Hi Everyone! :)

I hope that the insane fireworks have scared off all of the bad spirits for the year and leave us all with lots of good luck.

The next book club meeting with be on Feb 21st (next Thursday night) at The Bookworm (6586-9507) at 7pm. We've pre-ordered extra copies of Dai Sijie's Mr Muo's Traveling Couch, so you can swing by there any time to pick up a book. We're only planning to discuss the first portion of the book (unless the vast majority of people who show up have read the whole thing). I've just started on the book and it looks like a great read, with lots to talk about, and I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about it.

For those of you who would prefer a Shunyi meeting at the Book Mark, could you please let me know which date/time works best for you? We could organize that meeting during the day if that's better for people as well.

Also, if you know of anyone else who would be interested in joining with the book club, please have them email me :)

Check out a partial review of the book from the Washington Post here:

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Four years ago, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, its cover adorned irresistibly with red scuffed Mary-Jane shoes, introduced the novelist Dai Sijie to American readers. Like his two main characters, he had been "re-educated" in China's Cultural Revolution, exiled to a remote village to be purged of intellectualism. And while one shouldn't ascribe autobiographical footnotes to fiction, personal experience and a reportorial eye were undoubtedly driving the story. Now comes Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch, and with it a whole new voice -- more wry, more charming and even more quixotic. Mr. Muo is a 40-year-old student of Freud, self-described as China's only psychoanalyst-at-large, a near-sighted klutz who has returned to his home country from his adopted Paris. His main mission, besides introducing 21st-century China to the blessings of psychoanalysis, is to win the release of his university love, a 36-year-old photographer named Volcano of the Old Moon, who has been imprisoned for documenting police torture.

"Love" may be an overstatement; Muo's sexual experience is confined to his notebooks, where he religiously records his dreams in the language of Molière, with the help of a Larousse dictionary. He records these dreams with something like rapture, "especially as he recalls or applies a phrase, perhaps even an entire paragraph, of Freud or Lacan, the two masters for whom his esteem is boundless."

Muo is our hero and straight man, so wonderfully earnest, stepping aside to observe himself, to excoriate and revile his shortcomings, to dream his dreams aloud. While his faith in psychoanalysis is boundless, Dai's omniscient narrator slyly deflates the science so beloved by the protagonist: "Having no French at first, Muo spoke Chinese, of which his psychoanalyst understood not a word; even if he had, he would have been hard put to cope with the dialect of Sechuan, the province from which Muo hailed."