I loved Peter Hessler’s first China book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze.

And was super keen to get to this, his follow-up.

Publishers Weekly:

Having lived in China for a decade now, fluent in Mandarin and working as a correspondent in Beijing, Hessler displays impressive knowledge, research and personal encounters as he brings the country’s people’s, foibles and history into sharp focus.

He frames his narrative with short chapters about Chinese artifacts: the underground city being excavated at Anyang; the oracle bones of the title (“inscriptions on shell and bone” considered the earliest known writing in East Asia); and he pays particular attention to how language affects culture, often using Chinese characters and symbols to make a point.

A talented writer and journalist, Hessler has courage—he’s undercover at the Falun Gong demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and in the middle of anti-American protests in Nanjing after the Chinese embassy bombings in Belgrade—and a sense of humor (the Nanjing rioters attack a statue of Ronald McDonald since Nanjing has no embassies).

The tales of his Fuling students’ adventures in the new China’s boom towns; the Uighur trader, an ethnic minority from China’s western border, who gets asylum after entering the U.S. with jiade (false) documents; the oracle bones scholar Chen Mengjia, who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution—all add a seductive element of human interest.

… Hessler gets the stories that no one talks about and delivers them in a personal study that informs, entertains and mesmerizes.

Amazon

It’s good. But didn’t captivate.

The best story is that of the minority Uyghur community in Beijing. Hessler befriends one of the dodgy street money traders and recounts the method by which he makes his way illegally to the USA. ($50,000)

I won’t read Hessler’s third China book, Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip. Not until I next travel to China.

If YOU are going to mainland China, these 3 books would be ideal prep.

Bloody Hell.

It’s the largest city in Siberia, the 3rd largest in Russia, with a population of about 1.5 million.

And you couldn’t find it on a map.

Shame.

Fact is … you and I know less about Siberia than any other land mass that size in the world.

Siberia … makes up about 77% of Russia’s territory (13.1 million square kilometres), but is home to only 28% (40 million people) of Russia’s population.

… Almost all the population lives in the south, along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The climate in this southernmost part is Humid continental climate (Köppen Dfb) with cold winters but fairly warm summers lasting at least four months. …

I read Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier, a writer for The New Yorker.

… What he loves is its tragedy and its humor, its stoic practicality and its near-insanity: he calls it “the greatest horrible country in the world,” and Siberia is its swampy, often-frozen, and strikingly empty backyard.

He took five trips there over the next dozen or so years, and Travels in Siberia is based on those journeys. But as in Great Plains, when Frazier travels he follows his own curiosity through time as well as space, telling stories of the Mongols and the Decembrists with the same amused and empathetic eye he brings to his own traveling companions. His curiosity quickly becomes yours, as does his affection for this immense and grudgingly hospitable land. …

comment on Amazon

I don’t think I’ll ever get to see the giant bust of Lenin.

Joshua Kim:

“This is one book that is best as an audiobook, as Ian Frazier is more a storyteller than an author, and his reading of his own book greatly adds to its pleasures. ”