Books I read in 2024

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff

The best book I read this year was Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff. Much as I enjoyed it, it took me forever.

The copy I read is printed and physically huge, so I didn’t carry it around with me; I had it by my bed. But it’s also an intellectually challenging book that requires concentration. So I didn’t really want to read it at bedtime. It sat there for months, until I made it a priority to sit down and get through it.

The truth is, my reading habits have changed. After I moved from Singapore to China near the end of 2022, I read fewer books overall, as part of the associated swath of lifestyle changes, and a larger proportion of my reading was ebooks in 2023 and 2024. I brought plenty of printed books with me, and I still can (and do) buy printed books in English (in China and when visiting the US), but I lost the habit of carrying a paper book around, and the habit of reading just before lights out. I almost stopped reading paper books in favor of ebooks: in 2024, I read 9 printed books out of 45 total.

In 2024 especially, I took advantage of free public domain ebooks after realizing that I was buying cheap ebooks even though I don’t much like the idea of buying ebooks at all—and I know darn well I shouldn’t be buying ANY books just because they’re a bargain price! So now my goal (again, still) is to try to do a better job following the last-in-first-out rule I made that I’ve been struggling with for a while.

See below for a complete list, book cover thumbnails, and thoughts on the quantity, length, format, and content of the books I read in 2024.

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Places visited in 2024

Siqi and I visited 2 European countries and approximately 9 cities in China in 2024. I took thousands of photos on my phone! The road trip that Siqi and I went on with my parents was particularly special. See below for an illustrated summary of where we went when.

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Movies watched in 2024

In 2024, I watched 50 movies (well, 46 movies, a miniseries, and three tv shows).

Part of the reason the number is so big is that I went on two international trips and watched 13 movies on planes. I try to watch foreign movies that I’d never even hear about, rather than Hollywood movies that I already know I want to see.

Siqi and I only watched 2 movies in theaters. China does screen Hollywood movies in English, but you kinda have to look out for them and plan to go when they’re available, and we didn’t pay that much attention.

We (re)watched 14 movies and shows on DVD. Sadly, most of my DVDs are currently in storage.

Luckily, Chinese streaming services are super cheap and have a ton of English-language Hollywood movies, and we have a big TV in our living room. So we watched 21 movies and shows online. (Still, like everyone who uses a streaming service, we had to go looking for things on multiple platforms because licensing.)

See below for the complete list, with comments and recommendations.

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26 Years of Doorstoppers

From 1999 to 2024, I have read at least one book over 1,000 pages every year.*

*Except 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2020 (?!).

According to my records, the longest books in those years were:

  • 2015 – Gone with the Wind (862 pages)
  • 2017 – Roots (899 pages)
  • 2018 – The Annotated Malay Archipelago (761 pages)
  • 2020 – Don Quixote (768 pages)

Caveats to the caveats: My copy of Gone with the Wind was printed really dense. Other copies (including the first edition) were more than 1,000 pages. Don Quixote is also often if not usually more than 1,000 pages in English. So I think these two still qualify me as having followed my “rule” of reading at least one 1,000-page book every year.

Roots and The Annotated Malay Archipelago really don’t qualify, though… What happened in 2017 and 2018?

What happened was, my local book group leader decided we would read The Dream of the Red Chamber! I read the five-volume Penguin version translated by Hawkes and Minford, titled The Story of the Stone, from October 26, 2017 to January 14,  2018.

Vol. 1 – 540 pages
Vol. 2 – 601 pages
Vol. 3 – 637 pages
Vol. 4 – 398 pages
Vol. 5 – 383 pages

Total 2,559 pages!

That’s more than equivalent to two 1,000-page books, so I’m going to count The Story of the Stone as my long book for both 2017 and 2018.

So, if granted a little flexibility, I can actually rather truthfully say:

From 1999 to 2024, I actually have read at least one book over 1,000 pages every year!

Or we can say that since there are more than 26 doorstoppers on the list, the average is more than one per year anyway. (Whatever! Much books! Very reading! Such wow!)

See below for the list of all the 1,000-page books (by year and by genre) and some comments.

Continue reading 26 Years of Doorstoppers

“English” on signs

I included some funny English signs in the post about the journey to Longquan; I saw a lot all in on the same day, mostly in the same place. But I saw and took photos of others in various other places. Rather than put them in posts about those places, I’ve collected the rest of the strange English signs here. Enjoy!

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Sightseeing in Shanghai

My parents’ visit is coming to an end, and they will shortly fly off from Shanghai Pudong Airport back to the US (via Seoul), and Siqi and I will return to our home and respective offices Hangzhou. But we have time to see a few more sights before we part.

See below for photos of The Bund and Yu Old Street (including some from 2010!), plus a couple of Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station, where Siqi and I caught the train back to Hangzhou.

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The Shanghai Museum

Although the Wikipedia article hasn’t realized it yet, there are currently *two* Shanghai Museum locations: the old one on People’s Square on the west bank of the river in Huangpu District, which opened in 1996 and is shaped like a ding (an ancient round bronze cooking vessel), and the extremely new huge rectangular one in the east in Pudong New Area, which opened in phases in 2024 (February, June, December). The museum (in both incarnations) is dedicated to ancient Chinese art, and has galleries displaying bronze, calligraphy, paintings, seals (stamps or chops), ceramics, numismatics, and jade. It is waaay too big to see everything in one visit!

On our visit to the new location in the east, we borrowed some audioguide devices and went through the ceramics gallery and the jade gallery—and that was all we had time and energy for before dinner.

Casting around for a restaurant, we wound up at what turns out to be Tripadvisor’s first-ranked mid-range dinner restaurant recommendation for the whole city of Shanghai! It’s a Turkish restaurant called Efes, and it was fantastic.

See below for photos of the museum, lots of porcelain, and a bit of jade. Plus, read about what I discovered when I looked through photos from my visit to the old Shanghai Museum in 2010.

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Hengshan Garden Hotel, Shanghai

How do you choose a hotel when you travel? I wanted a nice hotel in Shanghai, somewhere reasonably central, not too expensive, and not too modern and soulless.

I figured I could skip the research phase of hotel selection and just book the hotel in the French quarter that I remember staying at before, in 2010—if I could figure out which one it was. Luckily, in 2010 I took a photo of the hotel sign!

Still, booking was not as straightforward as I assumed it would be. The hotel had been bought by the hotel next door, so the name had changed, from Hengshan Picardie Hotel to Hengshan Garden Hotel. Upon arrival, we discovered they had closed down what had been the main entrance on the corner. In fact, not just the lobby, but also the rooms we stayed in weren’t in the original building I remembered. Still, the experience was fine overall.

See below for 10 photos of the hotel, then and now.

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Impression West Lake

Someone at some point recommended seeing the Impression West Lake show, and my parents expressed interest, so we made a plan to go and went. Siqi drove us to the Yellow Dragon Stadium complex and parked, and we all walked to the ticket office, had dinner at a noodle place nearby, watched the show, and went back to the car.

See below for 20 photos from our walk and the show.
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Back to Hangzhou

On the way back to Hangzhou, we detoured to two places that had been recommended to us by the hotel guy in Huangshan City.

First, we tried to visit Ancient Huizhou town. We drove there, parked, got out,  visited the washroom, went in the ticket office… and decided we just weren’t up to it. It was just too sunny and hot for walking around. So we got back in the air-conditioned car and left. In the parking lot, I got some photos of car license plates that I needed for my collection of photos of car license plates, so that was good.

Then, we went to another tourist site, a place with yellow mud Hui-style houses. Same problem, but worse: we would have had to take a shuttle bus into the tourist area, which would have made it hard to leave if we got tired of walking around. We called it quits and headed back to the highway to Hangzhou. But we enjoyed the scenery on the little roads on our detour, and the mountains along the highway looked pretty cool too.

See below for 16 photos from our drive from Huangshan back to Hangzhou.

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