<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="2" > Searchlight Book Reviewer Good Book List September 2021 Top 10 Nonfiction Original Good Book List</h1>
The "Reading Searchlight Book Critic Award" is hosted by Tencent Group + Reading Group, co-organized by QQ Reading, WeChat Reading, Tencent News, and undertaken by the Searchlight Book Critics Association. According to the votes of 33 readers, 10 Chinese and foreign novels, 10 Chinese and foreign genre novels, 10 non-fiction Chinese original good books, and 10 non-fiction translation books are selected every month. According to the readers' votes, the popular Top 5 books in the 4 lists per month are rated.
We pay tribute to those good works that have "the beauty of literature, the truth of thought, the weight of history, attention to the present, elegant narrative, and beautiful expression", creativity, imagination, and exploration.
Here are the top 10 non-fiction original books for September 2021, in no particular order.
Thanks to the authors, editors-in-charge, and producers and publishers of these works.
Non-fiction | Chinese original | essay
Chen Mengjia and His Friends
Written by Fang Jixiao
Life, Reading, and New Knowledge Triptych Bookstore
August 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Shi Hang (book critic, screenwriter)
"Chen Mengjia and His Friends" The first book is in the material, a large number of original private letters between Mr. Chen and his deceased colleagues, have been sorted out in an orderly manner, and the warmth and frost in the years are present, without whitewashing, enough for those who have a heart to investigate carefully;
The second noble has a position, for Chen Mengjia, who committed suicide twice in the catastrophe and finally abandoned the world, the author Fang Jixiao has a kind of confidant sincerity when the depression is different, that is, to seek justice for others, that is, to clearly explain who is the treasure of the cherished talent, who is in a hurry, the credentials are like mountains, and the thousand autumns can be learned;
The third noble is to understand restraint, and those narrative laying out do not make people feel strong and greasy at first glance.
Nineteen groups (counting twenty) Chen Mengjia's friends, their history of interaction with Mr. Chen is in this book, which is equivalent to recalling Chen Mengjia's life twenty times, but the author knows how to cut and avoid, so that you can read without heavy complexity, only feel that it is twenty sighs in your ears. Time and again, in 1966, it appeared on the horizon, crushing the little days of our Mr. Dreamer and this naked son's enthusiasm, loyalty, and dedication.
Non-fiction | Chinese original | Literary treatises
Chen Yinke and His World
Liu Kedi
Hebei Education Press
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Jin Li (Professor, Fudan University)
Although there was once a so-called "Chen Yin Ke Fever" inside and outside the reading circle, however, from the original meaning of Mr. Chen, it was basically not considered as an ordinary person's statement, and second, its writing was "deep and high, pretending to be swaying" (Qian Mu language), and the positive and negative meanings on the paper really made ordinary readers scratch their heads. Finally waited for a book that bridged the bridge. Mr. Liu Kedi has been studying Chen Yinke for many years, and this book expounds the writing background and main content of Chen Yinke's representative research in simple and simple language, supplemented by relevant anecdotes and interesting facts, which is extremely readable. It embodies cutting-edge achievements and can also serve as a model for speaking to the public.
Non-fiction | Chinese original | history
The Great History of the Silk Road: When Ancient China Met the World
By Guo Jianlong
Tianxi Culture and Tiandi Publishing House
September 2021
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Song Chenxi (Senior Media Personality, Writer, Book Translator)
"The Great History of the Silk Road: When Ancient China Encountered the World" is sprinkled with 600,000 words, centered on the Silk Road, telling the history of China's foreign development and exchanges in the past 2,000 years from the Western Han Dynasty to before the Opium War.
Through the perspective of global history, this book aims to clarify a question to people: why ancient Chinese had a strong curiosity about the outside world, but after the Ming and Qing dynasties, they closed themselves and closed the country.
Zhang Qian, Ban Chao, Faxian, Kumarosh, Du Huan, Xuanzang, Song Yun, Wison, Mark Polo, Rubuk, Qiu Chuji, Ibn Battuta, Basuma, Xavier, Zheng He, Matteo Ricci, Chen Cheng, John Tang, Macartney... Through historical materials, the author restores the wonderful story of a personal character exploring the outside world, shows the feelings and shocks of these explorers when they first encountered a foreign civilization, and discusses how the cognition brought by these people has influenced the attitude of Chinese foreign exchanges in different eras. In the process of narrating with characters as the main axis, the author deals with the historical changes of Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Europe, Africa and even the Americas. It can be said that this book has slowly unfolded a long picture of world history for us, and with wonderful brushstrokes, it has connected people and people in different eras and exchanges between countries.
As a freelance writer, the author Guo Jianlong has traveled around the world, based on walking, relying on information, and has written several historical travelogues that have both historical depth and realistic care. Therefore, when the author writes about certain areas that many historical figures have passed, he will also integrate his own personal experience, so that the reader has a sense of immersion. The description of different countries in the world also condenses the author's previous research and travel experiences in different regions. For many authors, this is rarely done, which is also an important value of this book.
In addition, relying on historical materials, the author also expounded a lot of profound insights, and unearthed many historical facts that had been previously ignored: for example, the "Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty" has intelligence characteristics, Zheng He's seven voyages to the West actually contain his own "selfish intentions", and the Southern Ming Yongli Dynasty once asked the Pope for help... One by one, seemingly bizarre views, supported by the historical materials excavated by the author, have become convincing, making people sigh at the richness and excitement of history after reading
The title of the book is "The Great History of the Silk Road: When Ancient China Meets the World", and this "big" word is truly deserved!
Non-fiction | Chinese original | A collection of essays
Times and Portraits
Wang Yao
Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Fu Xiaoping (Director of the Criticism Department of The Literary Daily)
"Times and Portraits" is the latest collection of essays by critic and writer Wang Yao, which in a sense can be seen as a continuation of "A Man's Eighties", which he published a few years ago, and is a return of a writer to an intellectual. As the commentary said, Wang Yao's writing is "invisible", he relies more on content than form, and relies on narrative rather than emotion.
Through his delicate and restrained writing, we were able to return to his hometown hand in hand with him, "meeting" one after another unrepeatable legends of life: "Grandma" who resolutely refused to return to the village to greet the end of his life, "Grandpa Tian" who wrote well and was full of scriptures, "cousin" who loved to read but was defined as lazy by the villagers, Teacher Zuo who could play the accordion but lost contact... Through these portraits, we can glimpse the colorful light and shadow of the times. And those past in life also constitute the ideological background of Wang Yao as an intellectual with an independent and introspective consciousness, and also respond to what he wrote in the afterword: "At any time, intellectuals are faced with the problem of how to live by themselves in the times. These feelings reinforced an idea I had put forward earlier: prose is the way intellectuals exist in spirit and emotion. ”
The Unstructed Life
Written by Li Weichang
Yilin Publishing House
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Zhou Limin (Scholar, Executive Deputy Director of Ba Jin's Former Residence)
The Undemolished Life and several previous reading essays unlessly expose the author as a man of great reading, and even more amazing is how good his reading appetite is: from Flaubert to Naipaul, kiyoharu Matsumoto, Seiichi Morimura, and of course, Sontag and Isaiah Berlin seem to have taken his reading "character" upside down. I appreciate this freedom to read without boundaries, and in a sense, this freedom is close to the purity and essence of reading. The author's writing is also free, and in addition to the writer's text, he obviously refers to a large number of biographical materials and research literature, however, the author is not bound by it, but instead moves in and out of the inside and outside with ease, and opens up and integrates his own feelings and experiences with the text. Thus, this is not only a reading essay, but also a mental self-statement of the author's exploration of life and perception of life through reading, as the title strongly implies.
Non-fiction | Chinese original | Review anthology
"Running Collection"
By Li Jingze
Flower City Press
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Wang Xueying (Senior Editor and Critic, Wen Wei Po)
He interacts with the spirit of heaven and earth, he gets along with all corners of the world, he speaks freely with ideas that blend with sensibility, and he travels between literature and daily life in the form of essays. "Running Collection" is Li Jingze's latest collection of essays, which includes various comments, prefaces, essays and dialogues on literature and art in recent years, which include discussions on the frontier issues of Chinese literature and art, comments by important Contemporary Writers at home and abroad, and detailed analysis of literary phenomena in recent years. The literature in Li Jingze's eyes is to connect all kinds of irrelevant things on the earth, all kinds of things that are out of reach, and all kinds of things scattered in the sky like stars to form a wonderful star map.
He has a unique mind and is both literary and beautiful. His humorous and witty tone is like a mountain breeze leisurely blowing through the peaks of thought, so that you will not feel dull and depressed when you pursue and understand your thoughts, and when he talks about important issues, he will not gladly think that he is high-end and clever, but natural and kind; when he explains complex issues, there is no difficulty and confusion, but a weightless and smooth. He understood "Running Collection" as a kind of speech, and in the speech he reached the essence of literature. This is not only a way of writing an article, a way of thinking, but also a habit of expression.
His "Ten Worlds, One World" is like the beginning of a vivid and wonderful class in contemporary world literature. He introduces us to ten writers who belong primarily to the 21st century and confronts them in the era of globalization and the post-Cold War: writers have to reflect on their complex identities in the midst of chaotic and intricate historical experiences and cultural conflicts, and they want to give shape to people's unconsciousness and gain consciousness. Atwood and Monroe reveal that there is a secret isomorphic relationship between Canadian subjectivity and female subjectivity; the conflict between Christian civilization and Islamic civilization intertwined in Pamuk's body and eyes; compared to Pamuk and Oz's commitment to building a homeland, Haruki Murakami embodies the impulse to face the other direction of globalized "modernity"... They are all opening up and confronting new problem fields, and they are writing new stories about people, the world, and themselves.
There were inner ripples in his expression... His words take you out of your daily comfort zone and into the wilderness, and his essays are profound, wise, temperamental, and readable.
Non-fiction | Chinese original | Collection of Cultural Studies
"Where the song sounds is my hometown"
By Dima
Reading Culture Tianjin People's Publishing House
"Where the Song Sounds is My Hometown" is a book with a concentrated theme, content and text, but it is quite a miscellaneous book, which is probably the characteristic of the era of instant writing. The wonderful content of the book is still the two parts of folk songs and storytelling, which capture, record and discover those parts abandoned by the history and consciousness dominated by words, which have become historical masterpieces, but once upon a time they were so colorful and vivid. As a result, the geography, history, culture, and so many obscured lives of a region are restored or preserved in the book. This is a classic book passed down to future generations, and in its present appearance, I always feel that it is an anxious premature child.
Non-fiction | Chinese original | A collection of essays
"The Taste of Time"
Yan Feng
Hundred Flowers Literary and Art Publishing House
June 2021
Searchlight Good Book Judge | He Ping (Professor, Nanjing Normal University)
Professor Yan Feng is a newcomer in the media era. In the field of media and science fiction literature he studied, he stood at the forefront of the times, but his research was not the thesis of our academic bureaucracy today, "Industrial Party", he was a "player", a yogi wanderer. If it were not for this background, "The Taste of Time" would not be the "time" of the present, the taste would not be this "taste", and the text would not be the current article. It is precisely because the time Yan Feng devotes himself to has the present, the extremely fast, the fast, the future and the distant, that the "slow taste" of "The Taste of Time" has been redefined. Professor Yan Feng often watches Professor Yan Feng post his "simple meal" every day in his WeChat circle of friends, enlarge those pictures to see the utensils, ingredients, and appearances of a simple meal, not only utensils, ingredients, and products, but also the shadows of the four seasons, wind and moon, flower shadows, etc., a long history of life, swaying posture. Therefore, reading "The Taste of Time" is nothing more than another kind of "simple meal" for him. Moreover, the so-called "essay" must be made to "follow". This, "The Taste of Time" did.
Non-fiction | Chinese original | Long documentary
The Kitchen of the North: A Culinary History for a Family
By Jiang Yun
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Wang Chunlin (Professor of Shanxi University, Editor-in-Chief of Novel Review)
Strictly speaking, "Northern Kitchen: A Family's Culinary History", which has a certain chronicle nature, can be structurally cut into three periods of grandmother, mother and Jiang Yun's own chef. As the subtitle suggests, the work focuses on the culinary history of a family (or family) that is closely related to the times. In it, the first thing we see is the evolutionary history of an epochal society with food as the carrier. From the process of such a family (clan) journey to find roots, we can simultaneously see the history of Jiang Yun's personal growth, the material history of a society, and a spiritual and cultural history with the in-depth exploration of human nature as the core. Alternatively, it may be advisable to expropriate the phrase "physical human feelings" to understand and evaluate Jiang Yun's long-form non-fiction work with good ideological and artistic qualities. Fundamentally, Jiang Yun, who was able to write "The Kitchen of the North: A Family's Culinary History," is not only a compassionate humanitarian, but also a materialist who emphasizes the equality of all species.
Non-fiction | Chinese original | culture
"Modern Newspapers and Periodicals Literature Collection Series" (3 volumes)
Zhang Wei Editor-in-Chief Sun Ying Editing
Shanghai Science and Technology Literature Publishing House
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Zhu Xuedong (Senior Media Personality, Writer)
The Shanghai Science and Technology Literature Publishing House has recently published a set of "Modern Newspaper and Periodical Literature Collection Series", a complete series of three volumes, namely "Old Time Books", "Famous Books" and "Old Times Bookstore".
Looking at the book name business, it is probably the story of the old readers and books and bookstores salvaged from the old paper piles with cobwebs, which smells of dust, and I am afraid that I will not get anything but the value of the literature.
However, although the content of these three books is scattered in different newspapers and periodicals, the ages are different, the authorship is different, the level is different, the writing rules are more than the old tone of the old era, but the list of books and books is also a grand view, which is not easy. Reading today, most of the content is not only not contradictory, but also more often fascinating, often born "although not meat, chat and happy" feeling. Reading such a book is precisely because its content is complex and has different styles, that is, there are "the hosts of the five mountains in the mountains, and the king of the south of the hundred cities." A handshake in the crowd made my sleeve three years incense "specific and small. (Gong Zizhen, "Throwing Song in TingXiangfeng")
In the era when the three book anthologies were located, there were not as many readers as today, and their personal lives were also difficult, but in their eyes, the books were the most beautiful scenery. Therefore, Liu Dajie will buy books with the money for milk powder for his children; Zhu Ziqing will become a father to change the otters for books; Dai Wangshu is still lingering in the book market amid the gunshots on the streets of the Spanish Civil War; Zheng Zhenduo went all out to collect old Chinese books during the War of Resistance... Their love of books, their reading experience, the direction of their concerns, their disregard for their non-meritorious hobbies, they are ridiculed, and they indulge in their own world. (Li Qingzhao: Epilogue to the Golden Stone Record)
The stories or details that bring people to the book are both shameful and sad to read. However, it is precisely in these scattered and old-school texts that we can touch the love and sorrow of the Chinese readers we call the old era--an era of turmoil, backwardness, war, and uncertainty, and the atmosphere and spiritual outlook displayed by the readers of this country are not only their personal, but also the soul of that era, and the soul of this country.
For today's readers, reading, as long as there is some truth, can always expand a little horizon, increase a little wisdom, at least for me. What's more, although the books in the book are old, the love of reading is the same, and it will not change with the passage of time.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="301" top 5 > in September's non-fiction original book popularity list</h1>
Top 1 "Jingde Meteorology: An Aspect of Chinese Culture"
By Hu Ping
Guangxi Normal University Press. Worldview
Top2 "China in Symbols"
Zhao Yuntao
Zhonghua Bookstore
July 2021
Top3 "Chen Yinke and His World"
Top4 Blossoms on the Sea: The History and Art of the Month card
Zhang Wei
Shanghai University Publishing Company
Top5 "Haipai Literature Series Cinema Series" (3 volumes)
On-call editor | Peter Pan
Duty Editor-in-Chief | Liu Yihan
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="312" > the 2021 Good Book Selection! </h1>
The "Reading Searchlight Book Critic Award" is hosted by Tencent Group + Reading Group, co-organized by QQ Reading, WeChat Reading, Tencent News, and undertaken by the Searchlight Book Critics Association.
We pay tribute to those good books that have "the beauty of literature, the truth of thought, the importance of history, the concern for the present, elegant narrative, and beautiful expression", creativity, imagination, and exploration.
Select book types
Books are mainly aimed at the general audience, mainly fiction and non-fiction.
1: Fiction
1) Novels (long stories + short story collections);
2) Genre novels (long genre novels + short and medium genre novels)
2: Non-fiction
Biography, history, feature essays, essay collections (geography, travelogues), ideas, culture, popular science
Social Sciences, Politics, Military, Law, Philosophy, Sociology, Economics, Art, New Knowledge
3: Separately list the good books (book lists) of translation imported from abroad, and select them from the above two types of nominated books
Publisher's Recommendation Standards
☑Books published between January and December 2021
☑ Chinese mainland published
☑ Reprints and reprints are not included
Culture is the beacon of the nation, and reading is a symbol of the spirit of culture.
We still believe in the power of culture, in the power of reading.
Please pay attention to the searchlight book review list, we will recommend the best books of this era.