Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs is a thick book, 400+ pages. After a long time without reading such a big chunk, this journey took me months, walking with the heroine through a tedious time, when she delves into the real purpose of having a child.
Category: Book Review
Nabokov, the poet
“Like Joyce, Nabokov was first a poet.” Thomas Karshan wrote this as the first sentence in his amazing introduction for the book Vladimir Nabokov: Collected Poems. If one wants to understand Nabokov more, this collection could be of a great help rather than reading his renowned and celebrated novels. Not to eliminate the significance of his novels, such as Lolita, but this collection of Nabokov’s poems brought a series of moments together more than a chronicle, shining with various poetic images on those crucial time spans in Nabokov’s life.
Revisit Lu Xun’s《二十四孝图》
《二十四孝图》(24 filial exemplars) has been included in Lu Xun’s 《朝花夕拾》。The article started with Lu Xun’s concern about Chinese children books industry. Drawing from his own experience, Lu Xun thinks the Children’s book market in China was bleak, recalling the only graphic book he had as a child was 24 exemplars of filial duty.
A free Christmas carol
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is one of the marvel that has been through ages of turbulence and calmness. Reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol could bring a certain heaviness, later played down by the ultimate change of Mr. Scrooge, who eventually could enjoy the joy and warmth Christmas brings upon him.
Poems for Commuting | Lana Del Rey’s “Nowness”
Lana Del Rey published her first poetry collection, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass 2020 in September, however, she is a poem in many’s mind for quite a long time. Wonderfully composed, poems are of Lana Del Rey’s retro style, painfully deep. She’s not the joy slicer. In this debut poetry collection, she raised questions as well as gave answers, quite positive, optimistic, enabling and empowering. No cliche. Poems also offer a kind of silent feeling, subtly giving a breeze to the fatigue that we carry each day.
Future library | reading margaret atwood “dearly”
Sealed in Future Library Project, Margaret Atwood’s Scribbler Moon will be read only in 2114, but her newly published poetry collection Dearly just became available for her readers on 10th November 2020. Her previous poetry collection was published a decade ago and the fierce global pandemic we were facing both make this much anticipated new poetry collection more “dearly” to us.
FAST READING FOR COMMUTER | Joyce’s obsessive love
The beautiful language, the words, this little fragmented short story from James Joyce paints a wintry portrait of a man in love, weathered by his own thoughts, while her, actively living her life through the eyes of “Jamesy”, so painfully, so unrestrained.