Christmas Kindle

A very quiet Christmas day spent at home, most of it split between reading, some of it even reading the quaint 'paper' books that still line my walls. Spent some time reading a book by Jonathan Spence (Return to Dragon Mountain, Memories of a Late Ming Man). I've just started on it. It has all appearances of being a sad work, being as it is biography of someone (the scholar Zhang Dai), who survives the downfall of the Ming Dynasty, losing their place in society and all their property in the process. Perhaps it will be one of those 'testimonies to human resilience' so favored by the optimistic writers of our day. I'm pulling for a more melancholy slice of reality. Not all was lost, for instance Zhang Dai kept his manuscript of a history of the Ming Dynasty with him. But it wasn't actually printed till about 10 years ago, so his fate seems to be taking a long time to ripen.

Also spent a little time with my Chinese books, which are all paper for now except the small, bare-bones Yi Jing I have on the Kindle. I hope a hack comes out soon to read Chinese on the Kindle. It will open it up to another billion and a half people and allow me to struggle and fumble through various Chinese texts in e-ink as well as the regular kind.

I finished the Dickens short story I've been reading, Mugby Junction. A most unusual work, that. It seems like two pieces oddly thrown together, perhaps the thoughts of Dickens as he waited at a major rail junction of the time, Rugby, which inspired the physical background of the story. The thought of getting off at a place where nearly everyone merely changes trains is in itself a somewhat surreal subject. With the introduction of a main character who lies on her side throughout the piece (an invalid since infancy), the surreal element grows stronger, especially when the reader is trying to work out the physics of her 'horizontal' face being at the window to interact with the author and yet the person herself cannot rise from the sofa on which she lives. At first I thought it was a rather dark story, along the lines of a Kafka piece, but it turns into one of those typical bright turnarounds, a la Christmas Carol, as the narrator is changed by his interactions with the present and an unexpected encounter with his past.

Overall a good and a memorable story, but I'm still trying to sort out if I can say that I really liked it.

One of the books I've had on paper for decades is the history of self-deception and mass hysteria called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay. I found a three volume version of it for the Kindle and downloaded it. Today I read the section on the Mississippi stock and banking folly of early 18th century France. The whole affair was a study in greed, folly and tyranny. Having read about this irrational interlude, the French Revolution a few decades later really comes as no surprise. It 'warmed the place up' for it, really.