Robot-mel London, United Kingdom

Snow Queen on the other hand was a bi-lingual Chinese (traditional) and English children's story I borrowed from the library. I think I'm going to give up on the dual language ones from the library as they are all just western stories retold into Chinese and the Chinese kids books at the Chinese bookshop are much better! I first read the story in Chinese and was a bit confussed as it was so disjointed. I then read the English version and it was just as bad! it was kinda like it should have been a prompt book. Rather than the parents reading the sentance on the page they should have used that as a guide for making up their own version of the story. This really was the worst version of the snow queen I've read and the illustrations were totally uninspiring. I think the dual language books from the London Consortium of Libraries definitely turn out to be a failed experiement.

I'm so happy I got to read this comic book series. It's really helping me practice my traditional characters. It starts with the big skateboarding hero of the first comic book working in a cafe. Which everyone finds very amusing. The story lines are mostly just focused on romances, with some mysterys about who is related to who but the characters are enjoyable. I just about managed to follow along this time. I think I will definitely go back and re-read these as they are lots of fun.

I'm on a chinese pop music community on LJ and one of the members was giving away cds and dvds as well as these comics. I find comics really good for practicing Chinese and so I asked her to send me the 3 West side story 西街少年 comics. I just finished the first one. I read the whole thing in one go and I really liked it!!! It was in traditional characters which made it a bit harder for me, I had to add a new imput method to my iphone so I could look up words in the dictionary! But overall it wasn't too difficult to follow, I just got a little lost towards the end and had to go back and re-read parts to figure out what had happened.

The book was pretty great. It was all about teen skaters in high school who hung out on West side street. There were four characters who were the main gang. I have to say that one of the most lovely things about this was one of the four guys was actually transgender! She was a "tomboy" whose secret was revealed when she was hitting on the main girl character at the begining of the novel, when the main girl grabbed her chest and found out she had boobs! But she's totally accepted by the guys and they don't treat her/him any differently which was just brilliant!

The main character girl was also pretty fantastic. In her first scene she had a huge rant about the way that men and boys treat women and how they need to respect them and not see them as just sex objects. She's always conflicting with the main guy character as they try and find her missing schoolmate.

The story is a bit more than you'd expect to find in a teen comic about skaters, there's hints of prositution and lots of involvement of the police. I have two more books in the series to read and I'm really looking forward to them. I think I will end up reading them quite a few times just to make sure I understand everything. But I'm very happy I was sent them.

This is a Traditional Chinese comic version of St Mark's gospel. I decided to read it as I need more practice reading traditional Chinese characters and thought that as I knew the gospel quite well already it should make it fairly easy to read. However, I found that I still needed an English translation to read along side of this. I think this was partly due to the phonetic translations of all the names, places and Jewish words. It was good practice despite that though.

It made me realise how odd Mark's gospel is, so much casting out of demon (though that did make for some neat looking pictures!) Also I don't think I'd ever realised before that Salome was supposed to be there at the cruxifiction and the resurrection, just the two Marys. Which I thought was very interesting, though I wished they'd explained how she went from wanting John's head to being there! But then women really just aren't as important as men in the gospels!

This version also features explanations by a cartoon priest about the different events in the gospel, but I must admit I skipped most of those! I also have Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian Chinese comics. Now I think I need to read one of those for a bit of balance!

This book is one of the reasons I'm very glad I'm a member of SOAS library. It is totally gorgeous, and the cheapest copy of it is £86! It is put out by the Printing Museum of Hong Kong (a place I shall have to visit someday). And is just filled with beautiful reproductions of Chinese books from the earliest period on.

The book is dual language in Chinese (traditional characters) and English. The text is quite brief and supports the idea that printing in China began in the 6th century. Even though the earliest dated book we have from China is several centuries later. In fact it doesn't mention the Diamond Sutra from Dunhuang at all, presumably as it resides in the British Library and not in China. But it talks about other earlier items found in Japan and Korea. There is a little overview of each dynasty and the highlights of their production of books. It also includes a description of different types of bindings. As well as a description of the different types of inventions of moveable type printing in China (but does not mention when they were used).

The text is a little propagandaish in places but that kinda just adds to its charm. I would have to say that it should be read with that in mind as there are many challenges to the ideas that are here presented as "fact". But nonetheless it offers an interesting point of view.

However, the real reason for reading this book is the amazing high quality image reproductions of the old texts. They are simply stunning in their clarity and the book is full of so many gorgeous images.

This book is a collection of essays in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Harvard Yenching Library. It is a truly great look at writing and books in China and East Asia from early bronze inscriptions to digital libraries and digitisation projects on mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The first essay looks at Zhou dynasty bronze inscriptions and how one is very similar to part of the official Zhou histories, that scholars had previously thought had little to do with the actual Zhou. Puett looks at how people who wrote were originally sages, but then people who wrote later claimed not to be sages but rather to organise and comment on the knowledge of the sages, and says how this shaped the way books were written in China. It does seem that there are more commentaries than original works sometimes!

Wang talks of something I'd not been aware of previously, a woman writing a palindrome, or poem that can be read in many directions, weaving the message into brocade so her husband who left will return to her. The story is gets even more interesting as in the Tang these type of poems take on a whole astrological meaning and get caught up in the weaving maid myths and even get appropriated by Wu Zetian. It was an area I'd heard nothing about before, despite reading everything I can about women, religion, Tang dynasty and Wu Zetian. What was lacking was any sort of gender analysis of the poems/mirrors. Definitely an area for further research once I've finished my dissertation. Though once again has an interesting tie between Wu Zetian and the written word.

Lurie talked about how recent archaeological discoveries are changing the idea of writing in Japan in the 11th and 12th centuries. It was fascinating to read about all the discoveries made, as I know nothing about Japan and knowing there were so many newly discovered texts for historians was exciting.

Whitfield told the story of the Dunhuang manuscripts, nothing new or interesting here, but good for those who haven't already heard about the history of the manuscripts, the cave and IDP's task of digitising them.

Chia writes about commercial publishers if Nanjing and Jianyang. This essays is a smaller condensed version of her book and other essay. But what is new here is her work talking about the publishing done by the imperial princes. Rawski looks at the printing in the Qing dynasty in non-Han languages. One of the things that is interesting is that even in the Qing there was a strong manuscript culture alongside the print culture, particularly for non-Han language books.

Walraven talks about book culture in Korea from 1100-1900. What is interesting is how metal movable type was used in Korea from an early time and how it was useful for small print runs. Despite what would be considered "technological advances" Korea didn't seem to have the same book culture as China. The number of books produced was much smaller and they didn't have their first bookshop till the 16th century.

I must admit to skipping the next set of essays talking about more modern developments of book culture for Japan and Vietnam (as at the moment I really only have time to read things related to my dissertation) The last section looked at different digital library projects and digitisation projects, many of which are unfortunately subscription based, but I will definitely be looking at ones that are available on the web.

A good book with interesting essays by the leading scholars of the field covering many different areas of book culture in East Asia, but with an overwhelming focus on China.