Books I've read so far this year...

[nekosensei]

1. The human Christ: the search for the historical Jesus by Charlotte Allen. [I forget this one. Ancient history interests me, but I thought this one was a little on the dry side.]
2. Lisey's Story by Stephen King
3. Orientalism by Edward Said
4. I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb
5. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon
6. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
7. Language death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect by Nancy C. Dorian
8. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
9. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri. Tranlated by Robert Pinsky.
10. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See -- It took me only two days to read this book. It was very well written and defintely one I would recommend that others read.

Being a woman in nineteenth century China had to be horrendous. For one, the only options women had in life were to marry, and unless they were from a very poor village, in order to find a husband they would need to practice foot binding. And I used to think that they just wrapped girls' feet to keep them from growing bigger. No...they wrapped the foot and made the girls walk on them so the toes and the bones in their foot broke. The goal was to bend the last four toes back towards the heel so the big toe formed a point at the front of the foot. And the smaller their feet were, the more marriageable they were.

The book also dealt with the role of nu shu, a system of writing invented by women, so that women could communicate with female family members who were married off to families in other villages. It was a system that some women used to combat the oppression they were dealing with in their everyday lives.

Comments

[angharad76.livejournal.com]

Cinderella always bothered me. The idea that the ideal woman would have impossibly tiny feet always rubbed me the wrong way. It wasn't until I was in my 20s that I learned that the earliest known version of the Cinderella story came from China. Then it all made sense.

[nekosensei.livejournal.com]

Huh...I knew it was first recorded by Charles Perrault in France. I didn't realize that it had made its way all the way from China.

[angharad76.livejournal.com]

Sure nuff. It was recorded in China nearly a millennium before Perrault. I have a Chinese version, but it's at home.

[nekosensei.livejournal.com]

I guess that doesn't surprise me. I once read two versions of the same story first in Spanish and then later in Japanese. It wouldn't surprise me if it originally came from Japanese. It was about a man trying to dupe a store owner into selling him an antique bowl for a low price. He saw a cat drinking milk out of the bowl, negotiated the sale of the cat, and then tried to get the owner to throw in the bowl because the cat is used to drinking out of it. It turns out that the owner knew the value of the bowl and was using it to sell cats...essentially, duping the people who were trying to trick him. According to the story, he made quite a profit.

[grlinabox.livejournal.com]

curious what did you think of good omens ?

[nekosensei.livejournal.com]

I liked it. I've read a ton of stuff by Neil Gaiman, but never anything by Terry Pratchett. I have to say that the book itself was pretty funny. I thought the footnotes were a nice touch. I think my favorite one was about how only a handful of people knew the calcuations the angel was doing. He said that one had won a Nobel Prize and the other was in a mental institution and wasn't allowed anything pointy because of what he would do with it. One of these days, I'm going to have to pick up something else by Terry Pratchett. Do you have any recommendations?

The list of books I want to read grows longer...

[grlinabox.livejournal.com]

I would recommend.. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintnance by an author the last name of pirsig
she's come undone by wally lamb was also good.. I saw you read this much is true ...

did you read angels and visitations by Neil Gaimen as well?

[nekosensei.livejournal.com]

I've read She's Come Undone already. I haven't read Angels and Visitations by Neil Gaiman. I do want to get my hands on The Sandman graphic novels though.