Review

在很多情况下，余华肯定以偏概全，但是我觉得还是有意思。

Read this book to understand the Chinese view on global finance, and from that perspective, this book was very helpful.

不如看百度百科。这本书当中的描述偶尔让我糊涂，也没有描述最难的部分。如果你有起码现代汉语的了解，你可以看一眼目录来选择项看得课文，然后去网络找到更好的描述。 In the age before pleco, 百度百科, and 百度, I can see how this book would have been a godsend. But the fact is that almost every selection in the book has a more cogent and thorough explanation on 百度。 The translations, given in English and 繁体字 are of spotty quality, and the sections that I often had the most difficulty translating into 现代汉语，lacked explanations completely. The selections, unlike the first book, do not seem to go in order of difficulty. ...

This is about the first book I ever read. Not sure how much of it I understood when I was 9, but it was able to keep my attention better than Goosebumps or Animorphs, so that’s got to be worth something!

Pried it out of my teachers hands after I found out she wrote this book a few years ago. After reading the first two stories, one about revenge gone wrong, another about a mother falling in love (romantically) with her adopted son, I can see why she was reluctant to let me read it! Definitely have a different view of this teacher now.

Exposition disguised as a mystery This is my third time reading this book because I have not read the Arabic version. I originally thought, and still think, that this is the worst book in the Harry Potter series. The narration is similar to the “villain of the week” type seen in TV series. The portrayal of the plot is very formulaic. Afterwards, the summer vacation starts soon, and everyone is happy. ...

This book seemed to be some combination of a 余华 novel about the cultural revolution, a fictionalized version of a Brian Greene book, and a Stephenson novel about some digital reality. I can’t say that it combines the best of those three authors, but as a fan of scifi, it is the most entertaining book I’ve read in Chinese so far. Some of the descriptions were a bit tedious, specifically the chapter when 三体 civilization creates a 智子: the first time around the result is a bunch of floating eyeballs in space, then a rainbow, then a sentient mirror that tried to destroy the planet, then a hyper-dimensional paired pseudo-AI capable of magic tricks on earth? This is probably a problem with my Chinese proficiency, but I was just confused. Still, I enjoyed the mildly technical descriptions, and the plot kept going with something of a scientific approach to the mysteries presented in the beginning. Perhaps most importantly, reading China-centric scifi is simply fascinating.

I read this after reading 活着 thinking that since I liked the former, 兄弟 would also be worth reading, and good Chinese practice. It was good Chinese practice, but not really worth reading. There were good moments in this book, such the stories of 李光头 (li) as a child that reminded me of Huck Finn or a good episode of the Simpsons. The depiction of the cultural revolution, especially after witnessing red armbands suddenly appear on neighbors during the recent protests against Japan, was vivid and frightening. ...

《活着》的书名不太准确。我觉得《他们都死去了》更合适。

这个中文版特别容易看。 我觉得还比哈利波特容易。而且，翻译的质量不错。 It was a fun read, the voyeuristic thinking that takes place in a last-man-standing game is hard to ignore. There were certainly some good and interesting ideas, genetically bred weapons that have gone wild, cross breeding with the native population, reality TV as a means of government control. The main character was interesting and everything but the ending was unpredictable. But this book gave me the same pause that 1984 and Brave new world did- it seemed constructed tell a story, rather than a world that spawned a story. I’ll read the sequel, but I don’t expect too much.