A light diet for the invalid

[flemmings]

The Difference Engine is the exact antidote I wanted to The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. It has literary style, authentic period details, and an A/U setting that's clearly been carefully worked-out in advance-- which allows the appropriate period details (dress and dialogue) to stay, and supplies seamless A/U details where needed. No nose-following here, nor authorial agendas that I can see, nor howlingly unlikely behaviour from all classes.

Alas, just as the physical side of illness makes one disinclined to eat, so the attendant wanhope makes it inadvisable to read the kind of unpleasant people who populate the book. I'll make better progress with it now, I fancy; but if I need plain fare like the shaman book, which was what I read in between long stretches of sleep, I have one or two sociological treatises still sitting on the shelf, including a formidable-looking work on guanxi. Maybe I'd rather read about Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance instead?

Seeing as my new Hundred Demons still hasn't arrived after almost three weeks...

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Guanxi itself?

Thing being that the word keeps coming up in other works, being evidently untranslateable. Maybe I'll read the historical background and ignore the descriptions of party politicking in modern PRC.

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

but it's just connections, and nowdays it's really a just a quantitative difference between US and China in when it comes to the importance of connections, not qualitative. Humans are quite alike in their corruptability, alas. I also think the mystery surrounding th word originated from the early days of china's opening, when US was also a slightly different country, or at least people thought so. In any case, it's a word that only got coin under communist, so what ever historical background they can trump up would be somewhat suspect.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Interesting. The book seems to imply that guangxi needs constant concrete cultivation, which is a bit different from here. One doesn't bring nice pastries to the city councillor hoping for a favourable vote on the bylaw easement for your proposed rec room.

Even if the word is new, the concept must be old? Just as we have connections now, two hundred years ago we had 'influence.' And did the Quing or Ming version of guangxi work differently from the PRC one? etc etc is what I hope the book might touch on.