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I have just finished this book by Iris Chang.

I must say, this book touched me very deeply. The inhuman acts the Japanese commited is unspeakable and hard to read through.

I am chinese and the war crimes the Japanese commited makes me hate only the Japanese Government and their Imperial Army. What sickens me is the fact that how can they do such horrors to a human. The Japanese government denies it all saying it never occured when there is overwhelming evidence such as photos, diaries, witnesses, filming of the events, etc. Also trying to change their history books and report that it never even happen and it was just an illusion.

After reading this book, makes me wanna go see Nanking and see how beautiful it has transformed and flourished into after the rape from the Japanese Imperial Army.

An article in this week's (Mar 24, 2008) New Yorker about Abu Ghraib by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris. The article focuses on accounts by Sabrina Harman and other members of the 372nd Military Police Company (Harman took many of the now-infamous photos of tormented prisoners). Gourevitch and Morris somewhat try to empathize with the MPs who were eventually charged with maltreatment without trying to rationalize or let them off the hook. One thing they don't do is get accounts from any of the higher ups who were at or in charge of Abu Ghraib. There may be other articles that have looked at the way the prison was run in more detail, which anyone who reads this should try and find out, I just don't know. The most interesting (and damning) account in the article is of a prisoner who was tortured to death and then cleaned up and tried to pass for a heart attack. Harman took pictures of this but the charges were dropped on that one. I would recommend reading it but it's a pretty difficult read (like Gourevitch's book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families). Whole thing (minus some photos) online here.

I'll list my books at the end of the month.

Nice you went and read that Lennon. Have you read any of his other books? The Road is amazing.

That sounds very interesting Tazz.

Just finished The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.



This book was loaned to me by a friend several years ago. I started it right away, but only finished it recently. It was occasionally fascinating to read the notes she'd written in the margins over the years, though.

The book itself was so-so. A little disjointed, I thought, and Morrison seems to think so herself, given the things she wrote about it at the end (it was written in 1970, so I assume she was writing about it long afterwards for this reprint). It's fairly well-written, though, and it never goes more than a few pages without a nice turn-of-phrase or an intriguing angle on some everyday occurance.

There's one part, in particular, which describes an old man. It starts talking about his hobbies and habits and predelictions, and before long we learn that he's a pedophile. Sounds odd, I know, but it's extremely well done, and it's probably the only part of the book that I was unequivocally impressed by.

Glad I read it, but that's usually the case with fairly mediocre books, too. Can't really recommend it, but I wouldn't tell anyone not to read it, either. Popcorn may not be applicable here, but: .

heres a list of books i've read over the past few months--

American Psycho, Breat Easton Ellis
this is by far, the bloodiest, most disgusting, graphic, sexually explicit thing i've ever read. its pretty good. there are lots of little touches in the book that the movie doesn't recognize, but reading Patrick Bateman in the book, its easy to visualize Christian Bale playing him.

The Virgin Suicides - pretty much like the movie, except for a slightly different ending. if you love the movie, you'll love the book.

The Curious Incident of the dog in the night time - its brilliant! its the first book i've read where its told in first person of a person with a mental disability. i'm currently reading Haddons latest book, 'A Spot of Bother'. no reviews as of yet.

Girl With A Pearl Earring - i watched the film first, and while i really disliked the movie, the book TOTALLY got me into Jan Vermeer. his paintings are literally breathtaking, but its the way in which they are described in the book that really made me look into it. what i love about the book is how its actually fiction, even if its based around a real person. i also really love how Vermeer was never a Picasso or anything like that. at the time he was alive, he was just a regular guy... who was really respected in his community for his art. it wasn't until way after his death his talent was appreciated.

The Bell Jar - a personal favorite now, a 'semi auto biography' about Sylvia Plath's struggle with depression. i looked into 'the Unabridged Journal of Sylvia Plath' shortly after, and its huge, but hell of interesting.

more later! lunch now!

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Ooh, glad to hear The Curious Incident is good. I bought this on a total whim a few months ago but haven't started it yet. (My pile of "books I bought recently but still haven't read" is way too big!)

I'm still slogging through Pillars of the Earth and also now reading Sleeping With Ward Cleaver, by a writer I met through an online forum.

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no, but I am going to pick it up as soon as I'm done...


honestly the only author I own more than 1 book of is Dav Pilkey with Captin Underpants

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I used to be addicted to crystal meth, now I'm just addicted to Breaking Bad.

Just finished Life of Pi by Yann Martel.



Great book.
For those who haven't read it, the story of a teenaged Indian boy, who's parents owned a zoo, but then had to sell it - and then tried a move to Canada.
Along the way, their ship sinks - I hope I'm not ruining this for you, because you can already see by the cover that there's a hint to what the book is about - and Pi is marooned on a lifeboat with, among other things, a 450 pound Royal Bengal Tiger.

Enjoy.

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March reading:

Galactic Pot Healer by Philip K. Dick
The Book of Night by Alan Wall
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré
As You Like It by William Shakespeare
Technique of Film Editing by Karel Reisz

Just Started:

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2001: A Space Odyssey -- started it the day Arthur C. Clarke died (I ran to the library to grab some of his books). Almost finished. It's pretty good. If you haven't read it, you definitely should.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison


Read it. It's awesome. There's a reason it won some awards. The metaphors aren't out right obvious but they're still easy to identify if you just give it some after thought. I liked it and I'll read it again.

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Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor and The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. I thought Wise Blood was just okay, but The Time Machine was awesome.

Just reading articles for my environmental law exam now on the arbitration case taken by Ireland against England in regards Sellafield. Fascinating stuff!!!

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I can't believe I saw this.....I remembered it From Dan In Real Life and I just had to pick it up for the hell of it.

That is an awesome book. You should read The Pride of the Bimbos by John Sayles (yeah, that John Sayles), another excellent piece of outsider Americana. Here's the book discription from Amazon:

"The Pride of the Bimbos is John Sayles's outrageous, poignant and hilarious first novel, about a circus sideshow softball team—The Brooklyn Bimbos—who play in drag at scraggly small towns across the South. The heart of the team—and the novel—is a midget and former private eye named Pogo Burns, who is pursued by Dred, an evil super-pimp whom Pogo had earlier shot in order to rescue a woman he loved. The Pride of the Bimbos is about Pogo's rise, fall and eventual immortality, a man who refuses to admit he's a freak."

That description makes it sound a little more of an adventure/genre novel than it is, because it focuses on the setup for the main plots, juggling sensitive portrayals of supporting characters... but check it out, I think you might like it.

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That definitely looks interesting. Right now I'm reading James Joyce's, Ulysses. Its the hardest thing I've ever tried to read. I might end up coming back to it later on. I think I just talked myself into putting Ulysses on hold to read The Pride of the Bimbos.

Ulysses is the hardest book I've ever read too (finished it a couple months ago after 4 months or so of reading that with multiple breaks to read other books). I'm still not sure what I think about it. I read it twice in total (for every two pages forward I would go back one) because the effort of reading it was so straining for me that I would constantly lose track of text on the first try. And reading it like this, there were some parts that I enjoyed a lot on my "second" read (I really liked chapter 4: Bloom's introduction, and chapter 10 which synchronizes all the characters) and parts that were still just a blank, impenetrable thing. In the absence of a great memory, I think it might have helped if I had taken notes on the characters, because a huge part of the book is just keeping track of everyone in the maze of details. Hope you have fun with Ulysses!

Having said that, I just read the first ten pages of Finnegans Wake yesterday and I'm very reluctant to read that. It looks infinitely harder than Ulysses, and just about every other word is a made up word combining two or more seemingly-unrelated words. Eh... Not yet anyway.

My most recent finished book was Dark Carnival by David J. Skal and Elias Savada, a biography of Freaks director Tod Browning. It wasn't very good. I mean, the subject was somewhat interesting but the biography itself was so-so. I think my biggest gripe was the half-hearted attempts to interpret Browning's movies that didn't really add any insight, especially all the times they brought up Freudian interpretations of his work but without ever actually endorsing or defending said interpretations. They would say things like "Freud might interpret the one-eyed character as a phallic symbol" or "What would Freud say about all the creepy father-daughter relationships in Browning's films?" and then just leave that facile thread dangling unjustified.

If you ignore that it has a lot of interesting info and some really amusing episodes. One of my favorites had to do with when Herman Mankiewicz came to Hollywood to work in movies and Browning assigned him the task of coming up with a rationalization for a movie about a scientist who wants to decapitate women and monkeys and switch their heads (the question he asked Mankiewicz: what would be his scientific goal in doing this?).