Christopher > Recent Status Updates

I don't quite understand what the author's position is yet. She simultaneously seems to be dissecting and criticizing the narratives of rogue states and American hegemony while also repeating a lot of the clichés uncritically, as when she announces the Soviet Union fell because of the superiority of the Western model.

Starting book two.

Almost done the first volume. So much is going on now, with the meeting of Yang Tiexin and his wife and son, Guo Jing and Huang Rong, Daoist Wang being poisoned, Wanyan Honglie revealing the existence of Yue Fei's tactics book and the quest to find it, and now Guo Jing falling into the clutches of Mei Chaofeng after having been attacked by a medicinal snake and accidentally drinking its blood.

It really irritates me when authors opt for ambiguous statements to give a more sensational account. "thousands and missionaries and Chinese converts" is accurate in that thousands of both groups combined died, but more precise sources say only like 150 missionaries died. Failure to distinguish these two numbers will leave readers with a very biased mental image.

While it's gotten better over the Mongolia arc, I'm starting to recognize a bit of humor which feels rather juvenile and only somewhat well-placed. Things are finally starting to come together as I start on the final chapter of the first book. Three more to go after this.

Fascinating

The last couple hundred pages were a bit grating. I'm losing any sense of where the story is going. There's very little personal action anymore (though it does fluctuate), leaving it sounding like an oddly dry history book. Something is wrong when an eager reader of academic monographs is bored by the dryness of a novel.

I want to read 90 English books, 9 Chinese, and a German this year. If that's going to happen, I'll probably have to count this as 4.

An interesting but dry account of the early successes of the American Protestants in winning over a small but meaningful segment of the Japanese population following the revocation of the ban on Christianity dating back to Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

This was one of the first Chinese books I bought yet it was also the most incomprehensible. Every few months I would pick it up, stumble through a few paragraphs and leave. Then yesterday I picked it up again and read seven pages straight through. I will finish the first story then see from there, but I'm really not feeling the parodical style and insipid wordplay - things I'm so impressed I can pick up in Chinese.

Beautifully translated, instantly compelling, so far looks suitable for all ages. I think I should get a copy for my nephews, helpfully nudge them towards learning Japanese.