Category: REVIEWS

Yuan Shih-k’ai by Jerome Chen

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Ah, hostile biography. Today I’ll be discussing what I’ve picked up reading a book about Yuan Shih-k’ai (now just Yuan Shikai), the first President of post-revolutionary China. He’s one of those figures I’d never even heard of, and when I stumbled upon Jerome Chen’s eponymously titled  biography of the man, I decided to read it mostly out of curiosity regarding his role in Seoul in the turbulent 1880s. I’d assumed his involvement there was the main reason the book was in the library’s holdings at all, to be honest, but it turns out he’s actually more like China’s equivalent of Syngman Rhee, except that just before his downfall, …

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The Record of the Black Dragon Year

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The other day I mentioned how I’ve been reading Peter H. Lee’s translation of the Imjin Nok (임진록), titled in English The Record of the Black Dragon Year.  Lee is a scholar I’ve encountered before, mainly as an editor but also as a translator in the excellent 2-volume Sources of Korean Tradition, as well as A Korean Storyteller’s Miscellany: The P’aegwan Chapki of O Sukkwon—the latter, a book I own and I think I’ve loaned out to a friend, but which I haven’t read all the way through. In any case, my curiosity about the Imjin Nok is pretty much rooted in the fact that it’s popular …

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The Status of Fiction in Traditional Northeast Asian Literary Culture

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A while back, I mentioned how, in 1632, the commoners around Shaoxing (in China) had planned to cosplay the characters from the famous wuxia novel The Outlaws of the Marsh, hoping to appease the gods into making it rain so a famine could be avoided, and some of the local literati had gotten involved, donated some cloth and lots of money, and turned the thing into a massive Harajuku-meets-Vegas stage production extravaganza. Ah, late Ming China! Ah, Zhang Dai! This mini-anecdote leaves me slightly skeptical about parts of the introduction of Peter H. Lee’s translation of the Imjin Rok, titled in English The Record of the Black Dragon Year (a Korean text roughly …

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Whilst Nature Was Busy Making Cabbages: The Woman in White

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Of all the places to find a euphemism for baffling passivity! This is from Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White: A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting …

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On Reviewing Books

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My buddy Joe recently asked me about my process for reviewing books, how I approach it and go about doing it. (I have done reviews for a few magazines and newspapers, but these days I mostly review for Kyoto Journal.) I figured I might as well talk about it here, since it may interest others. I suppose is “the usual,” ie. this kind of a four-paragraph thing: plot summary positives negatives overall impression Do I do this? Well, the structure, yeah, sort of. But, no, not really. I have done it, and occasionally I do revert to it when I really am underwhelmed …

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Readings, January-March 2015

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A slow couple of months, really: the job-hunting and housing situation–staying in a small sublet apartment with no place to sit comfortably and read, and only noisy places outside–combined with moving to another city and adjusting to my new workplace, along with all kinds of other things that recently came up, all conspired to make it hard to get much reading done. But I did get around to these books: Memories and Commentaries by Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft (link) I’m a Stravinsky junkie, and have been since, I think it was the end of high school or early in freshman year …

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The Five Types of Moon Viewers, According to Zhang Dai

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I’m reading Jonathan Spence’s book about Zhang Dai at the moment, and Spence certainly succeeds early on in making Zhang seem like the guy of person you would want to hang out with… at least for a while. He was swept up by random, sweeping passions, and a powerful drive to write and write and write about everything that interested him. Manifestoes were kind of a thing with him, and those passions were constantly renewing, eclectic but thoughtful, if a bit over the top… or that’s how it seems thirty pages into the book, anyway. So far, among many other things, Spence …

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Books I Read in 2014

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Well, I’m not quite a month late, but almost. Here’s the list of all the books I read in 2014. I’m not writing about magazines, because I’m 99% sure nobody reading this blog cares about that stuff. Heck, I’m not even convinced anyone’s interested in this kind of bookkeping/tabulation stuff, though I’m going to kick it off with a list of my top thirteen books of the year. Why top thirteen? Because… well, why should it be only ten? Here are the thirteen books I read in 2014 that I enjoyed most: 1. Blindsight by Peter Watts. Why in the hell did I wait so long? Usually,  when a …

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November-December Books

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It looks like it’s been slower around here than it actually has been, in terms of books: I’ve just been reading some big ones, is all. I’ll put ’em beneath the cut, to save space.

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