Christopher > Recent Status Updates

I just realized this is the first book in the omnibus. I just started reading, didn't imagine there's be something before the first book.

I don't think I've ever come out of reading a chapter of a book to find myself possessed of such a total respect for the profundity of an author's mode of thought, not before this book, at least. Sachi Schmidt-Hori puts the rest of academia to shame. 佩服！佩服！

I gave a list of nine books for my friend to pick one out for me to read. This was the last one I expected he'd choose. But it's a fairly quick read, hopefully I'll be done in a month, despite the presence of some hanzi neither of us have ever seen before.

This book is convincing me I was right to hold Ming-Qing vernacular novels in high regard. I own over a dozen, now it's time to read more of them!

My copy is 466 pages, not 360.

Why is the most interesting sounding book she discusses the one I can't find anywhere?!? 群英杰. Both 万花楼 and 争春园 look interesting and are easy to find, but 群英杰 is the one I want.

"One form of skillful means to curb male believers’ sexual desire, depicted in ancient Indian Buddhist texts, is exposure to the sight of female bodies decaying in a graveyard"

"Tasked with birthing the country of Japan, the male kami Izanagi proposes to his wife Izanami, “I am thinking of thrusting the part of my body that protrudes into the part of your body that is open to fi ll it up so we can birth lands. What do you think?”"

Why does everything play out so nicely? There just happens to be a discovery of a 32 year old corpse belonging presumably to the suspect's lost brother right when the detective happens to be in Hokkaido? I'm not a reader of mystery novels, I don't know how heavily others rely on such chance events, but I'm not sure I'm able to put up with this kind of thing.

If I finish it I'll probably give it a one star. If the author hadn't lied at the start and proclaimed himself neutral, then I'd be more generous. But to pretend you're neutral and then come out with a nonstop torrent of condemnation against one side and nothing but praise for the other reveals a lack of self awareness that should lead anybody to question their ability to handle this issue.

Too much of the book is simply defining the important terms used by the author in question. I want more. It's too all-over-the-place and could be laid out better.

One positive is the precipitous decline in the use of Western classical references.

Very interesting book. I'm watching The Advisors Alliance, a drama about Sima Yi, so it'll be especially interesting to get insight into where they changed things (which they did quite liberally I can tell even before starting this book) and the background, which I presume most watchers are expected to already know intimately.

Love this book.

The sense that the author might be a little too pro-America for my liking hasn't recurred since the first chapter or two. I'm still not really enjoying the personal sections, which to my mind haven't added anything to the narrative (but probably justified the expense of all these excursions) beyond unnecessary pages, but it's been easier to bear and less prevalent for the last few dozen pages.

This chapter, six, is proving to be a bit more interesting than the last, but I am still not very interested in how self-help books and random people describe what playing hutu 糊涂 means to them.

So far this is a must read. Not much new here for me, but it might be so for others. The history of the fascination with the occult of many luminaries of science has long been known to me, which has probably contributed to my skepticism of the received tradition more broadly when it posits a disenchantment stemming precisely from these individuals.