I am so cranky today. /o\

This will be a joke post in some way, in the sense that it is less of a serious review post and more of a "Li reviews the books she's read in the past eight weeks as a break from packing before packing them away for the summer and is also in a foul mood, so everything is going to be flavoured with cranky" post.

Now that we've got that out of the way!

Sons of the Yellow Emperor, by Lynn Pan.

Good history of the Chinese diaspora - slightly depressing in the sense that I could see some of the behavioural patterns of the Chinese immigrant Pan ascribes to the group (and she says this as a member of the group herself) asserting themselves in the kind of background I come from, and interesting in the number of personalities she covered who are kind of common currency to a wider Chinese diaspora. It made me feel connected to an entire overseas community, which is cool! Also discussed racial laws in the US. However, the book was written in the pre-1997 return of Hong Kong to China, so the ending was all "omg what will this mean??" which wasn't as... relevant now, obviously.

Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean.

I liked Tina! I didn't like Janet, which I think is worrying - I found her kind of irritable and judgemental. (There's this part in the book which is like, "Nick knelt down in front of her and then they kissed." and you can just feel Janet being like, "And then we kissed. :|" which, don't get me wrong, I appreciate :| characters (Tina!!!), but everyone seemed to take Janet perfectly seriously. ???) I didn't enjoy the magic either because... I don't know, I didn't like the way Pamela Dean scaled her book in terms of time, I thought it was weirdly-paced in parts. Also (this is a somewhat selfish critcism) I felt that the book didn't reflect my experience of college, in the sense that it kept being recommended to me as THE ultimate college story, but I was like, "... really?" in the sense that my own experience of college was way more intense, uh.

A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin.

I don't think I'm going to be searching out the rest of this series any time soon. Also, I liked the Daenerys chapters the best. SHE RULES.

Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, by Margaret Waters.

There are many ways to write very short introductions, and we must (for whatever reason) do it chronologically. So while this was good in terms of providing one with a historical background on (specifically British) feminism (Mary Wollstonecraft!!! ♥), I didn't find it quite as stirring when it came to talk about issues which contemporary feminism's concerned with - "Feminists across the world" (i.e. intersectional third-wave feminism) get relegated to a last, closing chapter. What the fuck? Also, paging through the pages which I tabbed in the (optimistic! optimistic!) hope of reviewing properly, it occurs to me that the good bits I liked were basically awesome quotes by awesome women, and the bad bits were disparaging remarks the author'd made about 1) "black feminist bell hooks" (arguing that the white women Betty Friedan wrote about were privileged - which is true - even if they were still subject to oppression anyway, which is the point Friedan (and the writer) was trying to make, anyway it could have been made more sensitively), 2) radical feminism ("melodrama masquerading as feminism") on consenusal sex, and 3) modern feminism "all prior feminisms have had an air of transgression about it" - i.e. by educating people about feminism instead of leaving them to discover it, we're robbing them of the delight of discovery and shoving it down their throats.

a;fjl;fj;ldsjf anyway the more I think about it, the more cranky I am getting. DON'T READ THIS BOOK. SOMEONE WRITE A BETTER INTRODUCTION.

Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter.

This was slightly better. The main bugbear I had with it was the fact that - well, okay, to explain this properly I must say that I once had a conversation with a South African postgraduate who said that it annoyed him that many of his colleagues who had undergone an undergraduate education at Oxford were in the habit of 'dissecting the question' (i.e. pulling apart an essay question and deconstructing each single key term), which he thought was disingenuous and had the air of a party trick.

AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THE AUTHOR DID HERE. He was like, "what does 'modern' mean?" and "what does 'China' mean?" and it was irritating enough that I noticed - this book has chapters entitled, "Is China's economy modern?" and "Is China's culture modern?" and "Is China's society modern?" and for each of them he came up with a different definition of modern, what the fuck. I think they were interesting questions he addressed, but what he was doing was also incredibly obvious.

... I am still really cranky and I still have many things to pack. /o\

Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, by Katharine Quarmby | Tipping The Velvet, by Sarah Waters | Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro | The Lantern Bearers, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Silver Branch, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli | Brick Lane, by Monica Ali | The Savage Detectives, by Robert Bolano | Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell | Cat On A Hot-Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams | Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson | The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle | To Live, by Yu Hua | Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby