Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler

Oracle Bones is Peter Hessler's second book and is even better than the first one (called River Town). What I like about the book is that it connects distant lands and time periods, from Western China to Canton and to America, from the neolithic oracle bones to modern teachers. Big leaps in time and space, but somehow still connected into a single narrative. At the same time, this is not a single narrative but a collection of individual stories, sometimes seemingly unconnected, yet still flowing in the same direction.

Another fun thing is that Hessler steps out of the realm of stereotypes. Almost anything he writes about is atypical, the people, the circumstances, the times. So anything you look at, if you look close enough, is quite different from the general category it is in.

The term "oracle bones" refers to the tortoise plastrons used by the ancient diviners of the Shang dynasty. They cracked the bones and divined on the basis of the cracks. In the process, they also scratched short sentences onto the surface of the bones, and these are today the earliest examples of Chinese writing.

Hessler's Oracle Bones is a book about how China's present mirrors its past, and vice versa. If you were to read a book about China, read this one.

A book on book collecting: A pound of paper

John Baxter, A pound of paper.

This was a great book, I enjoyed every page of it. John Baxter knows how to write and, at the same time, has extensive first-hand experience in collecting books. Collecting books is a passion, quite similar to gambling and the collector often spares no effort or money to get what he is after.

  

I really hate books that tell you how to collect something. They are like those getting rich manuals or guides to sell your junk on eBay. So A pound of paper was a nice surprise because it is as much about books as about the psychology of the collector. I could really relate to the entire experience of collecting Graham Greene editions, even though Greene is not someone I do collect myself.

Collecting books is not an investment. I guess that true art collectors are similar in this way, even though lately people started buying art as a form of investment. But there is usually not a lot of sense in buying books for the sake of reselling them years later for twice as much. So if you are trying to find something invest in, avoid books. Get some Google shares or an apartment is Beijing.