Quote:
Originally Posted by alansplace
i'm currently reading the first of a series of 6 Charlie Chan mysteries called The House Without A Key by Earl Derr Biggers. wow, is the character of charlie chan ever different than the ones protrayed in hollywood movies over the years by a handful of (non-asian) actors.  |
Yeah, that's kind of gone into by my current read-in-progress,
William F. Wu's
A Temple of Forgotten Spirits, which is the kind of thing you'd get if you mashed up Jack Kerouac and urban fantasy and took a Chinese-American guy on a cross-country roadtrip of personal/cultural heritage discovery. He's got a specific story about the ghost of Charlie Chan in Asian-American culture.
Chang Apana, the real detective that Charlie Chan was inspired by was apparently much, much more interesting, to the point where after Earl Derr Biggars met him in person after writing the books, the latter started revising the character to be somewhat more of a person and somewhat less of a caricature.
As for me, just finished reading
Sethra Lavode, the 3rd book in the Viscount of Adrilankha trilogy in
Steven Brust's "Paarfi" set of Dragaera novels.
Somewhat surprisingly, it turns out I hadn't actually read this earlier like I thought I had (although it's possible I've just entirely forgotten the story, as all the Paarfi books tend to blend together for me due to the writing style).
Anyway, a neat wrap-up of all the plot and character points started throughout the "Paarfi" portion of the series, and nice to know how the resurrected Empire got its restart. Although it really is kind of a rather superfluous set of tales, as even the characters we encounter "later" basically stay as they always were, it's just we get details of what they were doing X years ago filled in.
The Paarfi books are a nice read if you already like the Taltos series, but really too self-involved to be all that enjoyable outside that context, in my opinion.