Christopher > Recent Status Updates

Finally on to the Ming.

I don't know if I will ever find another book that can quite compare to this one.

Hard to put down.

The last few chapters are finally getting more interesting. I should probably read more on Daoism. I've increased my understanding of this novel after opening it once a week for six months more from reading a few chapters on Daoism this week than anything else I've done. Very heavy on Daoism and Buddhism. The language can be quite arcane, but now that there's zombies it's become a really quick read suddenly.

She seriously needs to stop with the comparisons to Chinese history. Her understanding of Chinese history is excruciatingly superficial at best.

I really want to read a book the history of peoples indigenous to the Americas, but she makes so many ridiculous statements in the first chapter. She should have skipped the whole spiel about the rise of agriculture and nonsense about Eurasian history and focused on her specialty. I want to give the Aztec proper part a go before calling it quits though.

What does Mote have against the south? Seemingly endless discussion of northern states, references to "Korea, Japan and Annam," as if they constituted the whole of the sinosphere (though he's not even mentioned that Vietnam was just coming out of a thousand years under Chinese rule), a reader could be forgiven for not realizing the Dali Kingdom existed at this time. I wonder if Kokang will get its mention in time.

I really liked Vandiyathevan in the first book, but he has become quite obnoxious and useless in this second part. There's also less excitement in this book. A great read, to be sure, but I hope vol. 3 returns to form

This might just replace Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Demons as the best African book I've ever found.