Wednesday, April 27, 2005

The end of the world as we know it

For some people, at least, the world has ended. The big news here in Taiwan is the surprise announcement that Wu Bai and his long-time girlfriend/manager, Ms. Chen Wen Pei, were married in Japan in 2003! The media let the cat out of the bag yesterday, and last night Wu Bai confirmed it on TV, and today the newspapers were full of stories about the secret wedding. While the majority of the fans are extremely happy for the couple, some of the gals are quite crushed and heartbroken. I'm in the happy camp, since to me the man is just a fantasy anyway, so my fantasy Wu Bai remains unhitched :) I mean, gosh & golly, it's not as if I was ever going to actually get him for myself, so why care that he finally married the woman he's been with for over 10 years? I say it's about time he stepped up to the plate.

To drown my sorrow, I went shopping for some new reading material. There's an awesome bookstore called Page One at Taipei 101 (you know, the tallest building in the world, that place), and managed to find five good books for my library. I got Volumes 1 and 2 of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is China's oldest novel. Then I found Gail Tsukiyama's The Language of Threads, which is the sequel to Women of the Silk, a novel I very much enjoyed. Keeping with the Japanese trend, I then picked up Cloud of Sparrows by Takashi Matsuoka, a novel of Japan in 1861, after Japan opened their doors to the West (boy, I'll bet they're still sorry about that). My last purchase was pure fluff, the latest Spenser novel in paperback, Bad Business. Dang, I love Spenser and Hawk! Robert B. Parker's books are so simply written, and Spenser's wit keeps a smile on my face through the entire book. Yup, I already finished reading it.

The distressing thing about my book purchase is that for these five books, I shelled out the sum of $90 US. Ouch ouch ouch! The Spenser novel was the cheapest, and that was almost $9. Thank goodness I've managed to find one secondhand book store here in Tian Mu, but it's not easy to get to. I'll have to make the supreme effort to go there more often, because I'm an insatiable reader, and I'll quickly go broke buying books here!

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