Christopher > Recent Status Updates

I would have liked this a lot more when I was younger. The encyclopedic discussing of theater would have been fascinating when European civilization was a great interest. Now I would rather enjoy a story, I read more than enough nonfiction.

I feel like it would take two or three additional readings to really begin to understand this text. So, so many Yi names that are very confusing on a first read. I read 兹的主地 twice to try to understand what I'd read. 合侯赛变, though, was an easier read, a wonderful tale of tribal origins as two feuding families engage in various transformations in an attempt to undermine the other before ultimately making peace.

Gotta find more books on Dali and the Bai people before I go there in a few weeks. This one is okay but I feel like the very local nature of 神奇的白族本主 is more relevant to my current needs.

Bizarre. Quite different from any other novel I've read, and it makes for a supremely compelling story.

Lots of unusual place names, but only a handful of Yi words I really have to look up. 兹 refers to nobles, 倮 refers to commoners.

特别有趣的。当我去云南冒险的时候，大概会见到彝族人，尤其地在巍山彝族回族自治县。可是云南的彝族和四川凉山的彝族不一样，而这首诗是凉山彝族创作出来的。

I need to find a Yunnan Yi-specific text for my travels there later this year. This is not quite as enchanting or as deep as a heroic epic like Hanvueng, but it's still an immensely enjoyable cosmogony.

So much Tibetan in a typical paragraph that it often feels pointless to read without having a background in that language.

It started out relatively strong, but weaknesses are creeping in. I'm greatly put off by his tendency to describe extreme individual cases as if they were the rule without attempting to provide any background cultural logic to explain how they came to be seen as proper.

Surprisingly not too inscrutable for a first time reader on Laos. Doubtless I would be totally lost if not for the dozens of books I've read on Buddhism and folk religion, though.