At RusselinToronto's suggestion, I recently read Ma Jian's Beijing Coma, which is a piece of historical fiction covering the Tiananmen Square massacre and the lives of student leaders who were most visible in the democracy movement.

The main character in the book is a Beijing University student who is shot in the head the morning of June 4 and spends the next decade in a coma. He is alive on the inside, hearing and sensing everything that is going on, including the greater changes to the country, but he is unable to move or indicate that there is life in him, so he is seen as a vegetable.

The narrative takes a reader from the childhood of the main character, Dai Wei, and explores all the familiar theme's of the suffering borne by his parent's generation through the constant political tumult and resultant sufferings of the era. His father is a branded rightist for a minor interaction with a Westerner which was viewed unfavorably, and the rest of his family pay the costs for his being so labeled. The story touches on all the strains and trauma's of a family in such a predicament, a theme common to so many literate families who lived in China since 1949.

The boy gets lost in the mythical fable The Book of Mountain and Seas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shan_Hai_Jing and the author uses this theme throughout the book as a secondary theme to juxtapose the condition of his coma and the changes in modern China.

The overall portrayal of events is rather accurate but it isn't clear why the author elects to only slightly fictionalize some of the actual protagonists from the the student movement while keeping others as their actual self. For instance a Taiwanese pop singer is described as himself while a noted physicist has his name only slightly changed and though everything about his actual role remains factual. Some student leaders he ascribes to a certain university that they did not attend, but he then gives an accurate portrayal of their post-Tiananmen fate. Another he has squished by a tank, while their actual fate had them consulting for Bain. It isn't clear what the author was trying to do with these small shifts between historical accuracy and fiction in the story.

What else is not clear from research is how much time the author spent in Beijing. Much of the novel is devoted to the tiresome internecine politics among the student leaders themselves. One would've had to have spent a great deal of time in constant contact with this group to sort it all out. It isn't clear whether the author was there doing that or if he's recreated the dynamic. What is missed is the bigger, city wide and nation wide impact of the democracy movement and how those outside of Tiananmen Square reacted. The author doesn't really touch on this although he shifts the book's theme in that direction for his post-Tiananmen handling of larger Chinese social themes.

This book has received decent acclaim, but the prose at times is a little tedious. The book may have benefited from some selective editing of material. Much of the story bogs down with his treatment of the petty squabbles among student leaders without capturing the energy and daring of the movement as a whole and its wider impact outside of the student population.

A reader does get a sense of what one Tiananmen leader has described as the "Beijing Doctrine". In China, and especially Beijing, economic development will be permitted to proceed at all costs, even if those costs involve killing people. This book deals with the human cost of that doctrine and the morally and spiritually bereft environment which is created by a people accepting that sort of pact with a government who will kill their own people in the streets of the capital.

im reading some POS called Kill Everyone

Why do people read poker books besides The Theory of Poker? It's all in there.

The story is deeper but something about his writing style bugs me. I end up finishing and needing to continue due to the story but his style makes it like work. I picked up something else by him on a holiday and had the same reaction...only the story was not as good.

Just finished "The Dirt" it`s the story of Mötley Crüe, written by all 4 (5) members. Lots of dirty sex, drugs and rock & roll stories.

If you like that kind of stuff, I think it`s a good read for you.

Bought Keith Richards - Life, will start reading tonight. 700-something pages...let`s go.

dirt is awesome. scar tissue by anthony kiedis is another awesome tale of rock debauchery (he has a bunch of spiritual hippy crap to go with it though).

This is my first post in this sub-forum and i'm excited that this thread is here.

My contribution is "Nickel and Dimed" -Barbara Ehrenreich

It's a really good book that I got in college and never appreciated and didn't read, but have been reading steadily now for the past day or two. This author took several jobs at or near minimum wage and wrote about her conditions and trying to maintain survival.

That book's been in my wish list on Amazon for a while. I'm sure I'll enjoy it quite a bit once I get around to it (probably over summer).

Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a small island' is fantastic.
'Notes from a Big Country' is also very good.

reading lord of the rings again but now in english, soo much better ...

If you like that style of writing try The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific J. Maarten Troost.

It is about a guy who moves to a small island in the south pacific for 2 years. Very funny and interesting. A new take on the dangers of snorkelling and very interesting view into a different world.

just got a kindle for mah bday... subscribing to tread imo

I don't disagree with your criticisms, but your last paragraph describes why the book had a strong effect on me. While I already had a sense of China as a repressive society, this novel brought home the day-to-day effect of that society on the average individual in a way that no newspaper account ever had and it has since provided me with a context for the more recent news story about that repression. (This says something, I think, about the power and function of fiction.)

The author's form of fiction is just barely fiction in some parts, and that's where as a reader it is hard to know why he chooses certain twists or what exactly he's leaving to imagination.

His description of the chronology of Tiananmen Square events in the spring of '89 are very nearly historically accurate. A reader of this fiction is getting more or less a first hand view dressed as fiction.

His description of the college life of the main characters is somewhat idealized. He ascribes a certain maturity and worldliness to the characters which was not particularly common among the student body at Beijing University. He description of sexual activity among the student body is completely out of line with the very repressed reality of the typical Chinese student there in that era. Even the basic freedom of thought and speech among classmates was not as I remembered it or how many other authors describe the era. Students of that era were still very much living in the shadow of decades of arbitrary political shifts that could have devastating impacts on their lives.

Post '89, the writer has essentially been an expat writer so his treatment of post-Tiananmen events read very much as a derivative of other accounts. The author has been living abroad and has not encountered these phenomenon first hand, whether that means the repression of Falun Gong or the destruction of traditional neighborhoods for "renewal" or the runaway wild west nature of Chinese capitalism in that decade. That being said, the feel of what people have gone through post-'89 is quite accurate and marries well with non-fiction first hand accounts, but the nature of personal knowledge is very much lessened in these passages. In a piece of fiction, the prose and color of description are somewhat lacking for those post-'89 portions of the book.

If one is looking for the seedy underbelly of the human costs of breakneck economic development experienced in China over the past 20 or 30 year, Beijing Coma paints a realistic picture, although a reader may be better served in reading many of the outstanding contemporaneous non-fiction works who have covered this era in both a sociological and historical way.

Quick question: Because of the great reviews here I will buy a Mark Bowden book. Which one shall I buy first: Killing Pablo or Black Hawk Down (assuming that I like both "scenarios" equally)?

Just started the Dice Man...

Weird, weird, weird

Just started Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. I'm about 160 pages in and loving it so far and think this will turn out to be a great read. It also has excellent reviews on amazon. The writing style is smooth to read and so far there are a bunch of different characters to follow independently that all are starting to end up crossing paths. I like long epic reads to.

I just finished reading Leonard Mlodinow'sThe Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. An interesting book, it makes the (familiar enough) point stated in its subtitle, but it moves to that point in engaging fashion, arguing that humans are hardwired not to recognize randomness and instead to see (and overinterpret) patterns. In its early pages Mlodinow makes the closely related point—that people are not intuitively equipped to understand probability—through a retelling of the Monte Hall paradox, followed by a useful discussion of why M.D.s are very bad at interpreting probabilities—for example, because they misapply statistics about false positives.

Among his many examples of how badly we judge and evaluate, and of how we impose expectations, Mlodinow has a particularly amusing anecdote in the opening of Ch. 9, where he tells of his disappointment at his son receiving an A- on a high school essay—because he wrote it for him. His story of how random events shaped Bill Gates's rise from minor-league software programmer to the place of power he now occupies is also amusing—and reinforces Mlodinow's point that careers that seem to have some shape to them are often just a series of lucky accidents.

One of the benefits of reading this book as a non-mathematician (and someone who'd never taken a course in stats) is that it left me feeling I finally understood (or had a better grasp of) concepts such as “standard deviation,” “regression toward the mean,” and “confirmation bias.”

Just read world war z: an oral history of the zombie war by max brooks.

It was awesome, currently I'm struggling my way through American Gods by Neil Gaiman which hasn't been able to keep my interest.

Looking for something new to read....

Re Beijing Coma
It's quite interesting to hear from someone with first-hand knowledge. I had wondered, when reading the book, about the descriptions of sexual activity among Chinese students at that time, as it was contrary to my previous impressions.

Still, even if the author has not gotten everything right, the book did make me more aware of China's contemporary culture, society, and politics, where I was not likely to read a non-fiction account of the period or events. Similarly, today's news out of Burma about the release of Aung San Suu Kyi is given more meaning for me because of my prior reading of Karen Connelly's powerful novel, The Lizard Cage.

just finished Bret Easton Ellis - Glamorama

two questions came up:
at one point during name dropping he mentioned a few people sitting in a cafe including David Koresh. What is the point here? the other people are some kind of B or C rated stars and David Koresh is the head of the religious group that died in the Waco TX massacer. He he was not a social guy that hung out with regular people in a cafe in NY...

the second point: whats up with the confetti all the time? my idea is that the confetti is a picture for Victor taking everything as one big party or parade because in his own mind he just walked around to show of...


any other thoughts?


(and I liked the book at lot)

Just finished Stephen King - The Stand, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Another one i've recently read is Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clarke. It was interesting but rather anticlimactic I think.

How could someone with Anne Bancroft for a mom and Mel Brooks for a dad not be talented?

I miss Ann Bancroft

Pillars of the Earth has been on my list of things to read for ages now. It feels criminal that I haven't read it yet as I know it's the type of story I'd love.

I think some tv channel did a mini series on it which is supposed to be great as well.