What are you reading in 2024?
- Thread starter Nellisir
- Start date
I finished the first book in the trilogy and am now starting the second, Twilight of the Gods II: Groa's Other Eye by Dennis Schmidt. It's pulp sword and sorcery with a Norse flair, and it does what it sets out to do: be a cool, action-packed pulp story with cool characters. I'm enjoying the ride thus far.
Johnathan
Johnathan
Retros_x
Adventurer
Thanks for the recommendation, because I definitely dig that. I like prose that challenges me and it feels good after reading relatively easy to digest books in the last months.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
I just finished reading Prof. Anne Behnke Kinney's Exemplary Women of Ancient China, which is her new English translation of the Lienu Zhuan.
As I've previously complained about works of history where the author's personal voice comes through, it seems only right that I praise Prof. Kinney's work for having avoided that. Indeed, this text strikes me as the absolute apex of what rigorous scholarship should be, focusing entirely on explanation and elucidation without any sort of moral commentary or personal judgment. (Of course, I suspect that this is easier to do when translating a singular text rather than overviewing a topic in general, but it still strikes me as being noteworthy.)
The tradeoff for this is that this text is far from being an easy read. As an academic work on a very particular topic, this book is focused far more on accuracy and comprehensive presentation than on readability, and it shows. For instance, the introduction is roughly thirty-six pages long, presenting the background and circumstances under which the Lienu Zhuan was written, an overview of the various sections of the text, and how it was altered and amended in various editions over the years. That might not sound particularly daunting, until you realize that this section alone generates one hundred seventy-three endnotes.
Indeed, the endnotes (of which there are well over a thousand) take up more than a quarter of the book, denoting everything from attributions from other texts (both ancient and contemporary) to noting where named places are in current-day China, to making notes of apparent errors in the original text, and quite a bit more. Likewise, be prepared for references to a large number of other classical works from ancient China, such as the Spring and Autumn Annals, the I Ching, the Lushi Chunqiu, the Shiji, the Zuo Zhuan, the Analects, the Shijing, the Zhan Guo Ce, the Hanshu, the Shuowen Jiezi, and many others! If you're the sort of person who has to read every note and look up every unfamiliar title the way I am, you're going to spend a lot of time researching all of these.
So with all of that said, what is this book actually about?
From the introduction, we're told that this was compiled somewhere around 10 BCE by a scribe named Liu Xiang of the Former (i.e. Western) Han dynasty. Recent policy changes had seen the Emperor's male relatives sent to far-flung regions of imperial control in an attempt to keep them from being able to attempt a coup; a consequence of this was that the relatives of the Emperor's wives/concubines were the ones given high-ranking positions in the government. Unfortunately, this led to those women and their families being similarly tempted by power, since it turns out that women are people too. Liu Xiang had thus seen the previous two emperors fall due to the machinations of high-ranking women.
The Lienu Zhuan, then, is a series of biographies of women that Liu Xiang hoped could serve as moral examples for noblewomen. Grouped into different categories, these are snapshots of women who were virtuous mothers, accomplished rhetoriticians, adhered to virtuous traditions, and otherwise served as outstanding moral paragons (though there's one section of the "depraved and favored," showing the destructive impulses of women who served as examples of what not to do).
In other words, this is very much the same idea that Giovanni Boccaccio would have roughly fourteen hundred years later, when he wrote a book on this same subject for Occidental women in his De Claris Mulieribus.
The biographies themselves are (also like Boccaccio) more akin to snapshots of a particular instance than any sort of comprehensive overview of the lives of the women in question (though more context is provided for some of them in the endnotes), and while many of the examples include self-sacrifice (e.g. the women who stays inside a burning house and dies because she doesn't have the proper number of escorts to be seen outside at night), many of them involve a woman chastising her male peers or relatives for not acting in accordance with virtue, often transgressing proprietary boundaries to do so (and being rewarded for it). And of course, the negative examples come to bad ends, one and all.
On a personal note, I was rather disappointed to see that the biography for Daji made no mention of her being a malevolent fox spirit; fans of the recent animated movie Jiang Ziya, which I believe is still on Netflix, will understand why. As it turns out, that was only to be expected, as that legend about her wasn't invented until several centuries after this text was written. Oops!
As I've previously complained about works of history where the author's personal voice comes through, it seems only right that I praise Prof. Kinney's work for having avoided that. Indeed, this text strikes me as the absolute apex of what rigorous scholarship should be, focusing entirely on explanation and elucidation without any sort of moral commentary or personal judgment. (Of course, I suspect that this is easier to do when translating a singular text rather than overviewing a topic in general, but it still strikes me as being noteworthy.)
The tradeoff for this is that this text is far from being an easy read. As an academic work on a very particular topic, this book is focused far more on accuracy and comprehensive presentation than on readability, and it shows. For instance, the introduction is roughly thirty-six pages long, presenting the background and circumstances under which the Lienu Zhuan was written, an overview of the various sections of the text, and how it was altered and amended in various editions over the years. That might not sound particularly daunting, until you realize that this section alone generates one hundred seventy-three endnotes.
Indeed, the endnotes (of which there are well over a thousand) take up more than a quarter of the book, denoting everything from attributions from other texts (both ancient and contemporary) to noting where named places are in current-day China, to making notes of apparent errors in the original text, and quite a bit more. Likewise, be prepared for references to a large number of other classical works from ancient China, such as the Spring and Autumn Annals, the I Ching, the Lushi Chunqiu, the Shiji, the Zuo Zhuan, the Analects, the Shijing, the Zhan Guo Ce, the Hanshu, the Shuowen Jiezi, and many others! If you're the sort of person who has to read every note and look up every unfamiliar title the way I am, you're going to spend a lot of time researching all of these.
So with all of that said, what is this book actually about?
From the introduction, we're told that this was compiled somewhere around 10 BCE by a scribe named Liu Xiang of the Former (i.e. Western) Han dynasty. Recent policy changes had seen the Emperor's male relatives sent to far-flung regions of imperial control in an attempt to keep them from being able to attempt a coup; a consequence of this was that the relatives of the Emperor's wives/concubines were the ones given high-ranking positions in the government. Unfortunately, this led to those women and their families being similarly tempted by power, since it turns out that women are people too. Liu Xiang had thus seen the previous two emperors fall due to the machinations of high-ranking women.
The Lienu Zhuan, then, is a series of biographies of women that Liu Xiang hoped could serve as moral examples for noblewomen. Grouped into different categories, these are snapshots of women who were virtuous mothers, accomplished rhetoriticians, adhered to virtuous traditions, and otherwise served as outstanding moral paragons (though there's one section of the "depraved and favored," showing the destructive impulses of women who served as examples of what not to do).
In other words, this is very much the same idea that Giovanni Boccaccio would have roughly fourteen hundred years later, when he wrote a book on this same subject for Occidental women in his De Claris Mulieribus.
The biographies themselves are (also like Boccaccio) more akin to snapshots of a particular instance than any sort of comprehensive overview of the lives of the women in question (though more context is provided for some of them in the endnotes), and while many of the examples include self-sacrifice (e.g. the women who stays inside a burning house and dies because she doesn't have the proper number of escorts to be seen outside at night), many of them involve a woman chastising her male peers or relatives for not acting in accordance with virtue, often transgressing proprietary boundaries to do so (and being rewarded for it). And of course, the negative examples come to bad ends, one and all.
On a personal note, I was rather disappointed to see that the biography for Daji made no mention of her being a malevolent fox spirit; fans of the recent animated movie Jiang Ziya, which I believe is still on Netflix, will understand why. As it turns out, that was only to be expected, as that legend about her wasn't invented until several centuries after this text was written. Oops!
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Eyes of Nine
Everything's Fine
Alex Segura - gamer. Often commented / engaged with the Gaming and BS podcast community (or was it Misdirected Mark? I don't remember - one of those pre-pandemic podcasts that have faded now)
Seems plausible. It was a library book, I don't have the author bio to hand.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
So, cognizant of what I wrote back in March about not having finished Crito, I sat down and read it through this morning.
...only to realize that, contrary to what I said before, I had, in fact, already read it through to completion.
As it turned out, the dialogue of Plato's that I'd only read part of, and have yet to finish, is Phaedo. Whoops!
...only to realize that, contrary to what I said before, I had, in fact, already read it through to completion.
As it turned out, the dialogue of Plato's that I'd only read part of, and have yet to finish, is Phaedo. Whoops!
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Finally finished A Brief History of Time, the editing of which just gets worse toward the end of the book. (There's an "its" in the one of the last chapters that doesn't appear to refer to anything Hawking has mentioned for several pages. I finally gave up on trying to figure out what he was referring to.)
I guess I'm glad I read it for some vestigial nerd cred, but it was 99% stuff I've read in the (written much later) Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neal deGrasse Tyson. I recommend the latter book instead for someone who wants a crash course in contemporary astrophysics.
I guess I'm glad I read it for some vestigial nerd cred, but it was 99% stuff I've read in the (written much later) Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neal deGrasse Tyson. I recommend the latter book instead for someone who wants a crash course in contemporary astrophysics.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
I spent the afternoon reading Phaedo, and came away very impressed. As a dialectic regarding the nature, immortality, and cycle of the soul, it was a very profound work!
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