The Analects of Confucius (ca. 500 BCE), translation by Annping Chin (2014) & Bits of Wisdom
The Master said, “The wise are never perplexed. The humane never suffer from vexation. The brave are never afraid.”
Tag: China
Death’s End: Remembrance of Earth’s Past #3 (2010) by Cixin Liu & the End of Humanity and the Universe
“It’s not even accurate to call it the past, for the events related in these pages didn’t occur in the past. The details that have been preserved are already abundant. Sealed in floating bottles, they will hopefully reach the new universe and endure there.”
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*** 200th Post *** The Good Earth (1931) by Pearl S. Buck & the Great Chinese Novel
“And he remembered as one remembers a dream long past how O-lan rested from her work a little while and fed the child richly and the white rich milk ran out of her breast and spilled upon the ground. And this seemed too long past ever to have been.”
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Nutshell (2016) by Ian McEwan & Dreams had in a Mother’s Womb
“But lately, don’t ask why, I’ve no taste for comedy, no inclination to exercise, even if I had the space, no delight in fire or earth, in words that once revealed a golden world of majestical stars, the beauty of poetic apprehension, the infinite joy of reason.”
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I Like You Just Fine When You’re Not Around (2016) by Ann Garvin & the Woman who Didn’t Want to Grow Up
“The big question in my mind is not if your mom is coming back. It’s if Pete is, and if I’ll get a chance at having someone like you.”
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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013) by Haruki Murakami & The Imaginary Reality
“Maybe I am fated to always be alone, Tsukuru found himself thinking.”
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The Dark Forest: Remembrance of Earth’s Past #2 (2008/2015) by Cixin Liu & The Future of Humanity
“Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society” (p 12).
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The Three-Body Problem (2006/2014) by Cixin Liu & the Remembrance of Earth’s Past
“She was intoxicated by her brilliant, crimson dream until a bullet pierced her chest.”
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Norwegian Wood (1987) by Haruki Murakami & the Songs of Seeking Love
“Well, to me, that’s what love is. Not that anyone can understand me, though.”
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Oracle Bones (2006) by Peter Hessler & the Tears of Regret for the Poet Chen Mengjia
“Recovery, in all its varied forms, is simply a human instinct.”
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River Town (2001) by Peter Hessler & the Imperialist vs the Poet
“To travel through Sichuan countryside is to feel the history, the years of work that have shaped the land, the sheer weight of humanity on patches of earth that have been worked in the same way for centuries.”
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The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
Holden is a grieving young man unable to cope with his brother’s death and much like Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury, we watch a sixteen-year-old Holden as he indirectly contemplates suicide over the course of a few days.
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The Masks of God, Vol. II: Oriental Mythology (1962) by Joseph Campbell
The Masks of God: Vol. II, Oriental Mythology (1962) by Joseph Campbell is again one of those marathons of the mind.
