The Four Books

Bored. Dislike of the style (perhaps, not helped by the translation?).

Great insight - delivered in a fable-like way - into a major chapter in China's history that I didn't know so much about. It seems to foreshadow the bigger environmental and social problems in the world today.

Seemingly Kafkaesque in its depiction of a Chinese reeducation labor camp, yet when you learn about the conditions during China's Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), you realize that the book is actually very close to reality. Blinded by a vision of communist ideals and a planned economy, Mao set out to restructure China's agriculture with unrealistic goals and poor decision making. Intellectualism was punished, scholars become peasants, production goals were lies and exaggerations, a reward systems encouraged cheating, and everyone was made to report on everyone else. All together this led to economic disaster, the great famine and a death count between 18 and 45 million. Quite brilliant, a good history lesson, and not as dry as you'd expect from an allegorical story. The novel falls in line with other Kafkaesque, allegorical and surreal tales like [b:The Woman in the Dunes 9998 The Woman in the Dunes Kōbō Abe https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1361254930l/9998.SY75.jpg 58336] or [b:The Queue 30186905 The Queue Basma Abdel Aziz https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463240555l/30186905.SY75.jpg 24080947].