forestofglory

I've been having a lot of hand pain for the last month or so and weirdly finding large physical books less painful that my ereader. So I've been reading a lot non-fiction recently. Here's some thoughts on recent reading and watching!

Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo— The latest Singing Hills novella, this is beautiful and sad. It made me cry!

The Long Ballad (长歌行) episodes 36-49 — I finished it! The ending was really good and narratively satisfying, which I wasn’t sure the show could pull off. I really loved this drama so I immediately started rewatching it. It’s also inspired me to write some fic, so that’s fun!

Chang Ge Xing (长歌行) by Xia Da, chapters 1-13 — This is the manhua that The Long Ballad is based on. I was curious about it because I loved the show so much. So far everyone is much more brutal than they are in the drama, and it is even more racist than the drama. The manhua is better plotted and the art is gorgeous! However since the characters were what I loved about The Long Ballad I still prefer the drama.

Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power, and Connections, 580-800 by Jonathan Karam Skaff — Since The Long Ballad is set in early Tang times and features lots of Turko-mongolians I bumped this up my reading list to give myself more background about the show. It’s bit more focused on names,dates and battles than the history I usually read, but it was still really interesting. And very helpful for understanding the historical background of the show.

The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History by Ruth Mostern— I love environmental history so I was excited to read this history of the Yellow River. It's Really interesting to think about how human actions impacted the river which in turn impacted humans and their actions and so on and so forth. There’s a lot here about the connections between soils erosion, flooding and agriculture. There is so much information here, which it really helps put other things I’ve learned in context. This book does have a lot of maps, but I think they aren’t adding as much as the author wants. It’s hard for me to see what she’s talking about on the maps – I wanted some more labels. It doesn’t help that most of the maps were clearly created in color but are reproduced in grayscale. I did really appreciate how the author empathized that some people in the past understood that erosion was a major cause of flooding, but that the political will to address the erosion was lacking.

The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald C. Shoup— For urban planning book club. This is a classic of urban planning literature, so I was familiar with a lot of the general ideas in this book. Weirdly for a 600 page book I thought it was too narrowly focused. There were a lot of economic models and a lot of faith in the free market (despite the author acknowledging that people aren’t economically rational) . I also feel like any book about planning in the US needs to talk about race and this book doesn’t at all! Another thing that bothered me was that several of the examples Shoup uses are fat phobic (especially the ones right at the start of the book) . It's still a bit until the book club meets so hopefully I will remember the book well enough to talk about it then.