I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (APRIL 2021 EDITION)
Momentum!
Defying the Dragon: Hong Kong and the World's Largest Dictatorship by Stephen Vines
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Stephen Vines has been covering Hong Kong and China since the late 1980s as both a local and international journalist - on print, online, and on radio and television. I read his columns fairly regularly and I generally agree with him more often than not. So I was keen to read his latest book about recent developments in Hong Kong - not least because I imagined it would be the sort of book that the HK govt will eventually ban from libraries and possibly bookstores as “fake news” that contradicts its official narrative of the 2019 protests.
And so it is, probably. More than a chronicle the 2019 protests and ensuing aftermath, this book examines the protests within the context of Hong Kong’s colonial history, as well as its overall relationship with China during that time, which has forged a unique HK identity that Beijing fails to understand. This is key to understanding the motives of the protest movement, the HK govt’s utter ineptitude in handling the protests, and Beijing’s willingness to crack down hard on HK despite the damage to its international standing, which is already taking a beating over China’s Uyghur policies and its handling of COVID-19. So in that sense, this book is as much about China’s current leadership as it is about Hong Kong.
Vines tells the story well and pulls no punches, especially when it comes to Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who has almost single-handedly put HK (and Beijing) in the position it is today via her handling of the protests. And as bleak as things look, Vines ends on a hopeful note, writing that Hongkongers are more resilient than Beijing and Lam give them credit for, and that historically speaking, empires never last. Highly recommended for people who want an accurate, reasonably deep and more contextual take on HK current events.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I picked this up partly because it was on sale and partly because there was a lot of buzz about how good it was. And the book-jacket synopsis is the kind of pitch that appeals to me: two agents on opposing sides of a savage time war leave each other coded notes that start as taunts but eventually develop into forbidden love. Result: I get to be the philistine in the room, because honestly this didn't really work for me. Which could be my fault. In fact, it probably is.
This is one of those SF/F novels (or novella, in this case) that goes for lyrical prose and wildly surreal imagery, as the time war in question is being fought by two opposing factions from different alt-futures - one is a post-singularity technotopia, the other a vast hive-mind consciousness embedded in all organic matter. Agents Red and Blue whip back and forth in time across all kinds of highly weird alt-futures and alt-pasts and mainly commit acts of ultraviolence and genocide to steer history in directions that ensure their future is the one that wins.
The problem for me is that the narrative hops from one surreal and alien future to the next at lightning speed, but with no set-up - consequently, I felt like I was being thrown in the deep end over and over. It doesn’t help that Red and Blue have the ability to encode their “letters” in everything from volcanic lava to sumac seeds to avoid detection by their respective commanders. It helps even less that all of this is described in prose more attuned to poetry than description, so I found it hard to keep up. But again, this is my problem. If you like mind-bending SF - and/or if you really enjoy love letters that are heavy on dashing wit and literary eloquence - you might get something out of this.
The Culture of God: The Syrian Jesus - reading the divine mind, sailing into the divine heart by Nadim Nassar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I picked this up as part of a Lent study course, but I might have read it anyway, as I attended a talk by the author, Father Nadim Nassar (the only Syrian priest in the Anglican Church), a couple of years ago when he was in Hong Kong speaking about the Syrian civil war, the refugee issue and the work his charity program, the Awareness Foundation, is doing to give young people hope and make them ambassadors of peace and reconciliation. Here, Fr Nadim writes about his idea of the “culture of God” and why it’s important to understanding who Jesus really was and what he was ultimately trying to share with us.
In fact, culture in general is a key recurring theme throughout the book. In essence, Fr Nadim sees the Trinity as a “culture”, which Jesus then shared within the culture he was raised in - Jewish culture specifically, and Levantine culture in general. The resulting culture clash is what got Jesus killed. Meanwhile, Fr Nadim talks about the Syrian culture he grew up in, his experience of studying theology in Beirut during the civil war, and his own culture clashes with Western Christians whose beliefs and interpretations of the Gospels (as well as their perceptions of Syria and the Levant) have been shaped by their own Western culture.
In short, Fr Nadim’s thesis could be summed up thusly: “God thinks differently”, which is why Jesus’ ministry went against the grain of almost every norm in the Levant, and yet he engaged with local culture to share his own “culture of God” - a culture of love, peace, diversity and inclusion, as opposed to the culture of laws, judgment and exclusion taught by the Pharisees. Obviously, there’s a lot in here to argue over and disagree with, although this in itself is not a bad thing. And there’s a little something for everyone here - his autobiographical sections are gripping, his interpretations of various parables are illuminating, and his argument for diversity is solid. It does take awhile for the overall message to gel, but I learned a lot along the way. Personally I found it educational and thought-provoking (in a good way), and while this kind of book is probably more likely to appeal to open-minded Christians only, I’d challenge anyone to read it.
The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political by Judith Butler
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I picked this up in an indie bookstore in Hong Kong (an increasingly rare thing) at a time when there was a lot of debate about whether violence on the part of protesters was justified even in self-defense, whether destroying property counts as violence, etc. There was also debate of a similar nature in the US when it came to things like how to best respond to the rise of fascism there (for example, if someone on a street corner is spouting Nazi rhetoric or ideas, is it morally acceptable to punch his lights out?). Does responding to state violence with violence make you a hypocrite, or at least morally no better? What is the argument for non-violence when one side is resorting to violence more frequently? This book from Judith Butler sort of addresses these questions, but mostly in the form of a theoretical intellectual thought exercise rather than a tactical debate guide.
Her argument, more or less, is that in order to pursue a truly non-violent ethos, we have to break out of the traditional definitions of violence vs non-violence, which in turns means breaking out of the frameworks that shape those definitions. The idea is to stop thinking of non-violence as an individual choice and more in relational terms with everyone else - which in turn requires us to pursue a new framework of what she calls “radical equality” at the political and institutional level (not just as individuals) to ensure that all lives really do matter. Or, as Butler puts it, “the practice of nonviolence requires an opposition to biopolitical forms of racism and war logics that regularly distinguish lives worth safeguarding from those that are not.”
I’m not doing her argument justice, in large part because Butler is a heavy-duty intellectual riffing on the likes of Freud, Einstein, Foucault, Fanon, Benjamin, Kant, Hegel, and Melanie Klein to make her case. Consequently, it’s rooted in dense philosophy, ethics studies, gender studies, psychoanalysis and other disciplines, which also means it’s written in the kind of dense academic discourse that is accessible mainly to academics who live and breathe this stuff for a living. For everyone else who doesn’t, it’s a hard slog even if you’re reasonably well educated. Or, hey, it could very well be my problem. Either way, it’s the sort of book that I think is great for philosophy majors to kick around as an intellectual argument, but of little practical use in terms of addressing the above questions (which, to be fair, Butler herself acknowledges). If that’s for you, have at it.
View all my reviews
Hard to beat,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1659121.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Defying the Dragon: Hong Kong and the World's Largest Dictatorship by Stephen Vines
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Stephen Vines has been covering Hong Kong and China since the late 1980s as both a local and international journalist - on print, online, and on radio and television. I read his columns fairly regularly and I generally agree with him more often than not. So I was keen to read his latest book about recent developments in Hong Kong - not least because I imagined it would be the sort of book that the HK govt will eventually ban from libraries and possibly bookstores as “fake news” that contradicts its official narrative of the 2019 protests.
And so it is, probably. More than a chronicle the 2019 protests and ensuing aftermath, this book examines the protests within the context of Hong Kong’s colonial history, as well as its overall relationship with China during that time, which has forged a unique HK identity that Beijing fails to understand. This is key to understanding the motives of the protest movement, the HK govt’s utter ineptitude in handling the protests, and Beijing’s willingness to crack down hard on HK despite the damage to its international standing, which is already taking a beating over China’s Uyghur policies and its handling of COVID-19. So in that sense, this book is as much about China’s current leadership as it is about Hong Kong.
Vines tells the story well and pulls no punches, especially when it comes to Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who has almost single-handedly put HK (and Beijing) in the position it is today via her handling of the protests. And as bleak as things look, Vines ends on a hopeful note, writing that Hongkongers are more resilient than Beijing and Lam give them credit for, and that historically speaking, empires never last. Highly recommended for people who want an accurate, reasonably deep and more contextual take on HK current events.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I picked this up partly because it was on sale and partly because there was a lot of buzz about how good it was. And the book-jacket synopsis is the kind of pitch that appeals to me: two agents on opposing sides of a savage time war leave each other coded notes that start as taunts but eventually develop into forbidden love. Result: I get to be the philistine in the room, because honestly this didn't really work for me. Which could be my fault. In fact, it probably is.
This is one of those SF/F novels (or novella, in this case) that goes for lyrical prose and wildly surreal imagery, as the time war in question is being fought by two opposing factions from different alt-futures - one is a post-singularity technotopia, the other a vast hive-mind consciousness embedded in all organic matter. Agents Red and Blue whip back and forth in time across all kinds of highly weird alt-futures and alt-pasts and mainly commit acts of ultraviolence and genocide to steer history in directions that ensure their future is the one that wins.
The problem for me is that the narrative hops from one surreal and alien future to the next at lightning speed, but with no set-up - consequently, I felt like I was being thrown in the deep end over and over. It doesn’t help that Red and Blue have the ability to encode their “letters” in everything from volcanic lava to sumac seeds to avoid detection by their respective commanders. It helps even less that all of this is described in prose more attuned to poetry than description, so I found it hard to keep up. But again, this is my problem. If you like mind-bending SF - and/or if you really enjoy love letters that are heavy on dashing wit and literary eloquence - you might get something out of this.
The Culture of God: The Syrian Jesus - reading the divine mind, sailing into the divine heart by Nadim Nassar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I picked this up as part of a Lent study course, but I might have read it anyway, as I attended a talk by the author, Father Nadim Nassar (the only Syrian priest in the Anglican Church), a couple of years ago when he was in Hong Kong speaking about the Syrian civil war, the refugee issue and the work his charity program, the Awareness Foundation, is doing to give young people hope and make them ambassadors of peace and reconciliation. Here, Fr Nadim writes about his idea of the “culture of God” and why it’s important to understanding who Jesus really was and what he was ultimately trying to share with us.
In fact, culture in general is a key recurring theme throughout the book. In essence, Fr Nadim sees the Trinity as a “culture”, which Jesus then shared within the culture he was raised in - Jewish culture specifically, and Levantine culture in general. The resulting culture clash is what got Jesus killed. Meanwhile, Fr Nadim talks about the Syrian culture he grew up in, his experience of studying theology in Beirut during the civil war, and his own culture clashes with Western Christians whose beliefs and interpretations of the Gospels (as well as their perceptions of Syria and the Levant) have been shaped by their own Western culture.
In short, Fr Nadim’s thesis could be summed up thusly: “God thinks differently”, which is why Jesus’ ministry went against the grain of almost every norm in the Levant, and yet he engaged with local culture to share his own “culture of God” - a culture of love, peace, diversity and inclusion, as opposed to the culture of laws, judgment and exclusion taught by the Pharisees. Obviously, there’s a lot in here to argue over and disagree with, although this in itself is not a bad thing. And there’s a little something for everyone here - his autobiographical sections are gripping, his interpretations of various parables are illuminating, and his argument for diversity is solid. It does take awhile for the overall message to gel, but I learned a lot along the way. Personally I found it educational and thought-provoking (in a good way), and while this kind of book is probably more likely to appeal to open-minded Christians only, I’d challenge anyone to read it.
The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political by Judith Butler
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I picked this up in an indie bookstore in Hong Kong (an increasingly rare thing) at a time when there was a lot of debate about whether violence on the part of protesters was justified even in self-defense, whether destroying property counts as violence, etc. There was also debate of a similar nature in the US when it came to things like how to best respond to the rise of fascism there (for example, if someone on a street corner is spouting Nazi rhetoric or ideas, is it morally acceptable to punch his lights out?). Does responding to state violence with violence make you a hypocrite, or at least morally no better? What is the argument for non-violence when one side is resorting to violence more frequently? This book from Judith Butler sort of addresses these questions, but mostly in the form of a theoretical intellectual thought exercise rather than a tactical debate guide.
Her argument, more or less, is that in order to pursue a truly non-violent ethos, we have to break out of the traditional definitions of violence vs non-violence, which in turns means breaking out of the frameworks that shape those definitions. The idea is to stop thinking of non-violence as an individual choice and more in relational terms with everyone else - which in turn requires us to pursue a new framework of what she calls “radical equality” at the political and institutional level (not just as individuals) to ensure that all lives really do matter. Or, as Butler puts it, “the practice of nonviolence requires an opposition to biopolitical forms of racism and war logics that regularly distinguish lives worth safeguarding from those that are not.”
I’m not doing her argument justice, in large part because Butler is a heavy-duty intellectual riffing on the likes of Freud, Einstein, Foucault, Fanon, Benjamin, Kant, Hegel, and Melanie Klein to make her case. Consequently, it’s rooted in dense philosophy, ethics studies, gender studies, psychoanalysis and other disciplines, which also means it’s written in the kind of dense academic discourse that is accessible mainly to academics who live and breathe this stuff for a living. For everyone else who doesn’t, it’s a hard slog even if you’re reasonably well educated. Or, hey, it could very well be my problem. Either way, it’s the sort of book that I think is great for philosophy majors to kick around as an intellectual argument, but of little practical use in terms of addressing the above questions (which, to be fair, Butler herself acknowledges). If that’s for you, have at it.
View all my reviews
Hard to beat,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1659121.html. Please comment there using OpenID.