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cyphomandraThey sent an email to remind me, which is an excellent idea (and definitely preferable to the robocalls). Now all I have to do is put the books into my bag and forget to drop them off.
Dreaming in Chinese, Deborah Fallows. Author is a PhD in linguistics who has lived in Beijing and Shanghai for extended periods of time, and studied Mandarin. Each of the short chapters is framed around a Chinese phrase or concept, from Wǒ ài nǐ ("I love you") to Nǐ de Zhōngwěn hěn hǎo ("your Chinese is really good" - I am copying from the text here and apologise if I've stuffed up the tone markers. I spent a year trying to learn Mandarin and am still not convinced I ever got a tone right intentionally). There are some nice moments in here, but it never really breaks out of this format in order to generate an actual narrative (yes, it's nonfiction, but it could still tell a story), and there's an odd sense of starting again with each chapter. In chapter 6, for example, she gives one of the staff at her local beauty shop an English name, Sasha - it's presented as a special moment, as Sasha - Xiǎo Xuē - is from a distant rural province, and doesn't have an English name like the city girls she works with. In chapter 9 Sasha shows up again, as if she's a new person - "a working girl from the coal provinces in the middle of China" - and any significance of her name is unmentioned. Another woman, Miranda, shows up in chapter 7 and chapter 8, and is both times introduced as "a young Chinese woman", as if the reader is expected to have forgotten her already.
I like that the author discusses the language, tones and hànzì and all, and looks how it's used by the Chinese (for fun as well as communication) and not just how it's grappled with by foreigners. Overall, though, I wanted either more narrative or none at all (and, ideally, more).
Verity Fibbs, Cathy Brett. Author is a fashion illustrator and has illustrated this extensively. The main character, Verity, is the daughter of a glamorous fashion designer and a compulsive liar, which is somehow supposed to endear her to me when her mother heads off to the US and Verity promptly starts skipping school and holding parties. Verity is also apparently addicted to a computer game called Demon Streets, chunks of which are interspersed with the text. It's apparently simultaneously playable on a phone and a console, is multiplayer and highly successful (but has a small enough cast that Verity will eventually encounter almost everyone she's met in the game world in the real world) and is very unclear about its actual playability.
The book is also unclear. Verity's lying sets her up for a variety of action scenes with a fellow (and attractive male) compulsive liar on their quest to defeat an evil fashion person who is exploiting third world orphans in order to sell cheap jeans. In the world of the book, this is something only evil people do; all other fashion is highly ethical and even the merest whiff of dodgy origins around clothing is enough to prompt large scale murder attempts on witnesses who might leak the information. As someone who tries to buy ethical fashion, and has had a number of unhelpful conversations about this with various shop staff (on one occasion a woman in a sporting goods store came out in a stress rash, much to my embarrassment), I would like to believe this but find it improbable at best. Also, by this stage I was completely untaken with any of the cast, as well as somewhat unnerved by 14 year old Verity's ability to impersonate her mother so convincingly that even a guy who's dated her is deceived. And then the pov started wandering all over the place, and there was an exceptionally unlikely denouement, and I moved on.
AIDS at 30: a history, Victoria Harden. In 1990 I picked Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On, published three years earlier, up from a returned books trolley in a university library, and ended up crouched on the floor two hours later, unable to stop reading it. About ten years after that I bought my own copy. It's an amazing, passionate, angry book, and I highly recommend it. I also recommend Bryce Courtenay's April Fool's Day, about the life and death of his son, Damon, a haemophiliac with HIV/AIDS, because it's also a very emotional book, although I put more caveats on this because I know some of the people involved, and their version of events is a little different. And I'm also very, very fond of Tony Kushner's two part play, Angels in America, chunks of which are still stuck in my head all this time after seeing it.
Victoria Harden's book is a perfectly competent history with no real emotional content - she was the founding director for the National Institutes of Health Office of NIH History, and much of the book comes from that, getting the names and dates of the scientists and researchers correct (at least, as far as I know, although there's a very short bit about screening the blood supply in France that does not seem to include any of the controversy I distantly remember from a lecture I went to about six years ago). In chapter 4 we get AIDS as a cultural phenomenon, and in chapter 7 we get the Global Epidemic (I had begun to wonder where the rest of the world had got to), and there were some interesting anecdotes about attempts to treat one of the early US AIDS patients with a bone marrow transplant from his identical, uninfected twin, as well as researchers in Zaire protecting their laboratory from rebelling soldiers by painting 'SIDA' (French for AIDS) on the outside wall in sheep's blood. Ultimately, though, I felt pretty much unmoved. I'm still waiting for something that goes past the advent of triple therapy and into the modern era.
Carpe Diem, Autumn Cornwell. Smug high school student Vassar Spore has her whole high-achieving life planned out, until her eccentric grandmother whisks her away to Cambodia and Laos in an attempt to disrupt her bubble. I give this props for having the love interest be a Malaysian Chinese guy who wears cowboy boots and fake sideburns, and wants to rebel against his parents by giving up engineering and ranching in Wyoming. I also liked the travel information, and Vassar's constant attempts to find usable toilets. The background does waver between exotic backdrop and intrinsic part of the story, tho', with none of the protagonists really local, and I'm not wild about Vassar's grandmother's found art projects (some of them sound great, but the one where they appear to be tracking down an endangered beetle to take back to another country?). Or, indeed the final reveal - and SPOILERS follow - in which Vassar discovers she's actually her grandmother's daughter, and her biological father is some Thai guy her grandmother slept with while drunk. Her own father (Vassar's grandmother's son) is adopted, but I got a headache trying to work out the actual timelines and how this had all happened. However, of all these books, this is probably the only one I'd look for other books by the same author of.
Dreaming in Chinese, Deborah Fallows. Author is a PhD in linguistics who has lived in Beijing and Shanghai for extended periods of time, and studied Mandarin. Each of the short chapters is framed around a Chinese phrase or concept, from Wǒ ài nǐ ("I love you") to Nǐ de Zhōngwěn hěn hǎo ("your Chinese is really good" - I am copying from the text here and apologise if I've stuffed up the tone markers. I spent a year trying to learn Mandarin and am still not convinced I ever got a tone right intentionally). There are some nice moments in here, but it never really breaks out of this format in order to generate an actual narrative (yes, it's nonfiction, but it could still tell a story), and there's an odd sense of starting again with each chapter. In chapter 6, for example, she gives one of the staff at her local beauty shop an English name, Sasha - it's presented as a special moment, as Sasha - Xiǎo Xuē - is from a distant rural province, and doesn't have an English name like the city girls she works with. In chapter 9 Sasha shows up again, as if she's a new person - "a working girl from the coal provinces in the middle of China" - and any significance of her name is unmentioned. Another woman, Miranda, shows up in chapter 7 and chapter 8, and is both times introduced as "a young Chinese woman", as if the reader is expected to have forgotten her already.
I like that the author discusses the language, tones and hànzì and all, and looks how it's used by the Chinese (for fun as well as communication) and not just how it's grappled with by foreigners. Overall, though, I wanted either more narrative or none at all (and, ideally, more).
Verity Fibbs, Cathy Brett. Author is a fashion illustrator and has illustrated this extensively. The main character, Verity, is the daughter of a glamorous fashion designer and a compulsive liar, which is somehow supposed to endear her to me when her mother heads off to the US and Verity promptly starts skipping school and holding parties. Verity is also apparently addicted to a computer game called Demon Streets, chunks of which are interspersed with the text. It's apparently simultaneously playable on a phone and a console, is multiplayer and highly successful (but has a small enough cast that Verity will eventually encounter almost everyone she's met in the game world in the real world) and is very unclear about its actual playability.
The book is also unclear. Verity's lying sets her up for a variety of action scenes with a fellow (and attractive male) compulsive liar on their quest to defeat an evil fashion person who is exploiting third world orphans in order to sell cheap jeans. In the world of the book, this is something only evil people do; all other fashion is highly ethical and even the merest whiff of dodgy origins around clothing is enough to prompt large scale murder attempts on witnesses who might leak the information. As someone who tries to buy ethical fashion, and has had a number of unhelpful conversations about this with various shop staff (on one occasion a woman in a sporting goods store came out in a stress rash, much to my embarrassment), I would like to believe this but find it improbable at best. Also, by this stage I was completely untaken with any of the cast, as well as somewhat unnerved by 14 year old Verity's ability to impersonate her mother so convincingly that even a guy who's dated her is deceived. And then the pov started wandering all over the place, and there was an exceptionally unlikely denouement, and I moved on.
AIDS at 30: a history, Victoria Harden. In 1990 I picked Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On, published three years earlier, up from a returned books trolley in a university library, and ended up crouched on the floor two hours later, unable to stop reading it. About ten years after that I bought my own copy. It's an amazing, passionate, angry book, and I highly recommend it. I also recommend Bryce Courtenay's April Fool's Day, about the life and death of his son, Damon, a haemophiliac with HIV/AIDS, because it's also a very emotional book, although I put more caveats on this because I know some of the people involved, and their version of events is a little different. And I'm also very, very fond of Tony Kushner's two part play, Angels in America, chunks of which are still stuck in my head all this time after seeing it.
Victoria Harden's book is a perfectly competent history with no real emotional content - she was the founding director for the National Institutes of Health Office of NIH History, and much of the book comes from that, getting the names and dates of the scientists and researchers correct (at least, as far as I know, although there's a very short bit about screening the blood supply in France that does not seem to include any of the controversy I distantly remember from a lecture I went to about six years ago). In chapter 4 we get AIDS as a cultural phenomenon, and in chapter 7 we get the Global Epidemic (I had begun to wonder where the rest of the world had got to), and there were some interesting anecdotes about attempts to treat one of the early US AIDS patients with a bone marrow transplant from his identical, uninfected twin, as well as researchers in Zaire protecting their laboratory from rebelling soldiers by painting 'SIDA' (French for AIDS) on the outside wall in sheep's blood. Ultimately, though, I felt pretty much unmoved. I'm still waiting for something that goes past the advent of triple therapy and into the modern era.
Carpe Diem, Autumn Cornwell. Smug high school student Vassar Spore has her whole high-achieving life planned out, until her eccentric grandmother whisks her away to Cambodia and Laos in an attempt to disrupt her bubble. I give this props for having the love interest be a Malaysian Chinese guy who wears cowboy boots and fake sideburns, and wants to rebel against his parents by giving up engineering and ranching in Wyoming. I also liked the travel information, and Vassar's constant attempts to find usable toilets. The background does waver between exotic backdrop and intrinsic part of the story, tho', with none of the protagonists really local, and I'm not wild about Vassar's grandmother's found art projects (some of them sound great, but the one where they appear to be tracking down an endangered beetle to take back to another country?). Or, indeed the final reveal - and SPOILERS follow - in which Vassar discovers she's actually her grandmother's daughter, and her biological father is some Thai guy her grandmother slept with while drunk. Her own father (Vassar's grandmother's son) is adopted, but I got a headache trying to work out the actual timelines and how this had all happened. However, of all these books, this is probably the only one I'd look for other books by the same author of.
