Excellent, very readable account of the lives of the rural migrants in China’s cities. These are mostly fairly young girls, and work in factories manufacturing all those “Made in China” goods we buy for so little.

You get to experience the journeys they make from one world to another – from the poor, boring, rural countryside to the buzzing cities. Not that the cities are super-rich, at least by our standards, but most migrants manage to make money to send back home, the lifeline of the countryside and almost the sole driver of development – the Chinese government is mysteriously absent from their lives. Their journey is also one of values, from the Confucian ethics of the generations before them to the new capitalist ethos of the cities, where a new attitude towards money, elders and even sex is taking hold.

You get to appreciate the hard lives these girls lead – thirteen-hour days, seven days a week, crammed into dormitories, pay docked if you talk while working. And their drive to lift themselves up, to continue developing themselves through classes and self-study even after those thirteen-hour days. And their spunk – needed if you are to attract the attention of your bosses to be promoted ahead of hundreds of other nameless girls, to switch from job to job (almost the only way to get ahead, despite the advice of conservative parents who view any job as something to hold onto for life), to hold onto their own identities even in the confusing, calculative, corrupt world they live in. And corrupt it is: besides obvious things like kickbacks, there’s all the people who teach things they barely know, and the people who sell things even though they know it’s dangerous. Not that the girls don’t also engage in such things from time to time – it’s necessary to lie sometimes to get yourself a better job, although on the other hand some job interviews can be somewhat ingenuous: “Actually I don’t really know anything.”

Overall, a compelling portrait of the new economic and sociological realities in China. There is a bit about the author’s own family history (which frankly I found a bit boring) but most of it recounts the experiences of a few girls. Though their tales are probably out of the ordinary – they are among the few open enough to talk to the author, a journalist – they are the face of a new China coming to terms with the future.

Having read the (wonderful! recommended!) Rurouni Kenshin manga, I had to “finish it up” with this book. The story is by the original author, but written in prose style by someone else. The stories are both included in the anime, but are changed a little there. There’s the incident with Sanosuke’s artist friend, as well as the story of the kid with the Jules Verne book Voyage to the Moon World, from which the title of this book is taken.

Personally, I felt that the stories in this book aren’t as strong, nor are the supporting characters as well-developed, as in either the manga or the anime. Then again, there were some historical citations in the back of the book that I personally found useful in finding out more about the actual historical reality behind Rurouni Kenshin. So, it was worth it to me, but to a less historically-inclined person, I’d say stick to the manga, or the anime.

Inkdeath is the last book in the Inkheart trilogy (though there is room for a sequel). What can I say…no one who has read the first two books can possibly NOT read the third book. The third book does fall a bit short of the first two, though.

In the first two books, Meggie was mostly the heroine. In this book, though, a lot of the characters undergo a cranial lobotomy or something. Meggie can only work her reading magic a couple of times and spends the rest of the time heart-sick. Her mother Resa does a little bit more but she seems desperate all the time rather than brave. Mo really becomes the hero of this story, morphing into the legendary Bluejay. Dustfinger, back from the dead, is now fearless. You get the sense that Cornelia Funk fell in love with the latter two characters and made them the heroes. Everyone else – even the Black Prince – falls into the shade. And it seems that she’s taken Resa’s words to heart – that the Inkworld is a world for men – and so Meggie and her mother pale a little, while Mo comes to the forefront.

The plot was a rollicking one, but there were numerous little detours that, instead of weaving into the main plot, wrapped themselves up neatly and didn’t seem to have much consequence, such as Mortola’s reappearance.

But, to be fair, anyone who read the first two books HAS to read this one. It’s a fairly good conclusion. And I did enjoy it while I read, it’s just that afterwards you’re like “What just happened to all those characters?” And I’ve always liked Mo’s character so I didn’t mind him getting a bit more screen time.

I can’t really say why I picked up this little book. It’s not really my sort of thing. It’s an account of Herbert Kohl’s venture into the world of Chinese painting via a small school in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and his ruminations as he connects the lessons learned among the Chinese children to his own life and career, particularly the art of teaching and the art of aging.

I found the author’s journey into Chinese art fascinating as, like him, I have always been fascinated by Chinese landscape paintings. It’s a bit repetitive in some places but somehow I didn’t really mind. I guess it’s kinda like listening to your grandfather reminisce, and I don’t mean that in a bad way.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher recounts a real-life murder mystery that gripped Victorian England. A four-year-old boy missing from his bed, found flung into the cesspool beneath the outdoor water closet. The case gripped the public imagination as the murderer was not found for years, despite the suspicions of Detective Whicher, which fell firmly on one member of the family. Without proof, though, he could not press charges and was derided by the public, partly for being a bit too invasive in his investigations and partly for not being able to bring closure to a titillated public.

Kate Summerscale shows how this case lent many elements to the burgeoning field of detective fiction – Edgar Allan Poe had already introduced Dupin, Sherlock Holmes was several years into the future. The idea of the contained mystery, where all the clues and suspects are to be found within a single house, can be traced back to the case. The fallible detective may also be found here, and in some ways the case may have engendered the infallible detective – the one the public wished for. At the same time, using letters that have emerged long past Whicher’s time, she shows pretty convincingly who the murderer or murderers must have been.

This isn’t really a book where you can “solve along with the detective” – an impression I got from the blurb. I wouldn’t call it a really fantastic book. At the same time I must admit that I really, really wanted to know who the culprit(s) was/were – so Summerscale did a good job there.

Interesting little book (<100 pages) talking about a little-known episode in Japan's history: when Japan gave up guns and reverted to (mainly) swords.

Guns were introduced to Japan early on with the arrival of the first Europeans in 1543. And yet in 1854 when Cmdr Perry “opened up Japan” in his “black ships”, it seemed like nobody knew much about them. In fact, between those years, Japan had taken up the gun, improved it vastly (initially swordsmen triumphed over gunners because guns were susceptible to wet weather and took a long time to prime and reload), and then gave up on them. This book seeks to find out why.

• Samurai hated guns and wouldn’t have been caught dead carrying one. There was no bravery in it, no chance for individual glory and required little skill – they, highly-trained swordsmen, could be killed by a farmer wielding a matchlock. And their opinion counted, because they accounted for 10% of the population.
• Geopolitical reasons: Japan was under no territorial threat, and hadn’t any designs on other countries – they knew they couldn’t conquer China, and everyone else knew they couldn’t conquer them.
• Symbolic value of swords: the Japanese loved swords, their swords were the best in the world, and were the only embodiment of honour they could wear. To wear a sword meant you had a surname and were one of the upper classes. In fact, fighting swords doubled as works of art.
• Part of a general reaction to outside ideas, including Christianity.
• Aesthetic reasons: handling a gun was ungraceful, you had to actually kneel with your legs apart (shock and horror) and unergonomic.

In fact I think reason number 2 is by far the most important reason. If other people had been continually attacking the Japanese with guns, they would’ve been forced to continue developing their skill in them. As it was, they didn’t until the arrival of Perry, when they threw themselves wholeheartedly into military technology and general Westernisation and modernisation with the Meiji era.

This book was a good little read – I had no idea all this had happened. Also Perrin has a wry touch of humour. Sample funny bit:

26. “That same year [1584], the two leading generals in Japan met with their armies at a place called Komaki. Both had the lessons of Nagashino very clearly in mind, and both had a high proportion of gunners among their troops. The result was an impasse. Not only were there no introductions and no individual heroics, neither general would allow his cavalry to attack at all against the other’s guns. Instead, both armies dug trenches, settled in, and waited, firing an occasional volley or blowing up a few of the enemy with a land mine to pass the time. In some ways it was like a scene from World War I, three and a half centuries ahead of schedule. In the end the two commanders made an alliance, and went off to fight other armies that were less constricted by their own technology.”

Also, there is some testimony as to just how good Japanese swordsmen could be:

73 ”...he recalled an incident a few years earlier in which two samurai had attacked twelve fully armed British dragoons in Kyoto (they were the embassy guard), and had disabled nine of them with spectacular swordplay, not getting a single bullet wound themselves.”

Sounds like Rurouni Kenshin!

This book is basically a history of Nintendo during the presidency of Hiroshi Yamauchi, when it dramatically expanded from a manufacturer of playing cards into video games (via simple electronic games). Basically a business book, it details the tactics used by Nintendo and its competitors in their quest to control the video game world after the collapse of Atari and others.

Even if you don’t appreciate Nintendo’s strong-arm tactics (which it could well afford as it was the dominant player after Atari’s demise) you have to agree that they were good at what they did. They made wise and careful business decisions and didn’t accept stupid industry rules just because they were “rules”. Most importantly, they made great hires and let them create great things, in both hardware and software (the combination of which made Nintendo unbeatable for a long while).

Some caveats about the book. First of all, after a few introductory chapters in Japan, it moves almost exclusively to Nintendo of America and its fights, legal and otherwise, against Atari, Sega, etc. There’s a little bit at the end, almost an afterthought, about Nintendo of Europe. I would’ve wanted to find out more about the development of the actual game consoles and Nintendo’s games, but once past the first few chapters they seem to spring fully-formed out of Nintendo in Japan, to be imported and distributed as NOA sees fit.

Second, this version of the book is hopelessly outdated. It published in 1993 and it’s still speculating about Nintendo’s own computer network (the internet was rapidly growing by then and moved into the mainstream ~1994, at least by my reckoning). Also, it speculates about Minoru Arakawa, head of Nintendo of America, taking over the presidency of his father-in-law, Hiroshi Yamauchi. In reality, both retired in 2002, with Yamauchi handing over to Satoru Iwata, the first Nintendo president not related to the Yamauchi family by blood or marriage – and in fact, who only came into Nintendo in 2000. And, of course, it doesn’t cover the recent resurgence of Nintendo with the Wii and DS.

There is an updated edition of the book, called Game Over: Press Start to Continue with new chapters. I recommend looking for that – apparently it’s more tightly written (this edition tends to repeat information, scatter it about the place and drone a bit) and of course it brings all the Nintendo story up to date. Good luck finding it though – copies routinely go for $100 and my entire library network doesn’t have a single copy.

This fascinating book takes us into a world that most of us will never be privileged – or rather under-privileged enough to see – the housing projects of Chicago’s South Side, where gangs effectively rule, and drugs and violence are endemic. As a new grad student in sociology, Sudhir Venkatesh naively entered the projects to conduct a survey, and found himself held captive by a gang overnight. Fortuitously, though, he met J.T., the gang leader, who had a college education and recognised Sudhir as a source of external validation about his own life, which most others would condemn. J.T. opened up the community to Sudhir – and lets us peek as well into the appalling lives of the project’s residents. We get to see why poverty remains the entrenched way of life – you can’t help but feel that the odds are completely stacked against these people as they struggle to survive from day to day. Recommended as an eye-opener.

In 2005, 110 people all won at the Powerball lottery – many times more than the usual number. Fraud was of course immediately suspected. But the real cause of this hit to the lottery? The “lucky numbers” on a fortune cookie slip, distributed to many in Chinese restaurants across the country, and taken advantage of by the 110.

This is the inspiration for Jennifer Lee’s book on American Chinese food – which has as much influence from America as it has from China. She explores the many paths starting from fortune cookies – who was General Tso? Why do Jews like Chinese food so much? How much did your waiter pay for the privilege of serving you? (Tens of thousands of dollars, if they came through human smuggling.) It turns out that the history of Chinese food in America is intimately tied to the history of Chinese immigration and assimilation into America. Which all makes for an interesting history not just of food but also of culture.

Recommended, particularly the first half – the second half gets bogged down a bit in a quixotic quest to find the greatest Chinese restaurant in the world – there is a winner, but very few people would really care. American Chinese food, unlike in China, isn’t about being good – it’s about being familiar, being comforting, being, paradoxically, home.

The sequel to Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart, this book continues the tale of the “Inkworld”. Dustfinger finally gets his wish to return to Inkworld, but loses Farid. Having heard so much about the Inkworld, Meggie too begins to long for the world, and finds a way to let Farid and herself in.

Having lost one of their prey, Mortola and Basta go to Meggie’s Aunt Elinor’s home, seeking vengeance on Silvertongue for killing Capricorn. With the power of a man even more silver-tongued than Mo, the mysterious but juvenile Orpheus, they too enter the Inkworld.

Thus begins a complicated story set in the Inkworld, where things have gone very differently from the way its author Fenoglio intended. It’s up to Meggie’s silver voice and Fenoglio’s magic words to turn things around – but somehow things never go quite the way you plan.

Excellent sequel and I am already looking forward to the third and last book, Inkdeath.