Recently I’ve really been enjoying two Canadian literary blogs, Seen Reading and the Quillblog. Seen Reading is about what one writers sees Canadians reading while the other is from a respected Canadian literary journal. All the books they discuss sound so great that I just want to go out and buy as many Canadian authors as possible. But Shanghai isn’t known for having much CanLit. Plus even if it did, books are expensive and I would just spend all my money on them I already have too many books on my shelves. So it got me looking at what’s there and making a book list for the next month or so. Here it is:
- Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctorine
- Ian McEwan’s Atonement
- John Updike’s Terrorist
- Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem
- Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys
You’ll notice that there’s only one China book there. I’ve kind of had my fill of China topics for now. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I deal with different aspects of the country everyday at my job or the fact that I spent most of my day writing an editorial for our company newsletter on the Olympics, but I need a break from it for awhile. Right now, I’m going to finish up some projects I’ve got in the pipeline (a book review of the memoir A Year Without Made in China for Lost Laowai and one on Jan Wong’s Beijing Confidential for That’s Beijing) then I am going to take a rest from China for a week or so. After that I should be ready to come back and tackle it again.
J.
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