Category Archives: Reading

“One knew nothing. One lived and walked about on the earth or rode through the forests, and so many things looked at one with such challenge and promise, rousing such longing: an evening star, a bluebell, a lake green with reeds, the eye of a human being or of a cow, and at times it seemed as if the very next moment something never seen but long yearned for must happen, as if a veil must drop from everything. But then it passed, and nothing happened, and the riddle was not solved, nor was the secret spell lifted, and finally one became old and looked as shrewd as Father Anselm or as wise as Abbot Daniel, and perhaps one still knew nothing, would still be waiting and listening.”

―
Hermann Hesse
Narcissus and Goldmund

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I love the writing and for the first few chapters, I was absorbed. There was a sense of not wanting to move forward, because the story may move such that I don’t get to enjoy the writing anymore. This not wanting to let it go, is a form of relishing.

Then, I went to other books, and came back again. Into the book I went; suddenly the story sped up and I was caught up in Goldmund’s travels, and Hesse manages to use this young man as a foil, teasing out the deeper questions of life, and yet, there is never an answer. Because life carries on, and meaning may or may not arrive.

It is clear that Hesse has insight into the human condition, and the way he described the natural world, it conveys a zest for life, an understanding of the importance of the simpler things in life. I read and re-read the first paragraph of the book. Goldmund is such a character – an aimless wayfarer – and Narcissus is so intellectual, perhaps overly so, but I love them both, and their differences perhaps reflect the different extremes one may struggle with, within oneself.

I am reading this in my 40s. I wonder if I would have loved this book as much if I had read it as a younger human. Would I have tasted the same sense of wisdom?

Highly recommended.

“My next project is to draw circles around places in which I find myself, say with a radius of one to five miles, and then to follow the circumference on foot all the way around.

Walking sometimes means undertaking an inner voyage of discovery. You are shaped by buildings, faces, signs, weather and the atmosphere. Maybe we were made to walk, also in cities? Walking as a combination of movement, humility, balance, curiosity, smell, sound, light and- if you walk far enough – longing. A feeling which reaches for something, without finding it. The Portuguese and Brazilians have an untranslatable word for this longing: saudade. It is a word that encompasses love, pain and happiness. It can be the thought of something joyful that disturbs you, or something disturbing that brings you plenitude.”

“Everything moves more slowly when I walk, the world seems softer and for a short while I am not doing household chores, having meetings or reading manuscripts. A free man possesses time. The opinions, expectations and moods of family, colleagues and friends all become unimportant for a few minutes or a few hours. Walking, I become the centre of my own life, while completely forgetting myself shortly afterwards.”

―
Erling Kagge
Walking

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I was in the library and saw plenty of books on running, and I thought that’s not what I want, why aren’t there any books on walking? The simple act of walking is perhaps too ordinary to deserve books to be written on it. But I took a step to the right, and there they were – books on walking. I was pleased, the bright pleasure of discovery in a library, amidst too many books that may or may not interest you.

I enjoyed the author’s book on silence, and had expectations for the book. It did not disappoint. This ode to walking is a perfect book for my December. Contemplative but not too much, and in December, I took a few more walks, one much longer than usual.

Highly recommended.

“We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.”

“He told me that his wife had Alzheimer’s, and that he could not remember the last word she had spoken to him, because she’d become gradually more and more silent and then she remained silent. And this man, her husband, could never remember the last thing she had said.”

―
Elizabeth Strout
Lucy by the Sea

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This is a book about the early days of the COVID pandemic, and it is surreal to read about something while you are still in it. (In our country, the pandemic is in a way, over, and we are living with it endemically, but one can never be too sure.)

The prose is sparse, but words precisely used, evoke a sense of delight in this reader. The main character is a lady in her 50s and the writing was such that I felt myself slow, to inhabit her world and her surroundings. The book is poignant but does not overwhelm. There is a lingering sense of hope, which we all need.

“I would start with three big, bold goals. One: Ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can’t focus. Two: Introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention. Three: Rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely – in their neighbourhoods and at school – because children who are imprisoned in their homes won’t be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention…”

―
Johann Hari
Stolen Focus

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The book touches on many things you may have read before elsewhere, but Hari has a message, and a coherent one. Although I half-expected myself to be let down (because we’ve all read about the topic), Hari does well to add perspective and value. If nothing else, you get good reminders for how to navigate the 2020s (is there a name for the period between 2015 to now?): the importance of playing outside; why you need to read fiction sometimes; the destructiveness of multi-tasking; media/tech’s tendency to rile and distract you; the importance of taking walks…

(While reading the book, I checked the writer out, and found out about his previous issues. Perhaps that is why his writing is quite careful at times, in explicitly stating that it is his view. Sometimes, writers (or anyone really) are not careful and it may be left unclear whether a statement flows from an earlier source or if it is the writer’s own belief and interpretation, after reading the source material. Being explicit may make the writing a little cumbersome, but I do appreciate the thought that went into it. I wish more of us were more careful in how we think, write and process.)

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“Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them.”

“In the United States, though, convenience was everything; it still is. We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society. There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web. We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control. And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.”

―
Nicole Perlroth
This is How They Tell Me The World Ends

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Zero-day exploits, passwords, airgap systems, multi-factor authentication, attacks on the grid, spies, a market for cyber weapons… the arms race all over again.

The book induces a breathlessness, an anxiety that you do not let overwhelm you because you know we are all screwed. Because you know that some things have already bolted out the door, the likely outcome already set in motion many years ago, when the world was a more naive place. This is a sobering read, and my helpless self proceeded to pat my password manager, change some old passwords, and set up multi-factor authentication for more accounts.

Highly recommended.

“Throughout the worst of the pandemic I, like everyone, thought of the many things I’d failed to appreciate back when life was normal: oh, to be handed an actual restaurant menu; to stand so close to a stranger that you can read the banal text messages that are obviously more important to him than his toddler stumbling off the curb and out into traffic…”

―
David Sedaris
Happy-Go-Lucky

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If anybody has the energy in this pandemic to write about this pandemic, it would be Sedaris. A collection of personal essays, you can expect the usual offbeat observations, sometimes drily expressed. He is always interesting and given the details he inserts, it makes me want to keep a journal, an audio record even, but perhaps I am meant to live my life more prosaically.

This is a wonderful record of the pandemic years. Everyone’s experience is of course different, but some of the broader themes are there, soothing to see in the written word.

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“Too much free time, and too much time together. I’m normally away from Hugh between four and six months a year, and when the pandemic canceled the tours I had scheduled, I panicked. We were in New York at the time, so I sought out his old friend Carol. “What’s he really like?” I asked her. “I think I sort of knew once, but that was twenty-five years ago.””

“I daydreamed about going to gigs, seeing arthouse cinema, having intellectually stimulating conversations, and being in the midst of the next great literary movement. I could not find any of this at home. My classmates and I were brought up on the belief that nothing was more important than securing a job that would eventually buy us a flat, a basic human right that had become nearly impossible for my generation, and these jobs were usually soul sucking. Hong Kong’s brand of capitalism makes it easy to live in a place and never engage with it.

I thought that when I eventually became an adult I would be one of those people who power-walked in heels across the bridge of the International Finance Centre in the central business district.”

―
Karen Cheung
Impossible City

//

This is one person’s memoir, from a person who lives in Hong Kong. Some things are more universal and familiar to a Chinese person who grew up in South-east Asia. But at some point, the unique, thorny situation of being a relatively younger Hong-Konger in the 2010s becomes a puzzle. It is an unenviable place to be, and Cheung captures the heartache and despite all the difficulties, the hope of her generation.

Capitalism, belonging and forces that insist on bearing down on you instead of letting you be. What a heady mix. I enjoyed the book, and appreciated Cheung’s writing and the way the chapters jump around. It is a little disjointed but life is like that.

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“I caption photos with #wanderlust unironically, chatting up fellow backpackers and believing that they could serve as conduits through which I could understand more about a world of which I had seen so little.

At the two on-campus Starbucks I rotate between, I keep tabs on tech sites and start-ups, holding on to the millennial delusion that a good business idea or a new app could radically improve our world. Being loud online on issues like climate change and racial inequality lets me pretend I’m part of a global conversation, yet at enough distance for it to not affect my daily life.”

“It was in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe that it would be anything but awesome.”

―
Chuck Klosterman
The Nineties

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This book was awesome to read. A child of the nineties now has a book that accurately captures the feeling of that era. I found myself nodding at various sections, and then I laughed at having taken this book a little too seriously. But well, it is really nice to chuckle at the caricature of a person who absorbed too much of the 90s vibe – progressive but not too much; hopeful but not too optimistic. And oh, the days of being a nobody, with no pressure to be on brand, to even have a personal brand…

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“The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool…. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy. Ambiguous disappointment wasn’t that bad.”

“No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.”