Land of Big Numbers

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Te-Ping Chen: Land of Big Numbers (2021, Simon & Schuster, Limited)

256 pages

English language

Published May 18, 2021 by Simon & Schuster, Limited.

ISBN:
978-1-4711-9059-9
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3 stars (5 reviews)

4 editions

What a weird book.

3 stars

Whenever I go into reading a more contemporary book, I try to go in without expectations. As my bio says, I am a lover of classics (one of the jokes I used to say was that if the author hadn't been dead for at least 100 years, I wan't interested), I am not that well versed in what has been written in the last 10/20 years. Well, this book was not it. It's not good fiction writing. It's painfully obvious that the author is a journalist with maybe some prose ambitions. While it was interesting having a glimpse of Chinese and its everyday life and people (as an American journalist could tell it/see it), the layout of these short stories was awkward to say the least. Plus, it almost felt like the Chen thought that by adding weird, misplaced metaphores, her short stories would give a more "fictional" impression. Nope. …