(no subject)

A few days ago I decided to go for the paid account free trial, yesterday evening I got a note from Live Journal saying

2 months of paid account time have been added to your LiveJournal account. 

I have no idea how this came to be, if I owe it to one of my LiveJournal friends, thank you so much! The gift is loved. :)

Books, books and more books

As you know, by now, last Christmas I was given a Kindle, surfing around I found that not a few e-reader owners declared that after going digital they read more than earlier.

This prompted me to keep count of the books that I'm reading this year, registering also whether they are e-books or paper books, I'm curious to see how 2011 will compare to 2007, the last time I kept count.

For starters here are a few:

Peter Hamilton: Judas Unchained and  Pandora's Star ,  I had both books in paper, but they are doorstoppers, one is 1100 (very thin) pages and the other 1200, almost impossible to read out of the house, so I bought the e-books with some Christmas money.
I like Peter Hamilton since I read The Night's Dawn books. I like his prose, I like his characters and the universe he writes them in, some may find the books too long or lacking action in some parts, I enjoy the balance of some fast action and some more contemplative moments, he is one of the contemporary SF writers I like to return to.

David Kaplan, Alec Dubro : Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underground  e-book.
I have a professional interest in Chinese organized crime and I feel the need to know more about the Japanese counterpart given possible territorial overlap (for example in Taiwan or in the West) and the level of confusion I find over here in the general public ( including some that should know better). Yakuza is an interesting overview, tracing the history and evolution of Japanese organized crime, the ties with politics, the problems and attitudes of law-enforcing agencies,  the yakuza self-perception and the perception of the Japanese public. in my opinion the book could have been a bit better organized, sometimes I felt it jumped back and forth in time a bit too much, even though it's supposed to be arranged chronologically. All in all a good introduction, though.

Leo Ching : Becoming "Japanese": Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation e-book.
Here the sample somehow misled me into believing that the book was an analysis of identity formation through case studies, this is true of the latter part of the book (chapter 4 and 5) while most of the other three chapters debate definitions of and theories about identity and colonialism and their interaction. An interesting reading, once I realized I wasn't quite getting what I was expecting.

Stephen G. Haw: Marco Polo in China e-book .
I've held a life-long fascination both with Marco Polo and with Kublai Khan (to me definitely the most interesting emperor of the Yuan dinasty) and I found intriguing, in a way, the recurring attacks to the credibility of Marco and his travel account (in that they seemed often to be grasping at straws, in my opinion), so, this book, written by a sinologist who went for original Chinese sources and has a personal interest in the plants and wildlife of China (a strong interest also for Marco and one that has stumped more than a commenter when it came to identifying the plants and animal he mentions) was a must buy.
Honestly I would have liked the book to be longer, the writing flows well and Haw makes a lot of interesting points about omissions, habits and place names (some naysayers based their objectons to the Travels on modern place-names or the modern course of rivers).

One point where there is something lacking is in Haw assumptions on life in Venice in the Middle Ages, and the medieval Italian outlook on things (for instance he attributes Marco's open-mindedness to his'Mongolization' it might just as well be a characteristic of Marco himself I'd suggest a little more familarity with Middle Ages literature and history and the consideration that Venice was a mercantile city-state and a rather cosmopolitan one) .
While Haw argues very convincingly that the silver female headdress that Marco brought back from China was very likely the gift of a Mongolian wife, the reason why Marco doesn't mention any such cannot be that his marriage would have been a problem at a period when divorce was, at best, extremely hard to obtain   (p.4) since, given that the marriage could not possibly have been a Catholic one it could have been annulled, if needed (since it was lacking the sacrament), besides, who knows? The headdress could also have been a memento of a dead wife.
I like to think that, to Marco, some memories were just too precious to be shared with the world at large.