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Mindy's 2019 Randomised Reading List

� 1) Empire of the Sun J.G Ballad
2) Vernon God Little DBC Pierre
3) The Beautiful Room is Empty Edmund White
4) Marks of Identity Juan Goytisolo (WL)
5) A Boy's Own Story Edmund White
� 6) Justine Marquis de Sade
7) Whatever Michel Houellebecq


Swap -3PP

My library doesn’t have marks of identity. Could I please swap?

Hi Mindy, swaps cost 3 points and will come out of your 2019 points score. Swaps can be made from 1st Jan 2019.

I'd like to swap Vernon God Little. Too triggering.

Hi Mindy,

Can you post me a link to your PP list I can't find you so I don't know how many points you have :)

I forgot to make one 😂 it is there now.

Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard
2 stars

Spoiled little rich white boy lives in opulence in Shanghai with his parents in the 1940s, where the Chinese are treated like second class citizens in their own country. Then Pearl Harbor happens and the Japanese take over the city by force, bombing the American and English ships in the harbor and causing mass chaos. In the shuffle, the boy's mother disappears and his father is captured by the Japanese and placed in an internment camp. The boy avoids capture and proceeds to live on his own in a dangerous city turned upside down by war and the changing hands of power in Shanghai. The Chinese servants become empowered and steal everything from the houses they once served in, and one slaps the boy when he asks for help, possibly as retribution for the maltreatment they had put up with for years at the hands of the British. Can the boy survive this newly hostile world on his own? Can he find and reunite with his parents?

I tried to care about the boy, but I couldn't. However bad his life was during this trial it was a thousand times worse for the occupied Chinese. The book doesn't focus much on that because it is told entirely from the point of view of the boy. He had a hard time of it, sure. But I just couldn't muster enough sympathy for him to make the read enjoyable.

Justine by the Marquis de Sade
2 stars

This book was supposedly the raunchiest of its day, and was partly the reason why the Marquis spent his final years in an insane asylum. While it does describe some pretty depraved acts, it is more of a philosophy about why being virtuous is a complete and total waste of time.

The protagonist, Justine, is a virtuous girl intent on keeping that virtue above all else. But she is thrown out into the world at a young age because of the untimely death of her parents, and manages to find herself in situation upon situation where the only way out involves the giving up of said virtue. So many characters come in and tell her why being virtuous is dumb and how she should look upon vice with more favor. But she refuses and of course her virtue is then stolen as a result. Justine isn't a very smart creature, so she keeps finding herself in similar situations wherever she goes.

I found some of the plot interesting, although quite a bit repetitive. The long-winded diatribes describing the virtues of vice were just that, long winded, circular, and kind of boring. I think my eyes glazed over on more than one occasion. It isn't a catalogue of sadism, which I've heard some of his other books are, and there is a plot, but I'm not sure if I am moved to read more of his works. There is one more of his books on the 1001 list, so I will probably get to that one eventually.

New book added