Dreams of sex and stage diving by Martin Miller,

A couple weeks ago we were over at kittylyst's and were presented with a large stack of books upon leaving. This was one he thought Bill would like but coming back rather drunkenly on the train of my birthday weekend I started reading it, and then a couple evenings later sat down and finished it. Kitty did warn us that it had "one of the worst sex scences ever written in the seond paragraph" but honestly I didn't think it was that bad. Punk girls having sex, even while a little sick, will always be more interesting to read than straight sex, in my opinion. The book was a fun little story that drifted between gritty realism and an adult fairy story. Set in Brixton in the 90s among squatters unable to fulfill any of their dreams, it was full of characters who were upset of relationships, and their inability to get anything done. There was also a very cool video game that was being written by the main characters brother which was definitly the funniest part of the story. It was an enjoyable book, and much better than most modern fiction I've read lately, but I'm not sure I'm going to rush out and read anything else by Miller.

The Chinese Scholar's Desk by Nigel Cameron

This book I picked up with Shanghai Calenders. It's a lovely collection of pictures of the Chinese calligraphy brushes, inkstones, paper, calligraphy and old photos. It's accompanied by a text throughout, however the text makes the very common mistake of refering to Imperial China as one big unchanging time period, and while outlining how candidates would have to progress through examinations neglects to mention, when these practices took place. But really it's not a book you buy for the writing, rather for the lovely pictures it contains. It was very beautiful.

Susan Whitfield, Aurel Stein on the Silk Road.

Susan Whitfield is one of my idols, she is in charge of the International Dunhuang Project, digitising the Dunhuang documents and making them freely available on the web. She works for the British Library and is speaking at the conference I want to go to in May. So it's not very surprising that I loved this book. It's almost a coffee table book, full of pictures from Stein's expeditions, but it also contains a very interesting biography of the man and his adventures. Despite having studied his trips to China before I found that I learned an awful lot from this book. I was expected to be less interested in his travels to other places but found that I was fascinated by it all. I also learned much more about his trips to China, including that he was fascinated by Xuanzang, (The monk whose own travels became legendary in Journey to the West). There were lots of extracts from the books that Stein wrote about his own travels and explorations which I now want to be able to track down and read. I also learned that the travel writings of the monks had also already been translated into English and I now need to find copies of those to read! I also feel like I owe an apology, in my research for my essay on the Dunhuang documents I did last year, every source I read made a point of saying how Pelliot was able to read Chinese and Stein couldn't so his documents ended up being a better collection. However, this paints a rather unfavourable picture of Stein, he never learned Classical Chinese, but he did learn to speak modern Chinese, and studied at least 7 other languages. A great book, gorgeous pictures and a fascinating account of a very interesting man.