dangermousie | Couple of book recs...

I don't normally post about books too much on my LJ because I have enough people to discuss them with in real life (as opposed to dramas, anime or BSG).

But I do want to recommend Lao She's Cat Country, which is considered one of the first Chinese scifi novels.

For some reason, I was remembering it today.

I first read the novel when I was about 12, in Russian translation, and fell madly in love with it. And you know what? I've reread it a number of times since, and it has always stuck with me, just as well.

Cat Country (also translated as 'City of Cats') belongs to one of my favorite genres: dystopia. It is a very thinly veiled and very harsh and hopeless critique of the then-contemporary (1930s) Chinese society. The narrator (but you can't really call him anything as active as a protagonist, he is largely a passive observer) is a Chinese astronaut whose ship crashes on Mars. Mars (or at least the country he has landed in) is populated by cats, and the cat society is brutal, stagnating, corrupt. There are people who fight against it (Little Scorpion, a rebellious intellectual son of an aristocrat whom the narrator ends up being friends with, is one such) but it's ultimately futile.

It's an awesome book. It's been translated into English.

Another book to check out, very very different, it Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden. It's about the hunt for Pablo Escobar, a violent and powerful Columbian druglord of the Medellin cartel, but the thing I found most interesting wasn't the description of the hunt, but the description of Columbia at the time, as a completely lawless, falling-apart society.