lists and books
Sep. 13th, 2009 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
issenlloStolen off... well, I saw sanlith do it. Which I feel is appropriate for a post where I intend to do bookblogging.
Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen movies/books you've seen that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.
Movies
1) Mary Poppins
2) Once a Thief
3) Lust, Caution
4) My Lucky Star
5) Hero
6) A Chinese Odyssey I & II
7) Wu Yen
8) The Hours
9) In the Mood for Love
10) Flirting Scholar
11) Infernal Affairs I & III (is it cheating if I name both?)
12) Ringu
13) Princess Mononoke
14) Sense and Sensibility
15) Romeo + Juliet
Um. Yeah. My taste is... yeah.
Books
1) The Changeover, Margaret Mahy
2) Beauty, Robin Mckinley
3) Jadewoman, Jonathan Gash
4) Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart
5) Return of the Condor Heroes, Louis Cha
6) Daddy-Long-Legs, Jean Webster
7) Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse, Louise Erdrich
8) Chinabound, J.K. Fairbank
9) The Waves, Virginia Woolf
10) A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
11) Is it cheating if I say the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters?
12) Village by the Sea, Anita Desai
13) I am David, Anne Holm
14) A Vision of Light, Judith Merkle Riley
15) Mrs Shakespeare, Robert Nye
And so many more! And I really should have added the Harry Potter series. There's only one Chinese work in that list... hm. I suppose it should really be Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre, but I actually prefer the TVB series (starring Tony Leung!) much, much more...
***
The bookblogging, which I've not done for weeks.
Title: The Rape of Nanking
Author: Iris Chang.
I was two pages in a biography on Iris Chang by a seeming frenemy, which said Chang was a totally ambitious go-getting journalist and writer (complete with what seemed to me was not-so-silent teeth-gnashing about this ABC(?) upstart), and at that point I abandoned the biography to go back to read the RN instead. I read it once when before when it first came out but only finished the part about the atrocities, by which I was thoroughly sickened and heartsick. So this time I went back to read about the cover-up by Japanese propaganda of the massacre, had an unwelcomed flashback to the time I had an argument about a Japanese student who thoroughly denied--"only 10,000 soldiers were killed!"--the extent of the killings, and ugh.
Then steeled myself and read the rest of it all over again. Chang hits a spot when she mentioned hearing of the massacre from her parents (me too! 'cept it was parents and grandparents) but not finding much mention of it in history books while growing up (me too! Well... the rest of Asia, especially Southeast Asia, had their trauma with the Japanese Imperial Army, too, so--). And getting a lot of belated conclusions, such as 1) the utter depravity and horror of the massacre--which was widely reported in foreign and Japanese media at the time--turned the tide against the Japanese, in that Chinese resistence grew a spine (a bigger spine) and American popular opinion, in a combination of moral outrage and racism, became even more anti-Japanese. 2) The backlash against the rapes started the Japanese on the idea of starting sex camps and filling them with 'comfort women', 3) I'm getting very, very curious about the exact roles played by members of the imperial family and 4) the process of brainwashing an ordinary person to become an inhumane killer makes a lot of nightmarish sense, and that 5) military dictatorships create hell. (Also, in an odd coincidence, saw and sighed over this Fanficrants post on how China =/= version of Japan)
Title: The Full Cupboard of Life
Author: Alexander McCall Smith
I'm entertained by this book, but there is no mystery in this book! *perplexed* Um, I mean, there isn't a particular case that Precious Ramotswe takes on, unless one counts the one about vetting a woman's suitors. And also that Ramotswe gets her fiance out of a spot and then gets married to him in the last page. So, yeah. Smith's writing is smooth, and brings out the speech patterns of the characters, love the way it all flows.
Title: The Sharing Knife: Horizon
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold
Is it my imagination, or did this book seem long? I was starting to feel like I was reading Mercedes Lackey. This is book 4 of Bujold's Sharing Knife series, and er, I'm just not really getting into the whole sharing knife idea and creatures such as malices and so forth. It's not that it's not well thought-out--I'm just not into magical weapon creation. It starts off with Dag going to be an apprentice with a healer, learning how to use hismagical special powers properly. That, um... I'm just a lot more into healing people with modern medicine, but the explanations are detailed and make sense and that's... the best we can hope for from medicine before diagnostic tests and surgery and antiviral drugs, I guess.
(Hey, Chinese traditional medicine is full of mumbo-jumbo about chi and heat and about eating tiger testicles and frog ovaries, I haven't a leg to stand on--and I like the frog ovaries. Don't judge me; I haven't eaten them for years, not ever since I heard the frogs are supposed to be an endangered species.)
But anyway, I enjoyed the travelling. Dag and Fawn travel southwards with a bunch ofcolonisers farmers looking for land, and they meet more monsters, fight 'em off, add drama about Fawn seemingly coming back from the dead and a pretty good ending. So.
Going to watch Slumdog Millionaire, dvd borrowed from my sister's friend of a friend--according to her, the dvd's already made a round of her friends and will be going a second round for those who want rewatches, so I want to watch it by today.
And um. I have Blind Go fic to work on.
sanlith do it. Which I feel is appropriate for a post where I intend to do bookblogging.Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen movies/books you've seen that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.
Movies
1) Mary Poppins
2) Once a Thief
3) Lust, Caution
4) My Lucky Star
5) Hero
6) A Chinese Odyssey I & II
7) Wu Yen
8) The Hours
9) In the Mood for Love
10) Flirting Scholar
11) Infernal Affairs I & III (is it cheating if I name both?)
12) Ringu
13) Princess Mononoke
14) Sense and Sensibility
15) Romeo + Juliet
Um. Yeah. My taste is... yeah.
Books
1) The Changeover, Margaret Mahy
2) Beauty, Robin Mckinley
3) Jadewoman, Jonathan Gash
4) Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart
5) Return of the Condor Heroes, Louis Cha
6) Daddy-Long-Legs, Jean Webster
7) Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse, Louise Erdrich
8) Chinabound, J.K. Fairbank
9) The Waves, Virginia Woolf
10) A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
11) Is it cheating if I say the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters?
12) Village by the Sea, Anita Desai
13) I am David, Anne Holm
14) A Vision of Light, Judith Merkle Riley
15) Mrs Shakespeare, Robert Nye
And so many more! And I really should have added the Harry Potter series. There's only one Chinese work in that list... hm. I suppose it should really be Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre, but I actually prefer the TVB series (starring Tony Leung!) much, much more...
***
The bookblogging, which I've not done for weeks.
Title: The Rape of Nanking
Author: Iris Chang.
I was two pages in a biography on Iris Chang by a seeming frenemy, which said Chang was a totally ambitious go-getting journalist and writer (complete with what seemed to me was not-so-silent teeth-gnashing about this ABC(?) upstart), and at that point I abandoned the biography to go back to read the RN instead. I read it once when before when it first came out but only finished the part about the atrocities, by which I was thoroughly sickened and heartsick. So this time I went back to read about the cover-up by Japanese propaganda of the massacre, had an unwelcomed flashback to the time I had an argument about a Japanese student who thoroughly denied--"only 10,000 soldiers were killed!"--the extent of the killings, and ugh.
Then steeled myself and read the rest of it all over again. Chang hits a spot when she mentioned hearing of the massacre from her parents (me too! 'cept it was parents and grandparents) but not finding much mention of it in history books while growing up (me too! Well... the rest of Asia, especially Southeast Asia, had their trauma with the Japanese Imperial Army, too, so--). And getting a lot of belated conclusions, such as 1) the utter depravity and horror of the massacre--which was widely reported in foreign and Japanese media at the time--turned the tide against the Japanese, in that Chinese resistence grew a spine (a bigger spine) and American popular opinion, in a combination of moral outrage and racism, became even more anti-Japanese. 2) The backlash against the rapes started the Japanese on the idea of starting sex camps and filling them with 'comfort women', 3) I'm getting very, very curious about the exact roles played by members of the imperial family and 4) the process of brainwashing an ordinary person to become an inhumane killer makes a lot of nightmarish sense, and that 5) military dictatorships create hell. (Also, in an odd coincidence, saw and sighed over this Fanficrants post on how China =/= version of Japan)
Title: The Full Cupboard of Life
Author: Alexander McCall Smith
I'm entertained by this book, but there is no mystery in this book! *perplexed* Um, I mean, there isn't a particular case that Precious Ramotswe takes on, unless one counts the one about vetting a woman's suitors. And also that Ramotswe gets her fiance out of a spot and then gets married to him in the last page. So, yeah. Smith's writing is smooth, and brings out the speech patterns of the characters, love the way it all flows.
Title: The Sharing Knife: Horizon
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold
Is it my imagination, or did this book seem long? I was starting to feel like I was reading Mercedes Lackey. This is book 4 of Bujold's Sharing Knife series, and er, I'm just not really getting into the whole sharing knife idea and creatures such as malices and so forth. It's not that it's not well thought-out--I'm just not into magical weapon creation. It starts off with Dag going to be an apprentice with a healer, learning how to use his
(Hey, Chinese traditional medicine is full of mumbo-jumbo about chi and heat and about eating tiger testicles and frog ovaries, I haven't a leg to stand on--and I like the frog ovaries. Don't judge me; I haven't eaten them for years, not ever since I heard the frogs are supposed to be an endangered species.)
But anyway, I enjoyed the travelling. Dag and Fawn travel southwards with a bunch of
Going to watch Slumdog Millionaire, dvd borrowed from my sister's friend of a friend--according to her, the dvd's already made a round of her friends and will be going a second round for those who want rewatches, so I want to watch it by today.
And um. I have Blind Go fic to work on.