The Rich Are Still Different from You and Me...

Kevin Kwan's books about the rich and famous in China, Singapore and environs are compulsive reading, I find. The first one Crazy Rich Asians I picked up because I liked Singapore a lot the couple of times I visited. I continued reading because it really is a remake of a Jane Austen novel, like Pride and Prejudice where the major intrigue is about marrying off rich young men and somewhat poorer women. The background is how the wealthy lived in early 19th century Britain: here it is the recent wealth of the Asian Tigers.

The richest people in  China Rich Girlfriend , the second of the trilogy, are mainland Chinese who are worth billions and billions. We don't learn anything about how they got their money: that's lost in the mist of what happened in the last 30 years of the 20th century as China changed its way of doing business. What we see is extravagance and nary a thought for ordinary folk. Rachel Chu, who functions as the Austenian heroine, provides some semblance of a moral compass, but otherwise the novel is enough to make one wonder what happened to the Revolution, any revolution...

I thought of that this morning as I found this story in the New York Times: "Admissions Scandal: When ‘Hard Work’ (Plus $6.5 Million) Helps Get You Into Stanford" https://www.nytimes.com/…/yusi-molly-zhao-china-stanford.ht… truth is right up here with fiction.
The photo, BTW, is of construction in Shanghai 12 years ago, as the city was being rebuilt.

Unsheltered Isn't Up to Kingsolver's Best

Barbara Kingsolver is a wonderful writer, and her Poisonwood Bible is one of the best novels of the 20th century, in my opinion. I think I've read all the ones she's written since, and found them engaging although not up to the standard she set with PB.

Unsheltered--two stories, one set in 2015 when Trump is on the rise and another about 1870, that are interwoven-- is not either. Some of her zingers were marvelous, and certainly the novel was compulsive reading. There was too much didactic stuff in places, although I thought she did a great job in explaining natural selection when her 19th century character Thatcher Greenwood must defend Darwin in a debate on which his future as a teacher depends. But I doubt that few Creationists are going to read the book, so Kingsolver is preaching to the choir here.

The novel has a few loose ends that are annoying, like why didn't the other set of grandparents contribute something to a child's welfare, and how did social services approve the transfer of custody of the child from the father to the "unsheltered" grandparents when their living conditions were so terrible. (The photo, BTW, is of our house during a period when we felt it was falling down around us: I really sympathized with the characters' concern about the place they were living.)

On the other hand, the conflicts and travails of the characters were perhaps too neatly wrapped up at the novel's end: all but the villains have things to look forward to. I'd like to think the world was like that, but it isn't, and I'm pretty sure Kingsolver is as pessimistic as I am.

Libraries Where You Can Sleep (Sort of)

The first thing I look for in a room where I am to spend the night (yes, seriously) is whether there is good light for reading in bed. This means a lamp on a bedside table that isn't so high that it shines in my eyes, and of course not an over head light that 1) will do just that and 2) require that I get out of bed to turn it off.

So I like this story in Bustle about  AirBnB accommodations  with lovely collections of books. But I also like places where guests are invited to leave a book they've finished and don't want to carry home. As Dylan Thomas had it in A Child's Christmas in Wales :

“(Miss Prothero) said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?” 

 

The all-purpose question!