For years, probably back as far as a trip with daughters Emily and Elizabeth in Spain in the 1990s, I carried and read the same book, Joseph Conrad, Chance. Of course I read other things but I must have read this book at least twice and finally decided to move on this summer! I read Conrad’s Typhoon. Heart of Darkness and Victory. Really liked Victory. Before I left NH, I was even reading an autobiography by his wife Decided to see which Conrad books scholars thought were with best and now I am in Nostromo. On about page 88, making reasonable progress.
I have always been a China watcher. Love the idea that a dictatorship is giving the US a run for its money as the most successful government. As you may know, the US Chine strategy was always to support their economic growth in any way possible, assuming that China would go the way the rest of the world has, with the end of subsistence living and economic success comes the desire of the population for things that democracy provides. Or at least did before Trump.
I really enjoyed a series of books by Peter Hessler. I have read some of the accounts of early protestant missionaries in China. The China book I am loving here in Cancun is Young China by Zak Dychtwald. He writes that the most important thing one used to want to know about someone to understand them better was which area of China they came from. Now it is which generation. He is talking a lot about the one child policy and its effects.
I almost brought along the selection for our January couples book club, Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue. I was enjoying it but figured out I had 10 reading days before the meeting once I got back. So, no need to put it at the top of the must make progress list.