Week 1: Undress me in the temple of heaven

By -

Undress me in the temple of heaven, by Susan Jane Gilman
It's 1986, and Susie has just graduated from an Ivy college.  She and her friend Claire decide to packpack around the world, and just to show how tough they are, they are going to start in China.  Communist China in 1986, which has been open to travelers for "all of about ten minutes."
As they hit the road, their utter naïveté is stunning.  But since at 21 I would have been just the same, I really got into the story.  After a few weeks of the usual rough living, and a lot of adventure, Claire starts to fall apart.  It takes Susie a while to realize that what she sees as weird bratty melodrama is quickly becoming paranoid delusion, and meanwhile they've traveled deep into rural southwest China.  It's a bad place to lose your mind; the chances are that they will end up arrested by the military.
I was both enthralled by the story and scared to keep going.  And I really identified with the author.  So I really enjoyed this one.  A good start to my weekly book list!

Comments

  1. Robin MJanuary 3, 2010 at 4:57 PM

    Interesting book to start off your new year. I read about this book last year and want to read. Will have to add it to my wishlist. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. JennyJanuary 3, 2010 at 7:03 PM

    What made you choose this book? How did you hear about it?

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanJanuary 3, 2010 at 7:54 PM

    I picked it up at the library--it was on the new bookshelf or something. I love travel books!

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownJanuary 5, 2010 at 7:44 AM

    I agree -- this was a stand-out book that I read in 2009. It wasn't necesarily the best book I read, but it stuck with me. I too related with the girls and marveled and their stupidity. I also thought that it was amazing that things were SO different in the time it was written from even 5 or 10 years ago -- no cell phones or internet, spotty long distance etc.

    ReplyDelete
  5. DaisyJanuary 9, 2010 at 7:17 PM

    Wow, it definitely sounds interesting. You've got me hooked already. LOL.

    ReplyDelete
  6. AmyJanuary 14, 2010 at 7:35 AM

    I'm going to put it on my library hold list now. Sounds like the kind of book you plow through, needing to know what happens.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more