Media Round Up: Writing History and Song
Aug. 28th, 2024 11:10 amLove Me, Love My Voice, eps 1-10—I started watching this because ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
libitina recced it as totally unstressful. So far it's very charming! I don’t watch many modern dramas, but I’m enjoying a lot of the built environments. The streetscapes are very cute! Also there is so much food!
Melody Journey—This is a currently airing singing reality show where singers pair up with songwriters to perform a new song. There’s going to be different pairs and different song writers each episode. It’s got Zhou Shen and a couple of people I know from season 3 of Our Song. The first episode was a lot of fun!
When We Write a Love Story—Another Chinese reality show – this one pairs up three men with three women and has each pair write and star in a romance mini drama. It’s mostly very cute, though I don’t love the way the show is trying to blur personal and professional boundaries. The mimi drama episodes have all been really good so far! I’ve tried watching a couple of mini dramas and always found the pacing confusing – but these didn’t have that problem. Maybe just having the extra context helps?
The Writing of Official History under the T'ang by Denis C. Twitchett—This book has too many names and dates and not enough gossip! It doesn’t help that the names are all transliterated using Wade-Giles which makes it harder for me to recognize them. And I know why establishing a chronology of these various documents is important but still I want the juicy bits! I read this partially to find out about Li Shimin messing with the historical record to make himself more important to the founding of the Tang, and there’s not very much on that. There were some good bits, especially the parts talking about what Tang historians saw as the point of writing history, but I also ended up skimming quite a bit.
Defenders of the Hidden—This is a documentary about pangolin conservation, featuring Wang Yibo. There’s two parts, each a little longer than 20 min. I have learned that pangolin’s are extremely cute animals! They have fuzzy bellies! They curl up in balls! I'm sad that they are endangered. Yibo gets to hold a baby pangolin at one point. (Content note: injured pangolin, which gets medical treatment)
Unspoken Magic by Emily Lloyd-Jones—Sequel to Unseen Magic, also very charming
The Witch of Woodland by Laurel Snyder—I read this to the kid. It is a MG contemporary Jewish fantasy novel, about a girl reluctantly preparing for her bat mitzvah. I liked how it dealt with questioning in a very Jewish way, and how the adults in the book are all trying their best. I think it was a bit heavy for the kid though.
The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region by David Alff—For Urban planning book club. I wanted to like this book, but it's just a collection of incidents that are loosely connected. I keep waiting for the author to explain why these things matter to the people of the Northeast or even to the railroad in general. Also I feel that a book that covers the 1800’s should at least mention the term “railroad baron” maybe that was less of a thing on the east coast, but then I would have liked to hear about why! The one thing I give this book credit for is calling Tomas Jefferson an enslaver
libitina recced it as totally unstressful. So far it's very charming! I don’t watch many modern dramas, but I’m enjoying a lot of the built environments. The streetscapes are very cute! Also there is so much food! Melody Journey—This is a currently airing singing reality show where singers pair up with songwriters to perform a new song. There’s going to be different pairs and different song writers each episode. It’s got Zhou Shen and a couple of people I know from season 3 of Our Song. The first episode was a lot of fun!
When We Write a Love Story—Another Chinese reality show – this one pairs up three men with three women and has each pair write and star in a romance mini drama. It’s mostly very cute, though I don’t love the way the show is trying to blur personal and professional boundaries. The mimi drama episodes have all been really good so far! I’ve tried watching a couple of mini dramas and always found the pacing confusing – but these didn’t have that problem. Maybe just having the extra context helps?
The Writing of Official History under the T'ang by Denis C. Twitchett—This book has too many names and dates and not enough gossip! It doesn’t help that the names are all transliterated using Wade-Giles which makes it harder for me to recognize them. And I know why establishing a chronology of these various documents is important but still I want the juicy bits! I read this partially to find out about Li Shimin messing with the historical record to make himself more important to the founding of the Tang, and there’s not very much on that. There were some good bits, especially the parts talking about what Tang historians saw as the point of writing history, but I also ended up skimming quite a bit.
Defenders of the Hidden—This is a documentary about pangolin conservation, featuring Wang Yibo. There’s two parts, each a little longer than 20 min. I have learned that pangolin’s are extremely cute animals! They have fuzzy bellies! They curl up in balls! I'm sad that they are endangered. Yibo gets to hold a baby pangolin at one point. (Content note: injured pangolin, which gets medical treatment)
Unspoken Magic by Emily Lloyd-Jones—Sequel to Unseen Magic, also very charming
The Witch of Woodland by Laurel Snyder—I read this to the kid. It is a MG contemporary Jewish fantasy novel, about a girl reluctantly preparing for her bat mitzvah. I liked how it dealt with questioning in a very Jewish way, and how the adults in the book are all trying their best. I think it was a bit heavy for the kid though.
The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region by David Alff—For Urban planning book club. I wanted to like this book, but it's just a collection of incidents that are loosely connected. I keep waiting for the author to explain why these things matter to the people of the Northeast or even to the railroad in general. Also I feel that a book that covers the 1800’s should at least mention the term “railroad baron” maybe that was less of a thing on the east coast, but then I would have liked to hear about why! The one thing I give this book credit for is calling Tomas Jefferson an enslaver
