Tag: Beijing

Books

Book 929: Portrait of a Thief – Grace D. Li

Geoff W

Book cover of "Portrait of a Thief" with Amazon Affiliate linkI’m punching myself for not reading this book earlier AND for goofing off (aka knitting and Minecrafting) while reading it instead of blazing through it as it deserved. I’ve been sitting on this since November of LAST YEAR when someone in marketing at the publisher reached out with it.* I forced myself to wait until late March/early April to read it because I had a feeling I would really enjoy it and that barely covers my enthusiasm for it.

The premise was fascinating to me even if I was a bit wary of the Boston setting (I have bad experience with books being set where I live/have lived), but international art theft by college students, critiques on colonialism, BIPOC author, and characters, discussion of diaspora, ummm obviously I was going to say yes to it. I found out while reading the acknowledgments, that this has already been optioned by Netflix and I cannot tell you how much I’m ready for that!

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ARC, Books

Book 462: The Courtesan – Alexandra Curry

Geoff W

curry-alexandra-the-courtesanWhen Dutton reached out to me about a copy* of this book for its new paperback release I jumped at it because of my trip to China this summer! What I didn’t realize was that it was predominantly set in two of the cities I visited: Suzhou and Beijing! It was really neat to read through the fictionalized life of Sai Jinhua and actually feel like I know what and where she was talking about for the post part!

This is a debut novel that I probably would not have read just because I don’t read too many, but with my trip to China, the cover and having someone reach out to me about it, I figured I would give it a chance and I’m glad I did. Add in that the book also featured a subplot line about the one non-English classic from Asia I chose for my Classics Club list: Dream of the Red Chamber and it was well worth the read.

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Random

北京歡迎你 | Běijīng huānyíng nǐ | Welcome to Beijing

Geoff W

2016 03-24 Freaking Out About ChinaI have no idea if the characters in the title will post or not, but I wanted to do a similar post to last year, Bienvenidos a Madrid! I failed miserably at learning any Mandarin, but what I did find out is that even if people speak different dialects they can still read the formal written characters. How interesting? I guess it shouldn’t be that weird, but that’s about as far as I got in the book.

By the time this posts, we will have been in Beijing for a few days after flying from Boston! I hope the 15 hour total flying time (with a short layover in Chicago) wasn’t as long as I thought! And I also hope we’ve adjusted to the 12 hour time difference by now!

I think I’m most looking forward to the three-day river cruise down the Yangtze later this week where we’ll get to relax a bit on the boat. There are some excursions planned where we’ll go ashore to see a few villages and get an up-close view of the Three Gorges (Wikipedia link). After that we’re off on the high-speed train (SAY WHAT!?) to Suzhou where we’ll spend a few days. I’ll have another post next week that tells you about Week two!