Christopher > Recent Status Updates

Incredibly fascinating

My biggest complaint is how he translates vernacular. It doesn't sound convincing and I feel harms his ability to handle the issue appropriately. I think more discussion on the mechanics of the representation of vernacular vis-a-vis standard Chinese would have been superior rather than showing the representation through English representation.

Nicholas Biddle!!? No, it's James Biddle!

I've been rather confused by this book. The jumping around in time without any indication besides who is in the scene is bad enough, but sometimes it even seems like a single chapter is occupying two separate points in time simultaneously. I'm not completely ignorant of this history so I'm muddling through, but it certainly isn't a novel for a total novice to Cold War or recent Central American history.

Very heavy on theory and thus quite repetitious, since he repeats the same ideas multiple times to whittle it down to his precise meaning, but in all it's a very important thesis I'm eager to read.

Ugh, how I despise this man. Milarepa is probably the most hateful, intolerable snob in all of literature! At least he was cool when he was conjuring magic to kill his enemies. But now that he's found dharma, he just sits in his cave meditating and viciously insults anybody and everybody around him. He seems full of self hatred. Yet this seems to be his liberated form! Woe! This book makes Buddhism look horrible.

After a few months of reading a chapter a week, I spent a couple hours trying to pick out my next novel after 昆仑, but then it hit me: why don't I just finish Yang Family Generals? It is such a great story, after all, there's no need to have two (or four) books going at once when one is good enough! Let's see if I can finish these 100 chapters in a month. 77 to go.

Very fascinating ethnological information. First cousin marriages were the norm such that these days a guy needs his maternal uncle's permission to marry someone else! The spelling of some of the words in the actual text is insane, with words like Shyzzyyy, Hlihlishy, and Yyhlihli.

He says so, so much about pagination and formatting in the magazines of a hundred years ago, but I still don't know the first thing about the actual story! Wan's Green Peony study is infinitely superior in this regard.

This book should have been an article. The last 200 pages have pretty much simply repeated themselves over and over and over again.