Review: Taiwan Literature: Special Issue in Memory of Tzeng Ching-Wen

Taiwan Literature: Special Issue in Memory of Tzeng Ching-Wen by Kuo-Ch'ing Tu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A nice collection of very Taiwanese stories. A great introduction to an author I knew nothing about (although I now see I have his novel "three legged horse" in my wishlist). This also includes some children's stories, which seemed a bit weird to me, but were certainly entertaining. Otherwise it consists mostly of nostalgic glimpses of a changing Taiwan.

My favorite story was Green Pepper Seedlings.

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Review: A Noise Downstairs

A Noise Downstairs by Linwood Barclay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun book, decent- to fast-paced, with enough red herrings to keep me interested and guessing. Although it ended up being a tad far-fetched for my taste.

Still, I think I will read other books by this author.


3.5 stars

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Review: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Great fun to read, especially about tweedledum and tweedledee. I look forward to hopefully reading this to my daughter in a few years.

Interesting how Humpty Dumpty is portrayed as an egg here. I always wondered when he started being portrayed as an egg. I don't think Carroll invented this, but I do remember seeing a picture from the late 1800's where he was portrayed as a boy, so who knows.



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Review: Beyond the Black Pig's Dyke: A Short History of Ulster

Beyond the Black Pig's Dyke: A Short History of Ulster by Art O. Broin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For non-Irish I'm thinking a map would help every 2 pages or so. Many locations, cities and counties are mentioned, without any maps. Granted, I came to this not knowing much about Ireland at all, but I think this book could have used some help. In addition to a map, possibly a timeline of main events, and possibly short bios of the main protagonists in footnotes or something.

As it was, it was certainly interesting, but I found myself lost and having to reread sections over and over.

Regardless, I did learn some interesting factoids. Would have liked to learn more about the Ulster-Scot emigration to the States, and possibly about the decline and then spread of Gaelic, and when and how different areas were affected by this.

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Review: Waiting

Waiting by Ha Jin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had no idea what to expect from this book, and I'm still not exactly sure what to make of it. It's arguably the best representation I've read of the life of an average citizen during and right after the cultural revolution.

It is also a great story about people, freedom, and how the lack of it can affect peoples' lives.

It isn't ever really obvious, and it doesn't delve into the worse possible cases (which is sometimes done in an attempt to show how bad life could be).

Having said all that, I found it to be stilted and long-winded at times. Probably 3.5 stars.

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Review: Chinese Wine

Chinese Wine by Zhengping Li
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Please Note, this book uses the term "wine" to mean "liquor", and uses the term "grape wine" to mean "wine", except toward the end, and a bit in the middle, when it just stops using "grape wine" altogether so you sort of have to guess. This also means that "white wine" actually means a white type of liquor, and "red fermented wine" is another type of liquor, neither of which have anything to do with wine.

Given that, there are some interesting factoids in this book. I especially enjoyed the section on the most famous forms of liquor in China, and some of the history and myths having to do with liquor, as well as some of the customs in various areas (although these are sort of glossed over, and Taiwanese aboriginal tribes are all grouped under "gaoshan". Also, the legend of "nu er hong" is mentioned twice, but the story is slightly different each time.

The section on drinking games could have been skipped, and the section on beer is out of date at this point, since it doesn't even mention craft beers.

2.5 stars

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Review: The Travelling Cat Chronicles

The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I never really considered myself a cat person, but for some reason I seem to enjoy reading novels featuring cats (including Murakami).

Anyway, this was a cute novel. It got a bit too cheesy for me toward the end, but I really liked the idea of a travelogue with a cat, seeing the various sights and finding the beautiful in the everyday.

I wonder if there are any books that do the equivalent but with dogs. Although, to be frank, dogs wouldn't be nearly as insightful as cats.

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Review: The Korean Way

The Korean Way by Edward B. Adams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It is interesting to read books like this so as to see how Korea was perceived by outsiders back in the 70s. I doubt this book is still in print, and there's no real reason for it to be, but it was good to read in a short session. The most interesting chapter was probably the one by Alice Rhee, returning to Korea after having grown up in the U.S., and her impressions of the school system during the late 70s.

Also, this book claims that Ewha University was the "largest women's college in the world". I wonder if that was really the case. It also included a nice brief summary of all Chosun dynasty kings (which they call the Yi dynasty).

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Review: Antimatter

Antimatter by Frank Close
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although much of the detail and most of the explanations were over my head, it was good to learn more about Antimatter. I get the impression that a big part of the impetus for writing this book was as a response to everyone getting excited over Antimatter after Dan Brown's novel "Angels and Demons" (anyone remember that?). In fact, the last chapter is pretty much dedicated to debunking all of the "FACTS" from that book. Part of this seems directed at the US military, which seemed to be considering using Antimatter as a weapon, possibly after having read that book.

I think this book's explanation of the theory of relativity finally got through to me, at least in terms of how we can't travel faster than the speed of light:
"In Einstein’s theory of relativity the mass of a body gets larger and larger the faster it travels. As it approaches the speed of light, the mass grows extremely fast, making the object ever more resistant to acceleration. Eventually, as one tries to reach the speed of light, the mass becomes infinite. It is thus impossible to accelerate a massive object to the speed of light; the only things that travel at light speed are things with no mass, such as light itself! (p. 28)

It is also interesting to see how unique earth really is, in terms of all the perfect elements available in one place, as illustrated by this footnote (p. 115): "if you selected at random a volume of the universe that is millions of light years in diameter, atomic elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, iron, silver, and gold would be all but absent"

Regardless, every time I read about physics I seem to understand marginally more. Maybe after a couple hundred more books I'll get it. I do wonder how out of date this book is, however. Maybe a new edition is in order?


Interesting passage about Paul Dirac:
"During a lecture at the University of Toronto a member of the audience asked politely ‘I do not understand how you derived that formula on the board’. There was a long silence, and it was only after being prompted by the chairman to give an answer that Dirac responded ‘It was not a question; it was a statement’." (p.35)

The whole section "Don't shake hands with an Anti-alien" (p. 110) was fascinating

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Review: Giulio Cesare

Giulio Cesare by Luca Canali
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This short book was very promising at the start. It doesn't go into too much detail, but covers Caesar's life and seemed very useful as a point of reference, not only for what happened in his life, but for the reasoning behind his main decisions, whether personal, political or military.

However, then came chapters 5, 6 and 7, where the author decided to act as a psychoanalyst and explore Caesar's motivations. This wouldn't be too bad, except he clearly uses this opportunity to pretty much justify any bad thing people might have to say about Caesar. He even has one entire chapter analyzing how often Caesar used superlatives in his writings (admittedly rather interesting), with the idea that this meant he felt very passionate about what he wrote (and that it wasn't propaganda). I confess I ended up skimming this toward the end since I felt the author had fallen into the trap of thinking his biographical subject could do no wrong.

Chapter 8, however, redeemed the book, with an analysis on the Ides of March. How the conspirators had read public sentiment so incorrectly, and why Caesar would not be surrounded by bodyguards, despite credible threats.



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Review: Chinese Myths & Legends

Chinese Myths & Legends by Chen Lianshan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Surprisingly interesting. A compendium of China's main myths and legends. Oddly enough it is very hard to find something like this, since mainland China tried to eradicate all "superstitions" during communism and only relatively recently are the old myths and customs resurfacing. I knew some of these from Taiwan, but much of it seems to be quite regional to other places. It's too bad that the English version doesn't seem to have been taken very seriously. It is worth re-editing and republishing.

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Review: Nathan der Weise

Nathan der Weise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Better than I thought. I feel like a politician or two would benefit from giving this a read.

I really liked Nathan's parable with the father and the three rings as related to the three main religions in the Holy land.

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Review: Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking

Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking by Cecilia Heyes
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

To be frank, I don't think I'm smart enough to understand this book. As least with regards to its subject matter. I probably should have given up after a chapter or two. I only stuck with it because what little I did understand was interesting, and I was curious about the chapter on language (which also confused me).

Keeping all that in mind, this is probably a moronic comment, but it seemed to me that many of her conclusions could have been reached by just noting the differences between various cultures, which would show proof of cultural evolutionary psychology as opposed to purely biological evolution. Then, taking that as a starting point, we could analyze whether the commonalities evolved from a fixed proto-human culture or not.

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Review: Norse Mythology

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really didn't expect to enjoy this all that much when I first started it, despite being curious about Norse Gods (it was the only compendium of Norse mythology I could find at the moment), but I'm very glad I stuck with this book. In many ways, Neil Gaiman is the perfect person to retell these stories. His style is quite simple and very fairy-tale like, which is how these stories end up feeling.

It's also good to see how familiar names, like Odin, Thor and the Valkyries, all tie into each other.

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Review: Snow Country

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A beautifully written book (kudos also to the translator Edward G. Seidensticker). For some reason, it made me feel nostalgic, despite being about a place and time I've obviously never experienced (nor would I necessarily want to). However, it didn't really seem to lament the passing of the old, Japanese ways for the new Western ways, as his other books seem to do. At least not obviously so.

The story itself was quite slow, but it still kept me interested and I pretty much finished it in one setting.

It also got me very interested in Chijimi: https://soranews24.com/2016/06/16/oji...

I'm rounding this up to a 5

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Review: The Sorrows of Young Werther

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I knew nothing about this book before reading it, and I'm glad that was the case. It started rather slowly, but the insights into the human condition and inner thoughts were excellent.

I guess I could see how this book could inspire "Werther Fever", although I confess toward the end I was fed up with Werther and his drama. Also, Charlotte and Albert were pretty close-minded not to see this coming.

I just saw that this was based on Goethe's personal experience. That makes me like it more, oddly enough.

3.5 stars

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