posted by Nk. at 10:15 PM

i broke my heart at the bookstore today. there was a big sale at the national bookstore and there i was drooling at all the books i wanted to buy (remember i lost ALL my books to reming?), -- arundhati roy's the god of small things, fyodor dostoyevsky's crime and punishment, yao ming & ric bucher's yao: a life in two worlds, cormac mcCarthy's the road, mark haddon's the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. but every time i picked out two or three of these precious things a voice in my head that sounded very much like my mother's, chanted, electricity bills, water bills, internet bills.

after prolonged aimless wandering in the bookstore's aisles i left with just one book, ha jin's the crazed (how appropriate), which i got at 50% off. here's what the back of the book says:

ha jin's powerful new novel is an unblinking look into the bell jar of communist chinese society and a portrait of the eternal compromises and deceptions of the human state. professor yang, a teacher of literature at a provincial university, has had a stroke, and his student jian wan -- who is also his prospective son-in-law -- is assigned to care for him. soon the devoted jian finds himself listening, in bafflement and increasing horror, to the professor's ravings.

are these just the outpourings of a broken mind or is yang speaking the truth about his family, his colleagues, and a system in which an intellectual is "just a piece of meat on a cutting board?" and will merely listening cost jian his future? for in china shaken by the tremors of tiananmen square, nothing is more dangerous than the truth.

i haven't torn up the plastic wrap yet (which i enjoy doing) so i've still yet to see if i'm going to like what's actually inside, but i'm pretty excited. also, emir is coming over tomorrow to give me a signed copy (!) of dean alfar's palanca-winning book, salamanca.


so, as them guys at chickenmafia would say, today's still a "yay!"