Lone Signal

Category: Books

  • June 2017: A Read Harder Challenge Update

    It’s been a few months! I just wanted to do a quick check-in, since I’ve been making some (admittedly slow) progress but not always with the titles I’d planned to read. Finished tasks have been crossed out, and the titles that were actually read are bolded and in italics. Over the next few weeks, I’ll…

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    Kate

  • Notes from “The Guns of August”

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    Here’s my first book for this year’s Read Harder Challenge! I first started reading The Guns of August two years ago. “Started,” because work quickly caught up with me, leading to a slow abandonment of the book around the halfway point. That was a shame, since this is–despite the heft and subject matter–an eminently readable book. Barbara…

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    Kate

  • 2017 Read Harder Challenge

    I read around 30 books last year, many of them during the later months when work became less hectic. The final 2016 list is front-loaded with a lot of science fiction before turning into a pretty scattershot collection of titles. Since I am one of those corny cheeseballs who theme their new years, I intend…

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    Kate

  • What’s the word?

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    From Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, which I also mentioned over here and which I’m still reading: “Peoples of color” sounded awkward if translated literally, so I used the standard Chinese term for minorities: shaoshu minzu. Of course, that was just as odd in English: “small-number ethnic groups.” Perhaps somewhere in the world there was a language that handled this issue…

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    Kate

  • On law, or how we view it

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    I’ve been reading Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, a nonfiction work that’s part-memoir, part-journalism, part-travel writing about Hessler’s years in China. One of the more intriguing sections I’ve recently finished dealt with the government’s crackdown on Falun Gong, a health system-cum-religion that gained millions of believers in the 1990s. Many of these adherents had a penchant for staging peaceful…

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    Kate

  • On Enid Blyton, David Foster Wallace, and awareness as ethics

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    I had the pleasure of stumbling upon an article on morality in Enid Blyton’s work (of all things) from Aeon this week. Nakul Krishna looks into the ethical life as demonstrated by the schoolgirls of Blyton’s Malory Towers and comes out with a quote from Iris Murdoch: ‘Love,’ Murdoch wrote in an essay called ‘The Sublime…

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    Kate