Kingdom of Committee Meetings
I fall asleep while reading books. Sometimes this is problematic for comprehension, so usually I find my place the next day. With Kingdom of Characters I didn’t find the material engaging enough to warrant such a second day search. This is a book about the history of creating APIs between English and Chinese, and if that sounds like a dry topic to you, let me assure you: it is dry. Rotten wood that turns to dust in your hands dry.
Despite dozing tendencies, I gravitate towards books labelled ‘dry’ or ‘overly detailed’ – the point of books is to go deep on a subject that only a few will find interesting. I find many topics interesting, and I’m more than 5000 hours into Chinese! But Kingdom of characters felt too much like attending an ISO standards meeting in which I already know the ending indexing characters based on stroke count and radical, character simplification, and roman alphabet pin-yin for spelling and adapting to small keyboards Maybe it’s that the dilemmas Kingdom of Characters presents as existential seem trivial in hindsight or at least non-unique when compared with Japanese or Arabic adaptations.
If you’ve spent time learning Chinese or a non-Indo-European language, the content is a little underwhelming, although as an alternative to learning the language, this could be a reasonable starting place to get a feel for how the language works.
** 95th book of 2022 **