Reading: Ruth Mandel – Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany

Having somewhat fallen into reviewing what I’m reading instead of the intended writing about why I’m reading a particular book, herewith I attempt to return to the point of all this writing about reading. Ruth Mandel’s Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges … Continue reading

Reading … A 5th Anniversary

And … here we go again. Another year finishing arbitrarily in mid-ish-October marking approximately an anniversary of when I first decided to blab about whatever I happened to be reading, with the caveat that no, no writing about what I … Continue reading

Reading: David Graeber — Debt: The First 5000 Years

This is one I haven’t been able to pretend I wouldn’t eventually get hold of, having been greatly discussed on quite a few blogs I read. From anthropology to science-fiction, David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years has been peculiarly unavoidable … Continue reading

Reading: Susan Mann – Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century

Shortly before departing for Brussels, I finished Susan Mann’s brilliant The Talented Women of the Zhang Family, and began Gail Hershatter’s equally sublime The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, which I’m still slowly chewing through. Both these books … Continue reading

Reading: Gail Hershatter — The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past

This is the book I was so intimidated by I went off and read Charles Stross and Harry Potter for a couple of weeks. I heard of Gail Hershatter in 2008 (if I was paying attention), but it was an … Continue reading

Reading: Gordon Mathews — Ghetto at the Center of the World

I once stayed a night in Chungking Mansions, when a flight from Canada arrived too late to catch even the cross-border bus to Guangzhou. I was given the address by a woman at the information booth just past the exit … Continue reading

Reading … a 4th anniversary

Another year of books. Not as many as last year; I took a pause for some time, unable to find a rhythm with all that I had to read, and at other times I was too impoverished to acquire even … Continue reading