I am starting to be of the (rather widespread) opinion that you can’t go wrong with a Margaret Atwood book. To date, I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Blind Assassin. I’ve enjoyed them all, and plan to read The Year of the Flood soonish.
I’ve seen it written that The Blind Assassin is her finest work, though I’m not sure I’d agree with that just yet. I read a lot of books that grab me quickly and I end up finishing them in about a day and a half. The Blind Assassin was not one of those books. First, it’s huge. There was a paperback copy in the tiny library here, so I read my very first paper book (aka DTE/Dead Tree Edition) since last Christmas, when I got my Kindle. After 7 months of reading on a Kindle, hefting a huge paperback that kept wanting to close on me wasn’t terribly pleasant.
The story itself was interesting, but it didn’t compel me to read for hours and hours each day. I was curious and wanted to continue, and I suppose that’s just as good. Three stories are happening at once here – the chapters are split between accounts of the narrator’s childhood, bits of her current life as an elderly woman, and chapters of a story written by her sister. The twist at the end was predictable (which may have been the point) and unnecessary. If it had simply been omitted, the story would have ended with a bit of mystery and book clubs everywhere could debate what REALLY happened. Laying it all out gave me the brief satisfaction of a “See? I was right!” but I think I enjoyed it more when I was in the middle of the book suspecting things and going back and forth. It was the puzzle that kept me reading. I still recommend it.
I finished The Postman by David Brin last night, and while I enjoyed it and recommend it, I’m not going to review it. So nyah. Now I’m reading Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. 
Despite having read a huge amount of books here, it’s been quite a while since I’ve done a book review. It’s going to be a little longer, because I have to lead up to this review.
Thursday, I was quite ill with who-knows-what, though I suspect it was a virus of some sort. I spent the entire day in either the bed or the bathroom, and started to feel better around 9pm. I took tiny sips of electrolyte drink as I woke up through the night, and felt much better the next morning. Newsflash: it’s difficult to teach when you ate NOTHING the previous day. I took another day off and napped. This morning I was starving and ventured out for food that was nothing like what I had thrown up two days ago. I settled on fried potatoes with cheese and some hot chocolate, and stared up at the TV while I waited for my food. It was a Chinese nature program with the sound off, because the cafe had it’s own preferred soundtrack. So, naturally, I got to watch baby elephants swimming to the tune of Knights in White Satin.
After stuffing myself and listening to a man complain about “boom boom nightclub music” until 1am (twice) I got up to leave and felt dizzy. Lucky for me, there’s a couch by the door and a table covered with books and magazines. Next to Amelia Bedelia (which I read, of course) was a book called Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China
If you’re interested in the ethnic minorities in China, if you wonder what we eat out here, if you want to see amazing pictures of food and people, and especially if you want to read the stories of Westerners who roamed China when it was barely open to tourists, then get this book. It has recipes alongside stories of how the couple met, encounters with notable folks, and the adventures and touching encounters they had 25 years ago when I was bopping around to Madonna’s True Blue album in my driveway.
As predicted, I’ve been reading nearly constantly. If my crochet hook is not in my hand, my Kindle is. This is partially due to my continued inability to connect my computer to the internet in the apartment (resolved fully as of this morning), but it certainly helps that I have no job and 17 books currently on my Kindle. While we were on the bus back from Jiangxi, I finished reading Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which I will get to in a minute. Instead of sighing and looking out the window for the remaining 20 hours of the ride, I went back to reading Atomic Lobster by Tim Dorsey (which I finished a couple of days later and moved on to Up in the Air by Walter Kirn…which I finished the morning I began writing this review). When I did something similar in the Philippines back in 2000, it resulted in a large pile of books that I didn’t have room to bring home with me. I’m diggin’ this Kindle thing. A lot.
Half the Sky Review
If you’re not familiar with Nick Kristof’s column in the NY Times, you should be. He writes about issues that are important but often not well-known, and I’m grateful for being introduced to these. Kristof is careful to not merely complain about things; he often highlights the work of a person or an organization which has been working on the highlighted issue with good results. His appeals also often lead to a flood of donations for whatever charity he mentions.
The book is no exception, for it contains a large appendix which lists all the charities he mentions in his narrative as well as others he knows of. They are sorted into the same categories as the sections of the book: sex trafficking, gender-based violence (including neglect), and maternal mortality. The narrative itself approaches each general topic from several angles, each telling the story of one or a few women and Nick or Sheryl’s experience with them. For someone brought up with plenty of opportunities, the stories are shocking. Each situation is impossible to imagine, starting with the opening story of a Cambodian girl who was sold into sex slavery and escaped, only to be jailed and have a crooked cop sell her again. There is no way for me to wonder what I would do in such a situation, because it’s so far beyond my experience.
Half the Sky will move you, hopefully to action. Because I’m lucky enough to be spending the majority of this calendar year volunteering, I intend to find a way to put a special focus on the girls and women. I won’t know specifically how I can do this until I get there, but I will try to highlight it here. Once I’m back in the US and earning money, you can bet that I’ll be contributing far more than I have in the past. Kristof mentions a few “price points” in the book:
- Tithing, which is traditionally giving 10% of one’s income to the church, need not be limited in such a way. The idea is to work a certain percentage into your budget and making giving a priority.
- The world spends $40 billion annually on pet food, but an increase of only $9 billion per year in aid money would “provide all effective interventions for maternal and newborn health to 95% of the world’s population”. What if we all donated, each month, to a charity focused on this problem, an amount equal to whatever we’ve spent on pet food?
Please, read this book, and start reading Kristof’s column in the New York Times.
Warning: Do not read this in public if you dislike sobbing like a baby in front of other people.
While I made the mistake of reading a lot of reviews for this book before reading the book itself, it didn’t spoil it for me. Many said the ending was stupid, but I didn’t mind it. Hokey? A bit, but it seemed to fit. I actually have a paperback of this that I got from a garage sale in 2005 or so, but I never read it. I bought the Kindle version before hopping on the plane, and am glad I did.
It was definitely a tearjerker. One particular moment had me looking like I had dipped my head in a vat of tears and snot (on the plane, of course) and I managed to scare the hubs when he looked over at me. I think what worried him most was that he thought I was still reading Midnight in Madrid, which had become a joke between us by then.
While the book opens with a scene of rape and murder, it is not overly graphic. It may be triggering for some. Overall, the book is about life and healing, not death. I found the characters to be well-developed and believable, and I look forward to finding a bootleg copy of the movie soon.
What utter shit. There’s a reason it was offered as a free Kindle download – who would get it otherwise? Generally publishers offer up one book in a series free to get folks hooked, but I will not be spending any money on this author (or publisher).
It’s partially my own fault. I saw a free book that sounded vaguely interesting, and didn’t bother to read much about it. As I got into it, I realized it was Christian fiction. This is different than fiction that happens to contain Christian characters. Christian fiction often contains large sections of preachiness, and this novel was no exception. Midnight in Madrid also included lots of stereotypes of Muslims; every single Muslim character was either a terrorist or helping a terrorist. These characters were frequently portrayed as hypocritical, while the Christian characters were infallible.
There was also a Chinese assassin who was so smart because he was Chinese.
Skip this book, please. I’m not even going to link to it on Amazon because I don’t want you to buy it.
Depending on who you ask, there are anywhere from three to five stages of culture shock. Let’s look at the 3-stage process through the eyes of J. Maarten Troost, author of Lost on Planet China. This consists of the Honeymoon Phase, the Negotiation Phase, and the Adjustment Phase.
Recent Comments