"God's Chinese Son"

Jonathan Spence's God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan is a history of the Taiping Rebellion (1845-64). This revolt against China's Manchu overlords was the bloodiest uprising in history; over twenty million Chinese died in that war, either in battle or of starvation. Though Spence's book does pay some attention to the political and military aspects of the war, it is its religious history that is the focus of the book. Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the rebellion, preached a new faith, based on Christian teachings but with a heavy overlay of Chinese tradition, and the interplay of those two religious forces makes for a fascinating story.

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There are problems with the book, to be sure. Perhaps the most annoying is Spence's habit of switching between past and present tense, sometimes paragraph to paragraph. There may be a logic to the choice of tense, but I did not notice one. The use of present tense to give greater immediacy to past events is, of course, a time-honored tradition, but it doesn't come off very well here. Nonetheless, I found the overall story interesting enough that I could overlook the stylistic flaws.

Books etc.

I finished Out of the Deep I Cry, which is excellent - the best book of the series so far. I'll probably review it later. I also blitzed through Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book, and may I say that Fforde is an absolute lunatic? (I mean that in the best possible way, of course.) I'm now working my way through Scales of Gold by Dorothy Dunnett, the fourth book in the House of Niccolo series. I think at some point, after I've acquired the whole set, I'll have to read the House of Niccolo straight through, and follow it with the complete Lymond Chronicles. (This will probably have to wait until I have a lot of free time...)

Meanwhile, I've reached the second half of season three of Buffy. I have to say that in that string of episodes, from "Helpless" to "Graduation Day, part 2", Buffy achieves the highest sustained quality level of the entire series. The Angelus arc in season two includes some better episodes, including the three best of the series ("Innocence", "Passion", and "Becoming, part 2"), but they're interspersed with mediocre or simply bad episodes like "Killed by Death" and "Go Fish". The first half of season three has several very good episodes, including "The Wish" (which is the best episode of the season), but the second half has no bad episodes whatsoever. The weakest episode in that string is "The Prom", mainly because of the low quality of the monsters, but that episode has a glorious finale, not to mention Buffy's "You're going to have a prom, if I have to kill everyone on the planet to make it happen!" speech. (Xander: "Yay?") "Helpless", the two-parter "Bad Girls/Consequences", the hilarious "Doppelgangland", "Graduation Day" - it's all good.

One more week until my summer class starts...