointment.

So then, I arrive at Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century. Perhaps to say, Susan Mann shows unequivocally that no account of the Qing Dynasty can be said to have genuine worth, or be a work of serious scholarship without giving equal weight to women and their place in this history, and by obvious extension, this applies to all fields of study. That she is a beautiful, subtle, poetic and sensitive writer with a serious and diligent intellectual approach of course means I’m having a thrill to be reading her once more.

Susan Mann — Precious Records

It’s been sitting there for quite a few weeks, now, as it reminded me of Susan Mann’s The Talented Women of the Zhang Family, which I’d never finished, so began once again and was utterly taken. So for the next two weeks in Brussels I needed something I wouldn’t finish in a night (Harry Potter) requiring me to buy something new.

The cover of The Gender of Memory is a thing of beauty in itself, and then to open it … 488 pages set in a very small typeface, of which perhaps a fifth are notes, appendices, bibliography.

I’ve begun reading it perhaps three times now, only getting to the second page before being distracted for a day or two, necessitating a restart. Not to say it’s turgid, on the contrary, it’s so dense and fascinating I’d rather go back and make sure I recall some details than adopt she blasé reading habit.

As for why I am reading this, I have decided to make a specific shift in my China, Asia and Central Asian reading, to concentrate as much as possible on the often missing 50% of the human population: women. I notice this especially when reading on Afghanistan, which has been one of the regions I’ve concentrated on the last ten years or so, where voices of women in the historical narrative, in the contemporary political and cultural situation, in both academic and more generalist texts are substantially, if not wholly absent.

Much the same can be said for all of Central Asian and Chinese scholarship, as well as much contemporary european writing. Or perhaps another way to phrase it is, that if a writer neglects to consciously include the situation of and for women in a particular context, under the supposition that his writing by default is inclusive, he is sorely mistaken and has managed to exclude half the population whose experiences do not necessarily accord to the default, male narrative. Additionally, one chapter devoted to the subject of women out of a whole book does not make things right.

So this book, along with Susan Mann’s form part of  a new direction in reading for me on my favourite subjects. Which is not to say I’ll only be reading a book if it meets these unfortunately stringent criteria. There are several Southern China works sneaking up on me which are unlikely to entirely or even partly satisfy this. Nonetheless, Gail Hershatter’s work from the few pages I’ve read so far is likely to be among the best reads I have this year.

Gail Hershatter — The Gender of Memory

I read Charles Stross because he is intelligent, bitingly witty, and one of the only science-fiction writers who manages to write about (very-) near-futurism without either sounding like a Boy’s Own tech blog or being embarrassingly out of date upon publication (both fates have simultaneously befallen two other writers I used to enjoy hugely, and are now departed from my reading list).

Along with Iain (M. or otherwise) Banks, and China Miéville, I have his upcoming books firmly in my reading list, partly because of the above, and also because all three of them take the subordinate place of women in society seriously and consciously write to address this. Charles also has one of my favourite blogs.

As for Rule 34, yes, definitely worth the second read, though I’m still slightly confused by the implications of the ending — which is to say, I’ll probably read it again just to grasp this better.

charles stross – rule 34