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
7am waiting-room sitting at the Ausländerbehörde so I can be treated like an ungrateful “illegal immigrant” and procure a Fiktionsbescheinigung, thus feeling like I’m back four years ago and begging in precariousness to “please let me stay in your Wunderbar … Continue reading
Two weeks or so to go until my (it seems now firmly) annual revision of whatever I’ve read since last mid-October, and having just finished Jo Walton’s Among Others, which is just wow, I’m filled with a kind of utterly … Continue reading
After a gap of some years between reading Capacity, I finally dug my way through Tony Ballantyne’s Divergence and Recursion, reading the first last, and it was remarkable how the story unfolds when read non-sequentially; possibly better than if I’d read in order. … Continue reading
Having gorged myself on twenty episodes of Game of Thrones in under a week, I now return to the joyful vacuousness of reading science-fiction. Filling in some gaps, mostly. When I was in Zürich, having already got my introduction to Charles … Continue reading
It’s mainly the reason why every October I write about all the books I’ve read in the last year, that some remain in my thoughts. Isabel Cole’s translation of Annamarie Schwarzenbach’s All Roads are Open is one of these, as well … Continue reading
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
In early 2008, before I moved to Berlin, I had a book-buying spree, and a couple of those books I didn’t finish before it was time to pack them all into boxes and off to storage, where they would remain … Continue reading
China Miéville — Embassytown
owen lattimore – inner asian frontiers of china