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: A few for the nth time from the last some months

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

Reading: Tony Ballantyne – Twisted Metal

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

A Life Spent Searching – the Travels and Writing of Annemarie Schwarzenbach

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

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: (2nd time) Susan Mann — The Talented Women of the Zhang Family

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