Book: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (PB released March 2006)





I think what I enjoyed most about this book is the level of detail and research that went into it. While being a good story, it also provides (what I hope is) a fairly accurate picture of Chinese women's lives at that point in time. The author includes poems and songs and things that reflect how the women talked to each other. Part of the story's focus is nu shu or "women's secret writing," and entirely seperate written language that developed in a particular region of China. Family and friends used it to write letters when they were seperated, as most women, it would seem, were always "married out" to a different town than the one she grew up in.

I think I was surprised that the women had such complex social structures, given how "worthless" they were considered to be...the point of a woman was to have a son. But they did have very complex rituals and social groups and traditions that almost amounted to things like bridesmaids and such. It's also interesting just how ingrained the culture was into these women. It makes me wonder a bit about cultures where roles and traditions are so well defined that you don't have to think about much of anything. You just know what you're place is and how you should related to other people. Does that make it easier for everyone to get along, or harder for people to be happy?

One that seemed odd about the language of the book was that even though the main characters are followed from about age 6 until their 40's and beyond, the style of their speak doesn't seem to change much. Granted, the narrator is about 80, but it's hard to understand just how young the girls are at the beginning because of the way they talk.

The passages about foot binding where just plain disturbing. Not disturbing bad, I guess, but just unimaginable. I couldn't help googling it after I read that part.

In the end, it's another story-of-women's-relationships-hardships-etc. It'll will be a big book club book. But it's done pretty well with lots of back-up for what goes on (the research, etc). Since I'm a total history dork, I like the fact that I can feel like I'm getting an accurate glimpse of what the life was like. The paperback versiion also includes a narrative about the author's time in China doing research for the book, which was pretty interesting.

Book: Brief History of the Dead (released 02/14/06)





First I will say that several people who like fiction, have read way more fiction than I have and probably have better taste in ficion than I do (being as in general I just don't enjoy it all that much...) think that this is a really excellent book. I will take it to mean that it's well written, even though I personally found some of the decriptive details overbearing and distracting near the end of the book. In the beginning they seemed like vivid and interesting pictures, near the end it got old. However, as I said, I may not be the best judge of all that.

I did think that this was a very interesting perspective on something that everyone wonders about: what happens after you die? This author took inspiration that he probably got from the description of what an particular civilization thought to be the various travels of the dead (as noted in the beginning of the book) and put it into a specific context that is very relatable to the modern world. After a person dies, they appear in a city of the dead, and remain there until the last person on earth who remembers them also dies, and the cycle continues. In the city, the dead are reunited with people they knew when they were alive, and live normal lives, as if they were still on earth.

Meanwhile, on earth, a disaster of a grand scale is befalling mankind. I don't think the author specifically states a time frame for this book, but I will say that it's somewhere between 50 and 100 years in the future. Entire new security forces roam the streets just to watch for terrorists. Alarm systems warning of attack are already so old hat that people ignore them unless they continue to sound after several minutes. At any rate, as terrible things happen down below, the inhabitants of the city being to see rapid changes, and have only the overwhelmed newly dead to tell them what's going on.

One thing in particular that I thought was interesting was a short discussion on just how many people you meet in your life, even just briefly. At one point, one of the dead characters tries to count up how many people he was acquainted with when he was alive, and even when he hits the tens of thousands keeps remembering additional little pockets of people like all the mail carriers, or the extendend families of his siblings-in-law, or people he had a passing familiarity with at the first gym he had joined.

For a novel, this is a quick read. I was drawn in enough to want to know the ending and read it in one day, though I can say that I was definately more involved in the earth story line than the one in the city, even though I think the city plot and little side narrations were more intereseting in some ways. I was more interested in knowing the ending than following the story because I started skimming near the end, as I sometimes do. It's not heavy, but I think it's a fairly intelligent treatment of one author's idea of what might happen to our souls after they are done with our bodies.

I think it will have a slow beginning nationally, but look for it to pick up steam. I'm not sure its blatently emotional enough to work as a book club title (it doesn't explore a characters inner journey and eventual life renewal or any of that stuff), but I do hope it finds a niche among readers for just that reason: it's a fresh story line.