Category: Books
China, where the future is already the past
I have tried to stay off the subject of how the internet will change the world, since there is enough of that on the internet already. I was struck by this piec...
Harvard to Digitize Chinese Rare Book Collection
I just read on H-Asia that Harvard has announced last week that, in cooperation with the National Library of China, it will be scanning its 51,500 volumes of Ch...
Transvestite chickens late at night
I’ve been reading Cao Naiqian‘s There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night. It’s an odd sort of book, and you can see wh...
Zhao Ziyang
Zhao Ziyang’s memoir will be out soon. Some special people got advance copies, and you can see their reactions at CDT. Fillial children will remember that...
But what about the books?
So supposedly they are going to tear down my office building and replace it with a new one. This may end up not happening, and it will probably not happen real ...
A sinologist in Iraq
Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time has been re-issued. This is good news for everyone, and especially for those of us who got a copy for Christmas. (Thanks S...
Liveblogging, slowblogging, Mammoth Blogging?
John McKay, at Archy, is publishing excerpts from his work on the natural history and historiography of wooly mammoths. The latest installment is about China, p...
Flithy Asians
One of my colleagues recently passed on his copy of The Far East by James H. Maurer Sentinel Printing, 1912. The author says that the book is not the product of...
Lost Stories
I recently came across a book called Some of Us[i], recommended to me by one of the contributing authors, Dr. Jiang Jin. The book is a collection of memoirs and...
Invisible Books – Might Have Been Written But Never Were
The Italian writer Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a dreamy fabulation on cities that Marco Polo might have visited – if only they had existed. Of cou...
Pearl Buck's Intriguing Staying Power: Imperial Woman
Parade Magazine (September 14, 2008) asked Laura Bush what she’s been reading: “The Imperial Woman, by Pearl S. Buck. I picked up this book after re...
Lin Yutang and Chinese literature
One of my neighbors was doing some spring cleaning and brought me this. Lin was a notable if somewhat minor intellectual figure in China but his real fame came ...