Category: Books
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On “Death of a Red Heroine” by Qiu Xiaolong
I mistook this novel for a murder mystery. It is that, nominally: Chief Inspector Chen Cao and Detective Yu of the Shanghai Police Bureau spend their time investigating the murder of Guan Hongying, a national model worker found dead in an obscure county canal. Chen and Yu dig for clues, interview witnesses, mull over theories about what…
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Rapid-Fire Thoughts: 2018 Read Harder Challenge Update
The Book Riot Read Harder Challenge continues. Since my last reading challenge update, I’ve finished: #2: A book of true crime I came to this title cold (pun unintended but appreciated). The most I knew about the book was that (1) it dealt with a murder of some kind and (2) it’s indisputably Capote’s magnum…
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Postscript: Understanding Comics
Towards the end of January, the 99% Invisible podcast ran an episode with eminent comics creator and scholar Scott McCloud about the design features of comics. It’s a great episode that provides a good thumbnail sketch of some of comics’ most important formal elements. I first read comics in grocery checkout lines. My grandmother used to…
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Read Harder #4: Dead Balagtas Vol. 1: Mga Sayaw ng Dagat at Lupa
It’s easy to feel divorced from history. As a kid, I saw all my history lessons at a remove: upheavals, struggle, significance occupied a different plane of existence, and they had no place in my humdrum life, as I had no place in theirs. An ignorant belief to have harbored, for sure, and one that…
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Read Harder #12: Wishful Drinking
#12: A celebrity memoir – Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher Carrie Fisher gives readers a glimpse at the woman behind the famous Princess Leia. She mentions several times that the book takes, in part, from her show of the same name, and the writing proves it: Fisher takes a conversational — sometimes bordering on sloppy, but always…
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Read Harder 2018
I decided to try and read more last year, and 2017 ended with a respectable 36 books tallied. Not bad for a year spent in the intellectual doldrums. (That isn’t drama, either; the worst and longest of my depressive episodes had me vegetating on the couch, staring blankly as episodes played on loop on the…
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