Book Beginning: The Boat Rocker by Ha Jin

The Boat Rocker by Ha Jin, October 25, 2016

Book beginning:

Chapter One

A week before the fourth anniversary of 9/11, my boss, Kaiming, barged into my office, rattling a three-page printout in his hands.

"Look at this, Danling," he said, dropping the papers on my desk. "This is outrageous! How could they claim that George W. Bush had agreed to endorse a book by Yan Haili? Everyone can tell it's a lie the size of heaven."

Page 56:

Then she said, "I have written a script, and a movie company has been considering it."

About the book: From the award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash: an urgent, timely novel that follows an aspiring author, an outrageous book idea, and a lone journalist’s dogged quest for truth in the Internet age. (publisher)

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader. 

Book Beginning: A MAP OF BETRAYAL by Ha Jin

The Friday 56: *Grab a book, any book. *Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader  *Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you. *Post it. *Add your (url) post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginnings at Rose City Reader.

A Map of Betrayal: A Novel by Ha Jin, published November 4, 2014 by Pantheon.
Genre: historical fiction, spy novel

Book beginning:

My mother used to say, "Lilian, as long as I'm alive, you must have nothing to do with that woman." She was referring to Suzie, my father's mistress. 

"Okay, I won't," I would reply. 

Nellie, my embittered mother, had never forgiven my father for keeping another woman, though he'd died many years before. I kept my promise. I did not approach Suzie Chao until my mother, after a tenacious fight against pancreatic cancer, succumbed last winter. Death at eighty - I can say she lived a long life. 

Page 56: 

On the very afternoon he checked into a mall hotel on Queen's Road in downtown Hong Kong, he called Bingwen, who was delighted to hear about his arrival and eager to see him. 

Book description: A tale of espionage and conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two families and two countries—China and the United States.

Found at the library, a spy novel I'm looking forward to reading.

Sunday Salon: The Importance of Being.....

Welcome to the Sunday Salon!

 Would you believe I'm reading for the first time, The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People by Oscar Wilde. This after looking at some short comedy skits a friend had written, produced, and taped. He could decide to do a Jamaican-style version of Earnest, so I'm sending this to him!

I've been jumping around from book to book, and have settled on a humorous mystery novel set in India: The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken by Tarquin Hall. I needed a comedy break after (trying to) read The Orphan Master's Son, a novel that takes itself way too seriously. (But then I've never been to North Korea.)


I also had requested Ha Jin's Nanjing Requiem from Amazon Vine and have been sitting on it, another serious novel. But I think I'll get to it soon.

A Scandinavian-style crime novel I plan to read is Pierced by Thomas Enger, featuring Norwegian crime reporter Henning Juul, second in the series. I've been finding recent Scandinavian crime books very, very noir or dark, but we'll see about this one.

Also on the list is The King's Damsel by Kate Emerson, the fifth in the historical romance and intrigue series.

Now I've exhausted the different genres I plan on reading.

What are you reading this week?

Book Review, Waiting: A Novel by Ha Jin

In modern China, two people wait over seventeen years for each other to have a change of heart that would profoundly affect their lives.

From publisher's description of Waiting: A Novel by Ha Jin:
"For more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated... modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young - a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he visits in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce....


... Ha Jin vividly conjures the texture of daily life in a place where the demands of human longing must contend with the weight of centuries of custom. "

My comments: Lin's anguish in wanting a divorce so he can marry the woman of his choice is balanced by the long-suffering patience of the wife he left behind, Shuyu. A very worthwhile novel about a clash of the new and the old in a new China that changed only in some aspects.

The book was first printed in 1999 by writer Ha Jin and was a National Book Award finalist. Ha Jin decided after the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989 to remain in the U.S. I pulled this book from my personal library to review for Jen's China Challenge over at Biblio File.

An award winning writer, Ha Jin is now a professor of English at Boston University. His other well known book is A Free Life.

A Free Life by Ha Jin

My latest read - am about half-way through Ha Jin's A Free Life, a novel that describes the life of a Chinese student studying at Brandeis who is stranded in the U.S. after Tiananmen and who tries to make a life here with his wife and young son. A great book that helps us to understand the new immigrant experience.