I’ve read these two books before, here and here. I stand by those prior reviews. So much so, I’m just going to copy/paste my reviews from them into the text of this below, with a few edits for my added thoughts from this read-through.
The reason why I’m reading these books again is because I’m going to be reading R. F. Kuang’s BABEL soon, and I want to brush up. Babel is about British colonialism in China during the Opium Wars. I want to brush up on the history of the event, so I listened to the ‘History of the British Empire‘ last month and this book about china this month. Additionally, I’m re-reading ‘Craft in the Real World’ because Kuang as an author writes in a non-Western standard fashion, and ‘Craft’ discusses and deconstructs the Western standards.
The Fall and Rise of China
I’m planning on reading the last book in the ‘Poppy War’ series soon, which takes place in a fantasy version of China. Because I am a giant nerd, I decided to do some research on the background topic so I can enter the final text with more insight. To that end, I listened to this Great Courses lecture series about the fall of the Manchu dynasty, the warlord era which followed, and finally the rise of Mao and communism. This lecture series spans the expanse of time from 1700 to 2010. This course is 24 hours longs.
This lecture series focuses primarily on the communist era. The lecturer is an American China scholar/diplomat who spent the better part of 4 decades in and out of China and Taiwan. He used his personal insight to provide the listener with valuable ‘ground level’ anecdotes of what was going on at the time. From the Vietnam War to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the lecturer was there and playing a minor part in events as they happened. I enjoyed the lecturer’s personable attitude, and breadth of experience on the people and location in question. He made China seem not like ancient history in a far away place, but right next door and yesterday.
What this lecture series did very well was emphasize the importance of Chairman Mao. The lecturer emphasized his foibles and personal failings- as well as his military genius. Mao was a skilled soldier whose tactical innovations are still taught in military academies worldwide to this day. However, ultimately he got a lot of civilians killed because his hatred of the intellectual elite led to him not valuing trained experts on subjects, and his collectivization of farms destabilized generations of learned agricultural wisdom causing mass starvation. Mao’s paranoia was a valuable asset for keeping himself and the communists alive during the warlord era- but that selfsame paranoia unleashed the Cultural Revolution decades later, nearly toppling the communist regime. Mao was ultimately a deeply unstable man who surrounded himself with yes-men, and millions died as a result.
This lecture series was fascinating to listen to. If this sounds even a little bit interesting to you, I HIGHLY suggest you give it a spin. This is one of the best courses I’ve ever listened to. Just remember 1 thing as you listen to it: this is written by an American in China who served as a Taiwan attaché during the Cold War, so there is an anti-communist bent subtly woven into everything. As an amateur scholar myself, I appreciate that the lecturer did such a good job of constantly reminding us of his personal biases on scholarly issues. Scientific/scholarly bias can have a subtle impact on a person’s research, so it is valuable for nonfiction authors to state their pre-existing biases to inform the reader of what they’re getting into.
EDIT: On this re-read, I have to restate how excellent this was. I think this is probably the best Great Course I’ve ever read. The lecturer is both personable while being informative, while bringing to life the people and events of history.
One thing about this read through I found interesting was how the author tried to predict the future of China, and how he succeeded and failed in those predictions 15 years on. As an example, the lecturer theorized that China would become the dominant navy in the East Pacific by now, which hasn’t happened. Whereas he correctly foresaw a rise in Chinese nationalism, which is something continuing even to this day.
I’m glad I did a re-read. Re-learning about Mao is still an eye-opening experience. He was a proud and stubborn man, who had a few good ideas but ultimately believed in ideology over practice. However, concerning the modern era, his successor in Deng is undoubtably the more influential politician. Deng unwound a lot of Mao’s programs, ultimately kickstarting both the modern economic boom China’s going through, and also the crackdowns on democracy and minorities which continue to this day.
Craft in the real world
This is a book about writing, however it is not a how-to manual or a book of advice. Instead, this is a sociological commentary about the writing and publishing industry, in hopes of offering insight and reform for a stagnant industry. I found this to be a very insightful book, which forced me to reflect upon many of the habits and techniques I myself have used in my reviewing process.
In short, this nonfiction book provides commentary on writing workshops, and how they frequently fail to help authors come to their full potential. This is most true for minority authors and authors who write in genres outside of the normal genre of the writing workshops cultural group.
- As an example, in a writing workshop made up entirely of military fiction fans, a romance author would not get useful critique from that workshop. The military fiction fans would read the romance novel, and offer suggestions which would make the book more appealing for military fiction readers as opposed to romance novel readers. The resulting book would most likely appeal to neither romance readers or military fiction readers.
- The same is true for other books by real-world minority authors, with an intended audience of real-world minority readers. A nonwhite author in an white critique group would not get very good advice.
I am a book reviewer, and while this work of nonfiction is targeted mainly at improving critique groups and writing workshops, it applies equally to book reviewing. The author made very coherent and convincing arguments that a lot of what I would consider to be good storytelling is in fact a cultural assumption of what I think good storytelling is. To explain this…
- The common refrain of ‘show, don’t tell,’ is a modern and Western assumption. There are many storytelling traditions for which telling and not showing is considered to be more aesthetically appropriate.
- Premodern Western books are perfectly happy telling not showing, and that doesn’t make them bad books. We hold many of them to be classics to this day.
- Modern nonwestern books tell and not show, and they have millions of people read them and enjoy them around the world. No one in their right mind would argue such a popular book is a bad book just because it tells and doesn’t show.
- Therefore, when I review books and complain about ‘show, don’t tell,’ I might not be taking into account the fact that this book might be part of a tradition outside of the modern Western literary tradition. You can write good books which tell and it don’t show.
- Similarly, the modern Western fascination for writing ‘realistic’ characters is a very modern and Western tradition.
- Going back to my fantasy roots, let’s look at the characters of ‘the Lord of the Rings.’ From a modern perspective, none of them are particularly ‘realistic.’ none of them have substance abuse problems, none of them are dealing with grieving a loved one who died of cancer, none of them are particularly morally gray.
- And yet the characters of ‘the Lord of the Rings’ are still widely loved by millions of people. They aren’t bad characters.
- Therefore, when I review books and complain about mediocre characters, I need to take a step back and challenge my assumptions. The character might not be bad; instead, I might just have been trained to value the modern Western ‘realistic’ character ideal too much.
The list of ‘ideals’ goes on. The author is very clear to state that modern Western writing isn’t bad; instead it is only one of many options. If you are a writer or book reviewer, I do think you should read this. It’s difficult having your preconceptions challenged, but if there’s one thing a scholar loves it’s being proven wrong. To be proven wrong, is to become less ignorant.
Edit: This book deliberately cites the Fantasy Quest genre as an example. In the quest genre, the reader expects to read about elves and dwarves and rangers and paladins and wizards. If a quest genre writer goes to literary genre writing group for advice, they’re bound to get bad advice about throwing out the elves, dwarves and the rest. Let different genres be different genres.
John Mendez- Book Reviews and More 