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July 18
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YangYi
gave
 
to:
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Paperback)
by Milan Kundera
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in July, 2008
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July 04
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YangYi
gave
to:
Motherland (Paperback)
by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in July, 2008, has a copy to sell/swap
YangYi said:
"Editing wise, there were specks of typos and repetitive sentence structures, and hints of rough corners. The story itself is brilliant - heartfelt and inspired work with complex characters and gentle focus.
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May 18
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YangYi
gave
to:
Son of the Revolution (Paperback)
by Liang Heng, Judith Shapiro
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in May, 2008
YangYi said:
"China finally makes sense from my limited perspective.
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YangYi
marked as to-read:
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Paperback)
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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YangYi
marked as to-read:
State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independance (Paperback)
by Martin Meredith
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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YangYi
marked as to-read:
Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford (Hardcover)
by Jessica Mitford
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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December 25
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YangYi
gave
to:
American Primitive (Paperback)
by Mary Oliver
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in October, 2007, has a copy to sell/swap
YangYi said:
"Mary Oliver has great attitude of ordering her poems in American Primitive. It starts with a creation story that does not try to explain things – rather it tells like it is, to acknowledge existence of self in immediate sensations of “ripped arms...more
Mary Oliver has great attitude of ordering her poems in American Primitive. It starts with a creation story that does not try to explain things – rather it tells like it is, to acknowledge existence of self in immediate sensations of “ripped arms” and “happy tongue,” the silence growth of mushrooms, and the warm mystery of earth. She then throbs and splatters blood of joy all over the pages, and ends with a crescendo of gushing sensuality that urge us to be bold: “the only way to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it into the body first, like small wild plums,” and even leads us along to a steamy “trek” into “great run toward the interior” with her!
Mary Oliver is full of herself. That was my first reaction. I wish I had a cycloptic stillborn kitten to show off too, to behold the cosmic life force through its googly eye and tell everybody about it. It’s almost a dead baby joke, and I like that.
Every poem is ecstasy of her throbbing heart, that is what I feel in a storm too, and that is what I want in life. Shit, I need a girlfriend like her.
This collection of poetry reminds me the limit of objectivity. In removing prejudice and subjectivity, we also remove intuition and humanity. Sciences are cumulative tools for using within our mental capacity. Arts are hairballs of the human condition barfed out of our existence – rude, incomprehensible, and utterly beautiful in a familiar way.
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YangYi
gave
to:
Ceremony (Paperback)
by Leslie Marmon Silko
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in October, 2007, has a copy to sell/swap
YangYi said:
"
I loved the smooth montage of time in this book. It is so natural and instinctive, just like real life. At least in my life, I perceive time in content-based manner. I cannot remember happenings based on their dates because they don’t feel impor...more
I loved the smooth montage of time in this book. It is so natural and instinctive, just like real life. At least in my life, I perceive time in content-based manner. I cannot remember happenings based on their dates because they don’t feel important. This perception of time is characteristic of seeing time as memory. It is different from seeing time as a linear progression of repetitive containers (month contains 30-odd days, one day contains 24 hours, one hour contains 60 minutes…). I feel this way of looking at the world is a key to being human being. It promotes a kind of instinctive phenomenology that gives us self-reflection, self-awareness. Quantity and quality are not on the same axis despite the notion that they are opposite poles of one attribute – product of a fixed amount of resources. What I am trying to say is that I am troubled by the abstract constructions in this world that substitutes for something in my instinctive nature. It is the same thing as when in the book Josiah said thus; “Cattle are like any living thing. If you separate them from the land for too long, keep them in barns and corrals, they loose something. Their stomachs get to where they can only eat rolled oats and dried alfalfa. When you run them loose again, they go running all over. They are scared because the land is unfamiliar, and they are lost. They don’t stop being scared either, even when they look quiet and they quit running” (page 74). Biologically the fixed diet of cattle decreases the variety of bacteria aiding in their digestion. In the cattle guts, there is no more diversity, flux of bacterial “seasons.” This sterile state of stasis is wholly dependent on the way the cattle are taken care of. When farmers raise cattle without understanding them as animals, but just for the meat, to them the cows are no more than empty, repetitive containers of meat, milk. In long term, adaptability fades away from their genes because they are outmoded in such environment. But it’s important to hold from claiming this practice unnatural, unwholesome and against nature. It is perfectly natural because they exist in nature. It’s just a process of change in their existence from roaming animals to captive animals, a shift from a being of the land to a being of captors.
Can’t you find familiarity in the above quote? Don’t you think we are a bit like the cattle? Here is a proof: More and more of us are scared even when we are quiet. More and more feel a general sense of doom, a lost feeling that something somewhere is horribly wrong. And for this fear we call anxiety disorder, many of us turn to alleviating the symptom with chemical diets. To Tayo and his peer, “liquor was medicine for the anger that made them hurt, for the pain of the loss, medicine for tight bellies and chocked-up throats” (page 40) from a war over abstract constructions with invisible (too fast to see) bullets that maul down soldiers as randomly as statistics. I have instinctively felt there is some truth to anxiety, that there is something real in the fear that people dismiss as imbalance of brain chemistry, blaming failure of flesh. I have felt that we are fearful because we are lost, that the anxiety is the anxiety of our plant, that it’s the way it communicate with us of its impending doom that we are causing. Of course this thinking is from reading too much science-fiction books. But it is a kind of gut feeling, and like all inspired literatures the human mind created, this feeling seem to be have metaphorical validity. The last part of the book was a good example of this trust in personal gut feelings. Tayo “arrived at a convergence of patterns; he could see them clearly now. The stars had always been with them, existing beyond memory, and they were all held together there.”…”They had seen mountains shift and rivers change course and even disappear back into the earth; but always there were the stars” (page 254)....less
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YangYi
gave
to:
All the Pretty Horses (Border Trilogy, Vol 1)
by Cormac McCarthy
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in November, 2007, has a copy to sell/swap
YangYi said:
"
Did I tell you I read this book for high school class? After reading Anna Karenina in that same class, I still think this McCarthy book is harder to read from end to end. It’s not the Spanish conversations that get me stuck, it’s not the lack o...more
Did I tell you I read this book for high school class? After reading Anna Karenina in that same class, I still think this McCarthy book is harder to read from end to end. It’s not the Spanish conversations that get me stuck, it’s not the lack of quotations or the run-on sentences that unabashedly use “and” everywhere. It’s the absolute dryness of the narrative voice that reads like a movie script without any suggestions on emotions. The way to read this book is to have a very active imagination that can conjure actors, actresses and a whole environment for them to enact on. Otherwise there is a void of mental activity. Literatures usually engage the reader’s thought process and provoke some response, to forge a relationship with the reader. McCarthy’s book does not do that. His book is a full-length self-contained statement, no expectation of convincing the reader. As if this story is an old “horseskull” …“bleached paper white” (page 6) not caring whether somebody someday would pick it up or get buried in the sand forever or get blasted by the sand into dust over eons. McCarthy therefore treats the book format not as a communication device of abstract ideas and feelings. He seems to distrust ability of word to carry any meaning beyond literal representation. For him this book is a sedentary rock layered by his mind and hardened through writing. It is a self-content existence that he wrote for people to treat it like a piece of rock. All the Pretty Horses is an ‘experience capsule’ of the McCarthy’s Border Trilogy world. McCormick writes in a way to pass on the reader with the facts and the chronology as they unfold, and leave the reader to see for him/herself what’s going on.
Such minimalist novel as this has a tendency of being impersonal and empty compared to other more involved novels. On the other side, such detachment frees the novel from depending on sympathy of the reader. Anna Karenina works because Tolstoy wrote so well from the ground up to make the reader identify with the Protagonist Anna. He provides such full personality, such comprehensible thought patterns to completely win over the reader. All the Pretty Horses works in a whole different way. It tells the story like it is without prejudice on author’s part, hidden agenda on author’s part to hook up the reader with the protagonists. McCarthy’s book works not because he makes a hero out of his character. It works because the reader is left free to interpret for himself or herself the life of John Grady. It works because the reader sees that he/she is trusted to judge for his/her own from the “one truth[, …] the truth [that] is what happened[, not] what come out of somebody’s mouth” (page 168). I used to think that Minimalism and Deconstructionism are roads toward nihilism. I now see that they can be roads to free expression and unbound communication. What I found in this novel after reading it again this time is that, after accepting the significance of ‘truth’ in the book, it is clear that McCarthy has similar attitude toward the realness of dreams and lucid insights as mine: dreams are just as real as the existence of sleep, and lucid insights are just as real as the existence of facts. I found that the book is all in all extremely honest and therefore optimistic.
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YangYi
gave
to:
Wuthering Heights (Penguin Classics)
by Emily Brontë
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in October, 2007, has a copy to sell/swap
YangYi said:
"Wuthering Heights has facets of life that I have been previously oblivious to. One is a natural familiarity between women, and another is familiarity of death. The women in the novel are some of the most complex characters. They are the building bloc...more
Wuthering Heights has facets of life that I have been previously oblivious to. One is a natural familiarity between women, and another is familiarity of death. The women in the novel are some of the most complex characters. They are the building blocks of the novel, narrators of their own lives that are the novel. We not only know all of their life histories, we are familiar with all of them through listening to their storytelling. It is through the women’s viewpoints that the world is presented; it is around them that the story unfolds. Ellen Dean is the backbone of the realm, and she is the caretaker, the sister, and the mother figure of everyone. It is the world of women presented faithfully, the world that Brontë lived in.
I had as much fun reading this book as from reading the Preface, Introduction, notes, etc. and imagining the life of Emily Brontë. At first from the last name, I didn’t even know if she was a native English speaker. I also had little idea of the time frame, knowing only from clues in the social structure and speed of transportation. Brontë has done nicely to preserve the timelessness humanity of that English country life by encapsulating the story entirely within itself. The only outside contact is the broken violin “crushed to morsels” and Heathcliff that Mr. Earnshaw brought back from the Liverpool. The main character Lockwood scarcely count as a person, more like a camera crew, a conventional, male, aloof humanoid window that the readers can occupy to move around in Brontë’s story world. I wonder how much experience Brontë had with romance in her life – she is definitely intrigued about it, depicting in the book their second-hand manifestations – friend advising another, hearing about marriages, seeing the married life, gossips and looking at growths of children. The Hindley-Frances couple feels to be heavily based on real life for Brontë to draw from, and the Catherine-Hareton couple is obviously the resolved ideal that Brontë has arrived at the end of this story. The situation was that even if you found the love of your life and set up a family, the fact of death can set the happiness upside down into living hell – echoed in widowed Hindley’s destructive habits, and Heathcliff’s apparently lifelong “monomania”. Hareton’s desperate fascination with Catherine 2 follows the same subconscious premise but it ends up being a happy ending not because of their life choices, their self will. The two are forced out of their own shells and bonded together through unmediated series of events, Catherine shut in the wilderness of Wuthering Heights, Hareton chained to the domesticity of kitchen. Emily Brontë must have dreamt of a happy marriage, but not sure of how two people occupying different (social, existential) planes can squeeze together in a big wide world.
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