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Just read this today:



It was interesting to see how many elements of church design are in fact ways of working around limitations of building materials prior to the invention of steel manufacturing...

Anyway, I've now read 1,140 pages this weekend.

Izzy Willy-Nilly, by Cynthia Voigt

Pre-reading for my tweenaged daughter, whose reading level exceeds her emotional maturity by about six years. It's...an interesting read, a sort of 1980's YA study in ableism.

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

I'm reading Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, and it's one of my favourite books ever!

Bushido: The Soul of Japan, by Inazo Nitobe

Just read this today (It was just published on 3 May 2016, btw, so this is definitely the most recent scholarly work on the topic):




Frank Dikötter is somewhat polemical in some parts of his presentation, but I previously read the work Tombstone by Yang Jisheng covering the Great Leap Forward, and he and Dikötter describe almost identical mechanisms within the Chinese Communist Party and the disastrous consequences of them. So all in all, I would say it is a fair treatment of the subject despite the fact that Dikötter obviously has nothing but contempt for Mao (and I really can't blame him...)

The book also provides a good overview of the internal power struggles between the key players in the Chinese Communist Party: Mao Zedong himself, Mao's wife Jiang Qing (and her infamous Gang of Four), Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao... and the man who finally stopped the madness: Deng Xiaoping.

Anyway... The Cultural Revolution was nowhere as lethal as The Great Leap Forward (the latter killed at least 36 million people according to Yang Jisheng, and at least 45 million according to Dikötter, surpassing any other genocide in history). In comparison, Dikötter estimates that 1.5 - 2 million died during the Cultural Revolution.

However, the Cultural Revolution (and the Red Guards in particular) did almost incomprehensible damage to the history and culture of China. For instance, it basically wiped out the entire medical profession in large areas of China, because Mao had decided that formal education was unnecessary and contrary to communist ideology. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people then died from various illnesses and diseases.

Oh... and to summarize the book in a single line:

Communism is a disaster and Mao Zedong was a complete as*hole.

The Girl With All The Gifts, by M.R. Carey

Think of it as a sort of literary prequel to 'I Am Legend'...

To The Nines

Janet Evanovich

^^What are those like? I've never heard of them.

I'm reading Fire and Hemlock [by Diana Wynne Jones] for possibly the tenth or eleventh time, and it's one of my favourite books ever!

Read this today:



I was slightly disappointed... Not with the book, but by Confucianism itself... It comes across as little more than an exercise in "good manners". It is understandable that such restraints on behaviour might have been sorely needed in the chaotic Warring States Period in China... But as a philosophy Confucianism seems overly shallow compared to Buddhism (which it has also competed with throughout the imperial history of China). The book is thankfully rather short, though (about 200 pages), so it doesn't try to "sell" Confucianism as more than it actually is...

Oh, and even though the author tries to rehabilitate Confucianism somewhat, it is still - in my opinion - a deeply misogynistic philosophy. It may not have been responsible for the most egregious practices like foot-binding, but there is certainly not much to be found in support of gender equality within Confucianism...