Sharon > Recent Status Updates

_Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2_ is out soon. Enter to win a galley: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/en...

I hope I have never been these kinds of tourist.

Also, Ginny is confirmed to be 17 and no one tells her that the drinking age isn't 21 anyway? Does it take away the sense of "ooh, forbidden" if the reader knows (and thus the fact is suppressed)? Guess I should stop picking at things and, ahem, stop thinking--now I get how Ginny has come this far.

I have Things to Say (she muttered darkly) about Ginny's apparent inability to ask simple questions, but I'll wait. Temporarily free on Kindle, and started while unable to chip away at the printed book I mean to finish and return.

Almost completely uncritical in its top-down approach, and reads like a high-school textbook. Useful despite that (and despite a couple of English usage errors in the translation) for its density of information. Sumptuary laws are one thing, but I had not known that Joseon laws restricted by individual status how many dishes could be served at a time.

Pausing this to read SENRID for backstory and to finish printed books that need to be returned.

My goodness (she said mildly). I pegged about two-thirds of the reveal, but not that part. Nice.

I'm reading the free web version slowly and estimating %completion by # chapters. Two down....

Refreshing to read a study of the Joseon-era middle classes, one that not only asserts the futility of expecting other cultures' specific developments to be mirrored here but isn't afraid to draw some comparisons to Tokugawa Japan.

Interesting trajectory. As the author noted when re-releasing this as an e-text, it's not the most stunningly well-written story, but it's certainly very readable. I like Althea herself quite a bit.

Yay. YAY.

This is the way epic fantasy ought to be done. (At least some of the time.)

I'd like to return to this, but it needs to return to the public library!

A day with trains to go places means a day with reading. Yay. 39% is right around where I paused when the hardcover was too much for my wrists, nearly two years ago.

So happy to be moving forwards in this book again.

My recent (and somewhat temporary) inability to read anything aside, I'm paused partway through Sophy's first person recounting of her family's recent history and pondering that familiar question: who gets to tell which stories? Sophy's mother is Cambodian, her father Cambodian Chinese; though W+T is fiction, some authenticity is intended. Gish Jen is ABC.

I cave! Re-purchased the Kindle version so that I can read it on my phone (instead of the lustreless temporarily free books I've been reading thus).

Who knows what page I'm on of 424, a total I've only just noticed. The copy I'm reading has fewer total pages. A little past halfway, anyhow!