Christopher > Recent Status Updates

It's possibly the most fascinating book I've ever opened. A century ago in India, people often killed their own family members as a way of getting back at their enemies, a phenomenon called punitive self-harm. If you were going to be arrested for failing to pay taxes, you'd put your mother in a wooden box and set it on fire; fail to pay back a loan, the lender's daughter may be killed at your doorstep. So intriguing.

An engaging story, told from the perspective of a tiger, from his early days free in the jungle where he imagined himself king (despite being aware of his weakness against other big cats, though why should cognitive dissonance be a purely human trait?), to his discovery of humans and their discovery of him. Now he's captured, in training to perform for a circus, learning his role and succumbing to Stockholm syndrome.

Perhaps most fascinating is the prevalence of allusions to Christian mythology. The skill of the translator is truly superb, feeling no less erudite and at times yet smoother even than Tolkien's writing. I've contacted a Nigerian publishing house and desperately desire to obtain more works by both Wole and Fagunwa, hopefully I shall succeed in scratching this itch without traveling to Africa (I would for love of lit)

This is truly phenomenal. I feel like I'm reading the African Tolkien.

I want to marry the author.

If that doesn't tell you how great this book is, nothing will.

The second I saw the Cike, I knew she meant 刺客 and that they would be assassins.

This book may have seemed so imaginative, so grand, had I never learned Chinese. Now it just feels like a Chinese version of Harry Potter, not that that's a bad thing.

It's fun trying to figure out which Chinese characters these words are meant to represent. Keju, for instance, is probably 可举, or able to rise, which makes sense considering it is the test that allows people to rise through the imperial system.

Not as much debunking as I would have appreciated. Still an interesting look at the spirit of history.

19th century Americans look more hopelessly corrupted by their racism that even corrupt nations around the globe today seem almost quaint by comparison.

The first half of this chapter was so dull, didn't learn much. But now that we're on the complements, I'm finally back to something I have never understood well enough.

It's like something just clicked, and now all of a sudden I can read 10 pages straight through with maybe 85% comprehension, after two weeks of three or four pages at a time, read twice with 60% comprehension.

Exceptional

I can definitely feel the Chinese Dream in this. She imagines a very similar future as what I conjure before my own mind's eye when I hear the dystopian take on China's domestic situation by hostile newspapers. I see the possibility for revolutionary change that could make life finally worth living. I don't see it being realized, but I can still imagine. She has put those imaginings to words in the form of Mars.

This is my kind of book. True crime about book theft. A fascinating event in literary fandom history that few have heard of before (and still haven't, judging by the 66 ratings on this).