Books: recent purchases

I’ve been plugging away at catching up on some reading this week, hence my relative silence.  But I have bought a couple of books from Abebooks, which is always exciting. 

The first is a reprint of Isaacs’ Scratches On Our Minds, which I enjoyed so much when I got it on inter-Library loan, I just had to buy a copy.

The second is a copy of The Wrath of the Serfs, published by the Foreign Languages Press in 1976 (it’s as old as me!).  It’s a catalogue of the life-size tableaux created towards the end of the Cultural Revolution to propagate the official CCP version of life in pre-’liberation’ Tibet, in a similar vein to the earlier Rent Collector’s Courtyard. 

Looking forward to reading both, though I intend to get the rest of my ‘books on the go’ out of the way first!

What was particularly notable about the latter was that the box it was packaged in had been opened by US Customs.  Not only that, it looked like they’d chucked it about a bit.  Was all battered and bent and squashed.  Luckily the book was well protected and undamaged.  Why did my innocent little parcel attract all this attention?  I can only think it was flagged up for investigation because it was sent to me by ‘Revolution Books’ based in Chicago.  Honestly, haven’t they got more important things to worry about?!

Note-taking: I need a system

In all the years I’ve been studying, I’ve yet to hit on a really effective method of note-taking.  As an undergraduate and while I was doing my MA I used to take hand-written notes as I was reading (which meant I ended up practically copying the whole text with minimal analysis).  When I started my PhD, I tried to do the same thing, with annotated notes (i.e. my thoughts as – and when – they arose) in red pen down the margin.  That was just too much like hard work.  It became increasingly difficult to absorb what the text was about.  So, then I started just reading, but marking quotes or sections of interest with post-it page markers, and followed up with hand-written, or typed notes at a later stage.  This worked okay, until I kept running out of page-markers (and damn they’re expensive!) and ended up with an enormous backlog of notes to be made.  So, at the moment, I’m back to reading books and making hand-written notes (or jottings really) as I go, and typing them up afterwards.  I have got better at analysing and assimilating and cross-referencing texts, but it’s not a satisfactory solution.  I’d be really interested to hear about any other tried and tested note-taking systems!