2025

2025 was a turbulent year. First half was spent tired and angry, while at the same time struggling, hard, to figure out what I had to do with life. The next quarter was spent riddled with anxiety, half infused with optimism, half with fear. The last quarter was a little lighter, in a way felt like life is restarting.

In all this uncertainty, which probably was the main theme of the year, I picked up a lot of children's books. When real life didn't feel fun, children's books provide the much needed escapism, the adventures we don't have, the journey, the fun. They transport us to completely different world in a way that is lighthearted, not without a stake, but was much less burdensome than reading adult adventure could feel like sometimes. Le Guin's Tombs of Atuan, although technically is in the children or young adult category, I feel like it fell on its own category. It's really good in another level's good. At this point I think I'm going to continue reading one book from the Earthsea series every year.

The other category I read a lot this year was lighting books. A lot of the books I didn't even put the pictures here because I still have to finish or read more. Although I read it for my jobs, I really enjoy reading them, gaining new knowledge.

During the peak moment of confusion, I read a lot about astrology, understanding a little more deeper about it, and tarot. Many people dismiss them as some pseudo-science whatever bullshit, but despite the deeper history and the esotericism of it, they really are just a tool really. A tool to understand more about the self and the cycle of life. People really should try to understand something before bashing it with no reason just because they have a preconceived notion about it. In my opinion it's easier to understand astrology than religion because you can empirically see it yourself. But people hold religion as such sacred thing because it's the only thing they know and it's what the majority of people know.

Some favorites: Hour of The Star, Tombs of Atuan, The End of Night, Light Revealing Architecture. I love the Scarlett and Browne adventures but I love Lockwood and Co series a lot more. The Road to Tender Hearts and Bring Down The House were fun reads. Heart the Lover was good. The God of the Woods was so so overrated.

Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us was probably the most intriguing book I read this year. It's a fictionalise account of a real person and a real historical event. On one hand, the book is really interesting, made me want to know more about Algerian struggle against French colonialism. It's a good short read. But on the other hand, it's written in a very personal and detailed way it made me feel somewhat uneasy, knowing that they were real people and the author couldn't possibly know their thoughts and feelings. I know the intention was to humanise the people fighting in a revolution, that they are human with feelings and thoughts, not just numbers. But I don't know, I'm still not sure how I feel about it.  

I have to mention one book that I absolutely hate that is All My Cats. I came to it expecting stories about the many cats the authors took care of and their relationship. I definitely didn't expect to read how the author murdered kittens by bashing them to trees. I don't know if it's fiction or if it's real, it didn't matter. It's just didn't make sense to me and I hated it so much I just couldn't and didn't want to finish it.

Total count this year is 35 finished, and 34ish haven't finished. Didn't read that many literature this year, and didn't finish any political non fiction I started. Didn't have the brain capacity for them apparently. Hopefully will have one in the coming year.

the hour of the star

"I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men. I write because I'm desperate and I'm tired, I can no longer bear the routine of being me and if not for the always novelty that is writing, I would die symbolically every day. But I am prepared to slip out discreetly through the back exit. I've experienced almost everything, including passion and its despair. And now I'd only like to have what I would have been and never was." 

The Hour of The Star is the first book I finished this year and I think I have found my favorite book of the year on the first week of the first month. I highlighted passages almost on every page on the first half of the book. I am in awe with how Lispector wrote the interiority of her characters, how she could translate her feelings and thoughts into words. And how I could find myself in the many words she strung into sentences gave a bewildering feeling. The passage above reminds me of what I wrote about writing some time ago. If only I possessed a small tiny amount of capacity to write so beautifully.

I fell even deeper into admiration when I read the afterword. I have known that her writing is something special before I read any of her books but I had never read about her political activities, although of course this book displays her deep empathy for the marginalized people. Reading her son's words about her gave me the same exact feeling as when I was reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Woman Destroyed. It's this feeling of yearning to belong to a family that stands on the right side. It strangely gave me two kinds of longing. 

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2024 books

Total books finished this year is 44. First half of the year I spent reading a lot of fun fiction series, the other half I was so busy with my day job I barely had the time and the energy to read more serious books. So this year's list is shorter and isn't really exciting. But still I enjoyed all of my time reading. 

Speaking of fun fiction, I've always like reading children's books or fun light fictions, but I only just started reading young adult fantasy books in 2021 with Six of Crows. It was so popular at the time I was curious. The duology is still the best one I've read so far, maybe because it's the very first one I read so I was bias, I don't know. But since then I discovered that fantasy books are fun. That reading doesn't always have to be literature. I read Lockwood & Co series basically because the Netflix series, which was good, was cancelled so I looked for the books. Turn out the whole series was great and I was sad when I finished the last book.

And then there are romance books. Also just started reading them in 2021 with Emily Henry's Beach Read. I guess they used to be called chick-lit back in the day and I'd read some of them before maybe. But I guess Beach Read made me realise that maybe some romance books could actually be not dumb. I enjoy reading romance books for the same reason I like reading fantasy books, for the settings. Fantasy books take you to completely made up worlds and systems, romance books take you to a variety of the mundanity of life. Different cities, different kind of jobs, various social lives. Sometimes in the dullness and the boredom of my daily life, I enjoyed them. But romance books are very tricky. There are a lot of them but there are only a very few that are good. Even the more popular ones with high ratings I found a lot of them unbearable or boring. Even Emily Henry not all of her books are good in my opinion. My favourite romance author has got to be Catherine Walsh but I never put her books here because the covers are hideous and I hate that kind of dumb illustrated covers. Or maybe I just like her to be my secret favourite.

There are some books I need to highlight though. "Migration in The Time of Revolution" is an extremely important book for me personally, which I still need to read again. It's interesting reading "What My Bones Know" as someone who also suffers from c-ptsd and was once medicated for it. I found a lot of relatable things although somehow it wasn't as impactful as when I read Jennette McCurdy's "I'm Glad My Mom Died" two years ago. "Four Minutes" is a very compelling read about childhood that I made a separate post about it. "I Who Have Never Known Men" is a strange book that kept me turning the pages. I read Dostoevsky's "White Nights" on a flight. And I just love it. Best romance book I have ever read. "Boulder" has the best book cover ever. Sally Rooney's "Intermezzo" was my very last read. Finished it two days before the year ended. There's something about the way she writes which makes me still think about it even days after. 

a heavy lid over a well

"I'm not sure if I'll ever truly leave my childhood behind. A sticky fog seems to have descended around me and it obscures all possible paths. I feel discarded, and the awful memories of those early years press down on me like a sheet-metal lid over a well, all weighed down by an enormous boulder, leaving me with no chance of escape. All my shouting and banging from within feels useless. What's the point? No one can hear me. 

It's like I am barely able to tread the water; it rises and soon it will reach the top, to the sheet metal lid. I will begin to gulp down my fear and choke on it until I cease breathing. 

Or maybe somehow the water will swell and blow off the lid that holds my life captive and my fears will overflow and then subside, releasing me."  - from Four Minutes by Nataliya Deleva 

I always say that the best kind of art is the one that makes me feel like I want to make one myself. It's so good and it resonates strongly that it gives you the urge to create one yourself. Four Minutes is a very compelling read about childhood and the harshness of life. It's a short book with short chapters and unique structure inviting people to empathize. It makes me wish that someone would write the stories of my life turning it into a piece of literary writing. Or that I am talented enough to write one myself. Not in a biographical narration but in a lyrical dissection of my darkest thoughts. 

Couple of months ago there's a tweet on my twitter timeline about a mother who was abusing her oldest daughter that was eleven year old in favor of her younger sons. At first I was sympathizing but then it clicked in my head that I was once that daughter. And I laughed. 

It took me a very long time to realized that I was raised in deeply patriarchal household. I didn't realize until a couple of years ago when I was having a conversation with a friend who came from the same cultural background as me that it wasn't how working class households operate universally back in the 1990s. 

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2023 books

I read a lot less than the previous year. My total count is 42 books, but then it's because I read a lot of short books, and also I haven't finished some of non fiction books I started and I didn't count them even when it's just one chapter left. And also there were certain months where I worked on numbing tasks of finishing a tedious never ending construction drawings for my day job and I barely had time to do read. Anyhow count doesn't matter, it's just here for my personal note. 

I read many good books last year and a lot of them are becoming my favorites, some I didn't really like. And I'm going to talk about them.

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let's go back to writing

"I never wanted to blog before. I’ve never liked the word blog—I suppose it is meant to stand for bio-log or something like that, but it sounds like a sodden tree trunk in a bog, or maybe an obstruction in the nasal passage (Oh, she talks that way because she has such terrible blogs in her nose). I was also put off by the idea that a blog ought to be “interactive,” that the blogger is expected to read people’s comments in order to reply to them and carry on a limitless conversation with strangers. I am much too introverted to want to do that at all. I am happy with strangers only if I can write a story or a poem and hide from them behind it, letting it speak for me.

 
My trials/attempts/efforts (that’s what essays means) so far have very much less political and moral weight than Saramago’s and are more trivially personal. Maybe that will change as I practice the form, maybe not. Maybe I’ll soon find it isn’t for me after all, and stop. That’s to be seen. What I like at the moment is the sense of freedom."

When browsing through some reviews on goodreads I found a link to Ursula K. Le Guin's blog. The passage above was her very first post. And then two days later by chance I started reading her book No Time To Spare which I only realised later was a collection of her blog posts. Only several chapters in and I'd already so delighted by it. They were snippets of her thoughts and her daily life and I really enjoy them. I was reading both Le Guin's book and Annie Ernaux' book in the same day and I found it amazing how I could fall in love with someone through their writing, no matter how simple.

I have been saying over and over again that I wish we're back to the day where everyone had blogs. A lot of times I find myself thinking but I wanna know your deepest thoughts, your rumination, your fascination when all I got was posts and stories on social media which more often then than not are just subtle boast of how successful or happy one's life is. I mean I don't hate it. It just doesn't really mean anything. 

It is of course a lot harder today to really take time to sit down and write. Back in the day entertainment was very limited, phones weren't "smart" yet. We had time to sit down with our thoughts and had time to really process them. Today everything is effortlessly within the reach of our fingers. Endless entertainment online, bottomless scroll of social medias, mobile games, etc. Thoughts are easier to be shove down with distractions. Even when we are already sitting down to write, distractions are still there so easy to reach. As much as I like to write, it is hard. It often took me three months to even finish a post. I'm still often amazed of myself back in the day when even on a busy day I still could sit on the bed and write my thoughts out. 

Many of my friends stopped writing and deactivated their blogs in order to be more private, not revealing too much especially to newer people we met when we're older. I also am embarrassed of many things I posted when I was much younger and still have many posts I need to set to private. But these days I feel a lot more urgency to write my thoughts than ever. I am a lot older now therefore having more conviction on many things, I understand the world a little better now and I want more to say it. And I want to know other people's thoughts. I am still getting older and the world keeps going and changing, writing can in a way reflect the journey of growing. 

And then the word "blog" itself these days seems to be getting slightly negative connotation. I remember reading someone criticising a book by saying the writing feels like a "blogpost writing". What do you even mean? A "blog" is just a medium to put writings online. The quality of the writings will depend on who writes them. I really disliked it when people started migrating to medium.com from their own personal blogs. They put statistics on each writings. How many likes, how many "claps", how many quotes, whatever. Sure with these kinds of platforms it's easier to draw traffic to certain topic of writings, but it feels like another attention seeking competition. 

Anyway, I think missing the "blogging" era is in a way a craving for more meaning or deeper thoughts in the midst of endless entertainment, mindless scrolling, and the joy in vanities. With no likes no statistics, just let's be quiet together in conversation. 

a collective victory

"This is how I conceived my commitment to writing, which does not consist of writing ‘for’ a category of readers, but in writing ‘from’ my experience as a woman and an immigrant of the interior; and from my longer and longer memory of the years I have lived, and from the present, an endless provider of the images and words of others. This commitment through which I pledge myself in writing is supported by the belief, which has become a certainty, that a book can contribute to change in private life, help to shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed, and enable beings to reimagine themselves. When the unspeakable is brought to light, it is political."

"By granting me the highest literary distinction that can be, a bright light is being shone on work that consists of writing and personal research carried out in solitude and doubt. This light does not dazzle me. I do not regard as an individual victory the Nobel prize that has been awarded me. It is neither from pride nor modesty that I see it, in some sense, as a collective victory. I share the pride of it with those who, in one way or another, hope for greater freedom, equality and dignity for all humans, regardless of their sex or gender, the colour of their skin, and their culture; and with those who think of future generations, of safeguarding an Earth where a profit-hungry few make life increasingly unliveable for all populations." 

- from "I Will Write to Avenge My People"by Annie Ernaux, which was her Nobel Prize lecture, can be read here.

about astrology

"I think we all feel great ambivalence at the sight of our own horoscope. On the one hand we're proud to see that the sky is imprinted on our individual life, like a postmark with a date stamped on a letter - this makes it distinct, one of a kind. But at the same time it's a form of imprisonment in space, like a tattooed prison number. There's no escaping it. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful. We'd prefer to think we're free, able to reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. This connection with something as great and monumental as the sky makes us feel uncomfortable. We'd rather be small, and then our petty little sins would be forgivable. Therefore I'm convinced that we should get to know our prison very well."


The passage above is taken from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, best book I've read this year. In the book the protagonist is an old lady who is an amateur astrologer. She uses a lot of terminology of astrology. So in order to really understand the book I started to learn about astrology. Like the true Sagittarian that I am.

I learned how to read birth charts, the twelve houses, the planets, sextile, trine, and all that. Perhaps to no surprise to anybody who had properly tried to learn about astrology, I found the reading of my birth chart to be eerily accurate. I read several of my friends charts and got even more fascinated. About two years ago I had also learn some basic of Chinese astrology, bāzì, which is based on Taoism. Chinese astrology, like the western one, is also based on reading someone's specific birth date and time. I had also found the reading to be accurate.

Now of course we can argue about what accuracy here means. What we tend to do is to ignore the bits we don't identify with and mark the ones we like as accurate. In bāzì, as in Taoism, there are two things that make us who we are, the things that are inherently given to us by the heaven, the universe, and the things that happen to us and what we do on earth. Basically the nature and nurture concept. So in a way I think there's no way a reading can be 100% accurate because of the life that happens to us, but there are certain things that are specifically our given characters. 

I don't agree with all the results but I can tell that my birth chart reading is distinctively mine and the readings of other charts are definitely not me. I found things I had never realised point specifically to me. This is the one important thing I learn from astrology. That people are different. It isn't a new profound thing to discover but it's one thing we often forget. That everyone is wired differently. We can't expect people to have the same mindset as we do. I myself am often disappointed when I find people don't have the same conviction as I do. 

Astrology of course has been trivialised with the popularisation of horoscopes on the golden age of magazines, turning it into the oversimplified twelve zodiac that really doesn't mean anything and therefore became object of mockery. I might sound like I'm taking astrology very seriously, but I really don't. No one claims astrology as science. People who understand the concept of astrology often says that it's very much a self therapy. I think I agree. It helps me understand what ticks me and what fuels me. And why those things don't necessarily work on other people. It is frustrating sometimes that I am frustrated about things that don't frustrate others at all. As Tokarczuk wrote on the quote, our selves are our prisons and whatever helps me understand my prison is welcomed. 

Aside from astrology there has been a lot of efforts to create human classification both psychologically and physically, the MBTI (which I don't care about at all), the enneagram, the blood type psychology, etc. There are also certain classification of body types and colour analysis that classify people based on physical appearance. I found many of these to be helpful. Aside from the physical classification which we can directly see the analysis, I do believe there is a certain order of the universe in which biological and psychological are somehow related. I don't necessarily believe that the planetary alignments in the sky the minute we were born determine who we are. But I am open to the possibility that there are some celestial orders we may never understand. 

2022 books

so it turns out, to my surprise, i read even more books in 2022 than the previous year, with a total of 57 books and read some parts of another 21ish. although to be fair i mostly read easy fiction, especially towards the end of the year. with all the burn out and stress, i sought mostly enjoyment and lighthearted stories from reading. so the count itself really shouldn't matter, although it is the most i've ever read in a year my whole life.

some years ago a colleague from russia said that on average she read about 52 books a year and that it's a normal thing in russia. i remember i was in complete awe. 52 books is like one book a week. how was that even possible? well, now i know. in the end it's a matter of habit i think. once it's become part of your daily habit instead of a once in a while thing to do, it's easier to keep picking up new books to read. and it's also because it's one of the few activities that doesn't involve a screen. after working with computer all day, looking at your phone constantly, watching movies or series on a screen, a no-screen entertainment is a good thing.

i can't really pinpoint favorite books from last year but one thing i kinda had an "epiphany" about is: female writers. i never intentionally read exclusively from certain category of writers before. and i still don't. what happened i guess was that i consecutively read books written by women without even realizing it. and somehow it struck me how emotionally and intellectually relatable they all are in different ways but there are sensitivity you get specifically because they were written in female perspective. i remember after finishing the first story from "The Woman Destroyed" by Simone de Beauvoir at 2 or 3AM in the morning, i felt this huge sense of urgency to tell my female friends about it and i want them all to read the story about how a woman navigate her life at later ages because we soon will face the same issue. and how the particular story ends beautifully is what somehow i want us all to have. it was not the first time, of course, i resonated with books written specifically because the writer is female. but i guess because of the intensity of reading several of them in a row, it made me realized how powerful they actually are.

another thing i noted was how important writing is after i read books by Annie Ernaux, one of the female writers i read. there were a lot of insightful articles written about her works, especially after her nobel win (2022 nobel prize in literature), but it really isn't that hard to get the charm of her works once we started reading them. her books are very short, very personal, honest while also not without the doubts of brittle memories. she wrote about her personal truth as it was regardless any moral judgement that may come. she made me feel like every single person have stories particular to ourselves to tell. maybe not everyone have the eloquence to write as beautifully but regardless, everyone should write their own stories and their own personal truth. if not for the public, at least for ourselves.

psychopolitics

 "People who fail in the neoliberal society see themselves responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society or the system. Under the regime, people are turning their aggression against themselves, the exploited aren't inclined to revolution so much as depression.

Neoliberal psychopolitics, with the consciousness industry it promotes, is destroying the human which is anything but a machine of positivity. The neoliberal subject is running aground on the imperative of self-optimization, on the compulsion always to achieve more and more. The neoliberal imperative of self-optimization serves only to promote perfect functioning within the system. Inhibitions, weakness and mistakes are to be therapeutically eliminated in order to enhance efficiency and performance.

Endlessly working at self-improvement resembles the self-examination and self-monitoring of Protestantism, which represents a technology of subjectivation and domination in its own right. Now, instead of searching out for sins, one hunts down negative thoughts." -from Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

2021

i wonder if 2021 even happened. it passed in a flash while i just stayed stationery. life was dull and uneventful. i don't know how people could keep creating in such uninspiring time, i could barely pick up a pen and cook myself dinner. this is the first time since is started this blog around 14 years ago that i hadn't written anything here. i guess it was in order to prevent myself to completely turn into a potato who consumed to much tv series junks, i read and i read a lot. at least reading is an act of consuming while also at the same time educating ourselves in a way.

i finished a total of about 44ish books and read some parts of another 12ish, i think. it's the most i have ever read in a year, in my entire life. on usual year reading 10ish was considered good enough for me. i guess part of it is because i discovered the joy of using an e-reader. i'm a random reader, i rarely can hold just one book at a time and finish it. i read things based on my mood and it changes all the time. so e-reader accomodate that style of reading for me cause i always carry all my books with me.

i was also reading a lot of new genre that i've never read before like sci-fi, thriller, young adult fantasy, politics. i read a lot of different things this year and i surprised myself when i actually enjoyed most of them.
some of my highlight are:
* The Stranger - Albert Camus. i don't know how nobody has ever recommended Camus to me before. i can relate to this book in a lot of level. and the moment where Mersault grabbed the collar of the priest and yelled at him telling him to shut the fuck up is probably my favorite moment i've read in a book.
* Talking to My Daughter About the Economy - Yanis Varoufakis. i wish this kind of book exists when i was younger instead of rich dad poor dad, which is still popular to this day although the author has clearly declared bankruptcy.
* Animal Farm - George Orwell. i think Animal Farm is somehow overshadowed by 1984. a lot of people i think see this book primarily about stalinism or authoritarianism. but when i read it i can see how much it is relevant to our world this day. how we mostly are all the sheeps which are have no idea about our past histories and have been going along with the status quo for too long.
* The Jakarta Method - Vincent Bevins. this book opened up a lot of things i have never realized before about how the world works. i can only say that everyone should probably read this and then went on your own further research.
* How Do You Live? - Genzaburo Yoshino. it's a very simple book about humanity. it actually hit me the most when i got to the translator note about the author. it made me respect him and the book even more. i just don't know why every book about the equality of being human needs to be labelled as "marxist". even Sally Rooney's book is described as a story about two "marxist" girls. neither books mention marx even once. they of course carries socialist ideology but i've never heard of other normal books described as "capitalistic".

* other than those, i read a lot of books about Russia and the Soviet Union to the point that i learned how to read cyrillic alphabets. i read a lot of life in communist (totalitarian, to be exact) countries, not about communism itself, and it actually fascinates me but i'll write a lot more about this later. also i read a lot of psychedelics and the ongoing research about it which has been fascinated me for quite a while now. 

let's see if i'd be able to keep up the next year.

the nature of mind

"Despite this massive and nearly all-pervasive denial of its existence, we still sometimes have fleeting glimpse of the nature of mind. These could be inspired by a certain exalting piece of music, by the serene happiness we sometimes feel in nature, or by the most ordinary everyday situation. They could arise simply while watching the snow slowly drifting down, or seeing the sun rising from behind the mountain, or watching a shaft of light falling into a room in a mysteriously moving way. Such moments of illumination, peace, and bliss happen to us all and stay strangely with us. 

I think we do, sometimes, half understand these glimpses, but modern culture gives us no context of framework in which to comprehend them. Worse still, rather than encouraging us to explore these glimpses more deeply and discover where they spring from, we are told in both obvious and subtle way to shut them out. We know that no one will take us seriously if we share them. 

We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. We may even think that if we do we will be in danger of madness." –from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

jerome david salinger

“All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” - George Orwell
 
first time i saw the trailer of the biographical movie of this author last year, i hated it. it felt overly exaggerated accompanied with unnecessary dramatized sound effect. i found it rather disrespectful to an author known for his reclusiveness from the spotlight. now that i've actually watched the movie, i still find that the film is unnecessary. beside the quality itself that i don't favor (it's full of repeated imageries and clichés. plus it ends with coldplay's strawberry swing, duh.), the man is too big to be fit in a short two hours film. while it might be nice to see some images, i think whatever related to salinger would be better to be discovered in text, in reading.

however, now i'm preparing myself to reread all of his books in anticipation of the newest publications (details on glass and caufield family!) that might be coming out in 2015.

roma 29-3-90

il tesoro del giorno. found in a secondhand bookstore. happy as a kid finding her sweet candy.

the invisible people

I remember my boss once told me to start reading self help and motivational book and said that reading fictions only trains my language and serves no other purpose. I knew right away that he was wrong but I'm not a person who usually organize my thoughts, I didn't have any argument to back me up. This morning I came across a beautiful tumblr blog which I instantly fell in love with, it is as if it speaks in the same frequency as my mind. And on the blog she wrote,

"Do you know what makes writing great? You believe in the existence of invisible people. You believe. The concepts of another world, another language, another human being’s suffering and doubt. Great books make you forget that it is light outside, they make you want to curl up and live inside of them. The world becomes pale, as the book intensifies your deepest dreams and your most secret nightmares."

I guess those lines served me my argument, that reading - and writing - aren't merely to train our language, but are so much more than just that.

foer, daldry, and horn

There are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. But the number of dead people is increasing. One day, there isn't going to be any room to bury anyone anymore. So, what about skyscrapers for dead people that were built down? They could be underneath the skyscrapers for living people that are built up. You could bury people 100 floors down...and a whole dead world could be underneath the living one.

Sometimes you know a movie is going to be good just by the opening lines, and this is one of them. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a film adaptation of the book by Jonathan Safran Foer who also wrote the book Everything Is Illuminated, which was also adapted into a film.

In both films, the protagonist is searching for something related to his late father. In this one, after his father died on the 9/11 tragedy, the nine year old boy Oskar search for an answer to a clue, which he thought his father had left him, in the hope to extend his father's presence with him for a little longer. I don't usually interested in family affair movie but the way Foer created this Oskar character and how both Stephen Daldry, the director, and Thomas Horn, the actor, animated the character into life made me so drawn into this movie. His anger, his intelligent, his curiosity, his fears, his passion. I was actually surprised seeing how negative the reviews both to the book and the film were and one critic said that it's like giving a nine year old boy the brain of a twenty eight year old Foer. Might be true, but then sometimes the joy of reading or watching something is when you see a part of yourself in the characters, doesn't matter how old they are.

moby dick

The second on the series.

While my first, The Catcher in The Rye is one of my favorite book, I actually haven't read this one, and maybe never will, considering the thickness of the book. It's just that she mentioned it like a lot. Haha. And I like this classic version of cover by Rockwell Kent.

the catcher in the rye

Well, at least I tried.

added later:

The cover art is actually by Salinger’s friend E. Michael Mitchell. It depicts an angry red merry-go-round horse against a black-and-white cityscape — and it remains one of the most recognizable book covers of the 20th century: violent, visually arresting and beautiful.

eat in silence

"M. Yoshoto leaned his newspaper against my water glass, and the three of us ate in silence; that is, they ate and I systematically swallowed in silence." 
- from short story De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period by J. D. Salinger, in the book Nine Stories

Post this just because I realized I haven't posted anything from Nine Stories since I read it, unlike another two of his books that I've read. I'm always in love with the way he describes a situation. And how he uses the language in form of dialogues makes it so easy to visualize each scene it's almost like you're playing your own version of the movie in your head. If there ever comes a day when they make movie from Salinger's books, that, I assure you, will be the saddest day in the realm of literature.

finally shifted?

“What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, “It’s all your fault!” - Murakami

Call me so yesterday, but this morning at 9:38AM I finally finished reading my very first e-book. Now this is quite something for me. I've always said that I can't read on screen (computers or any other gadgets) when it comes to long passages, unless I really really have strong interest, and it needs extra focus. It makes me dizzy and I tend to skip a lot of lines, usually end up not reading it. I've tried reading Hemingway's e-book and gave up on the 8th page. So it's quite a surprise that I finished this one in less than 3 weeks.

Now, having finally experienced all the convenience of reading a paper-less book, it scares me somehow how this would affect my habit. Strolling around fancy bookstores has been one of the most joyous activity I always treasure on my daily basis. And hunting for the right cover of a title works more effectively for me than any other retail therapy. But on the other hand, I also realized that my reading pattern has changed. These days I read mostly during my commuting time in the morning, which is only about 15-20 minutes of bus ride, or during the intermission of a performance, well, basically I no longer set aside the time to read but I read during the time when I couldn't do anything else. I don't read on a nice sofa with coffee in hands flipping through pages but I read on those idle moments between activities.

So, conclusion is.. Printed books, right now I still have two I have to finish, two virgin ones I have to start soon, and one I have to reread. After that, we'll see what happens next.

ps. the Running book cover was designed by Jody Barton, who has a pretty cool doodle blog.