The blurb on the front of this book, a quote from a review in the the Washington Post Book World, reads: … A strange tale of adventure and foreign travel [that] illuminates grand historical themes… Hu’s story, so deceptively simple, makes powerful reading… [A] splendid book.” That’s about as apt a soundbyte as possible. What I found the book to be is a wonderful cross-cultural examination of ideas I first encountered in Foucault’s: the way that illness as a social object is constructed, that madness is construed by things like inconvenient uncontrollability, and so on — Spence makes no reference …

Kabuki is not for everyone. It’s a dark, vaguely SFnal epic about, well, sort of about the intricate connections between crime, empire, sexuality, and power in an imagined Japan which, unlike many inmagined futures, is definitely, clearly, and intelligently linked to real history. It’s dark. Dark, dark, dark. But it’s also beautifully drawn; it’s insightful, and it reminds me in a way of how, in SF, sometimes the technology that is being discussed takes on the status of a character unto itself. In Kabuki, the art is like this: it takes on the status of a character, and in some …

When I ran across this little red book in a used bookshop in Saskatoon last summer, I snapped it up for one reason and one reason alone: because I remembered the title from this post by Adrian over at mssv.net. Now, if you look at the post I just linked above, you’ll see that the book is, in fact, a kind of puzzle book. After I finished it, I had a sense — a very strong sense of it, one which Pullman works very hard to establish — that there was much more to the book than just the tale …

It is impossible to read this book without a sense of looming doom faced by all the Russians you’re reading about. The first bit of text visible on the cover of this book reads, HOW RUSSIA LOST THE PACIFIC TO THE JAPANESE, and from that line onward, you know that the people Pleshakov is writing about are going to fail. How sad it is to watch them set out on their journey in inadequate ships, following ridiculous commands, navigating a hostile political climate as threatening as the ocean itself — and sometimes moreso — and all the while, steaming Eastward …

I’m starting to feel a little silly including these short childrens’ books on my Lunar New Year readings list, but (a) I wanted to create a log of all the books I read in the Lunar Year from 2005-2006, and (b) I really do want to achieve my goal of reading 50 books in that time. Besides, if Ezra Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos counts as only one book, and if I am not going to count all the supporting texts I’ve read chunks of in my study of it, then the kids’ books are, to my mind, not …

High Society is a book I should have reviewed last summer. I read it in Saskatoon, in fact finishing it the night before I departed on a flight to Montreal, and forgot to review it when, a few days later, I arrived back in Jeonju. Only when looking into another graphic novel I picked up in Canada did I remember having read Sim’s fascinating graphic novel, and only then did I realize I’d been remiss in not reviewing it here. High Society tells the story of an aardvark named Cerebus, wandering in a world of humans. It’s a magical world, …

As I’ve mentioned in recent posts , I’ve been listening to the free & legal mp3 set that makes up the audiobook distribution of Lawrence Lessig’s very important book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Creativity. Now, I know some people will have trouble counting it as a “book”, or my interaction with it as “reading”, since it’s an audiobook. However, I want to note a couple of things: As an unabridged audiobook, it took me longer to get through all the audio than it would to get through a printed …

From the moment I saw the movie Lemony Snickets’ A Series of Unfortunate Events, I realized that these books had to be well-written. Dark, brooding novels for children aren’t really the norm — though I think this has more to do with the way adults think about children than anything, and I think it also reflects the changes in how we think about kids over the last few hundred years. It’s not as if the Grimm’s tales were written for businessmen or housewives seeking “the edgy”, after all — and the fact that the movie was so wonderfully interesting boded …

“A shock writer”. “A weirdo”. “That Fight Club guy.” These are the kinds of things that are said not altogether praisefully about Chuck Palahniuk, but I am not sure I can really agree… or disagree. I’m not sure I can agree with the pejorative use of a term like “shock writer” because, well, it’s pretty clear that Palahniuk values the shocking, the gut-wrenching, the revolting. It’d be one thing if he was publishing books full of snuff photography, or writing simply sadistic fantasies; in other words, it’d be one thing if he weren’t very clearly working at constructing texts of …