Books

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself.

— Romain Rolland

These are what I read since 2023 December.

(If there is an English version of Chinese books, I will tag with the English title. If not, they are just not translated.)

  1. Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, Keith Lowe

    4/5 [History]

    • The book is packed with data and historical information, some of which is yet to be verified. After reading the book, I realized that: 1) no ordinary person on one side of a war is a winner; 2) there is no limit to the evil of human nature; and 3) the power of “identity” and “emotion” is a kind of leverage that can be used for politics.

  2. All Men Are Mortal, Simone de Beauvoir

    4/5 [Literary]

    • Finished this in a bookstore in Zhengzhou, China. You may feel blue after reading it.

  3. 秦岭记, 贾平凹

    3/5 [Literary]

    • 没有惊喜也不太失望。贾平凹的文字瑰丽诡谲，想象力丰富，不过读完忘得也快。

  4. A Writer’s Diary, Virginia Wolf

    4/5 [Literary]

    • The second half during the war is more attractive.

  5. Becoming Beauvoir：A Life, Kate Kirkpatrick

    5/5 [Biography]

    • Never before have I felt so much like a man in terms of my worldview and mode of living. To see Beauvoir, forever in conflict, growing, struggling, to see how women struggle to strip away the shackles that bind them to men, to see women’s unconscious self-attack and self-rescue.

  6. Sakhalin Island, Anton Chekhov

    3.5/5 [Travel]

    • More serious than a travel diary, more entertaining than an academic book. Honestly I’m not a fan.

  7. The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, Craig Childs

    3/5 [Literary]

    • Fun to read. All creatures have souls.

  8. WOMEN & POWER: A MANIFESTO, Mary Beard

    4/5 [Feminism]

    • A booklet. Until today, the female figure remains absent from the top echelons of power, and the gender violence of civilization lies in its neglect. When will we think of words like “powerful” without the first male figure coming to mind? There is a long way to go in stripping oppressive positive words of their gender shackles, in order to get them out of the gender frame.

  9. The Memory Chalet, Tony Judt

    3/5 [Autobiography]

    • Memoirs. You can always find something to resonate when a historian wrote autobiography.

  10. 观念的水位, 刘瑜

    2/5 [Political Critics]

    • 不好看，不值得，不推荐。

  11. 成为雍正 : 从隐忍的胤禛到帝国权力巅峰, 李正

    2/5 [History]

    • 个人比较喜欢的B站历史区up主，但说实话写成书就没必要了。

  12. 鳄鱼手记, 邱妙津

    3/5 [Literature]

    • 台湾文学有时候敏感到了令我不适的地步。女性之间的爱实在无需如此撕心裂肺。

  13. The Roots of Romanticism, Sir Isaiah Berlin

    5/5 [Literature Critics]

    • Finished it on my flight back to the US. Rather than philosophy, this is more of literature critics. Berlin’s writing is elegant, beautiful, and incredibly smooth. I love this world more after reading this.

  14. Patrimony: A True Story, Philip Roth

    3.5/5 [Memoirs]

    • How we face the death of others, the death of our loved ones, and our own death? The topic of death is something that runs through our whole life.

  15. Look at the Lights, My Love, Annie Ernaux

    4/5 [Literary]

    • Shopping with Nobel Prize Winner. Fun to read.

  16. 最小的海, 叶昕昀

    3/5 [Literary]

    • 没有达到预期。

  17. Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revionist History of Footbinding, Dorothy Ko

    4/5 [History]

    • Definitions of Female Beauty, Culture, Power, and Sex …… Who says there is no alternative to foot binding now? From the individual to the group, the gaze of others is a shackle that is extremely difficult to break free from.

  18. La Place, Annie Ernaux

    3.5/5 [Biography]

    • How a daughter saw, felt, and evaluated her relationship with her dad? What role does mother play in the father-daughter relationship?

  19. Invisible Women, Caroline Criadoperez

    4/5 [Feminism]

    • There are many things that we take for granted, but only after we put gender into them do we realize that they are designed for men!There are so many unseen aspects of women, both in the light and in the dark, that it takes a lot of thinking outside the box to break the so-called “traditions”.

  20. The King Bows and Kills, Herta Müller

    5/5 [Literary]

    • It’s been too long since I’ve read words so life-affirming that I feel like I’m going to be peeled back and seen through by the author the next second.Every word spoken harbors the gaze of another, and the diary can’t be completely honest with itself, with third-party eyes running through every second, and every corner

  21. Thought to Survive (生き延びるための思想), Chizuko Ueno (上野千鹤子)

    4/5 [Feminism]

    • A new dimension of understanding of gender equity. Objective disparities, or the delicate relationship between violence and civilization, should not be an obstacle to the rights and interests of vulnerable groups/minorities. We ask for respect.

  22. The Hunger Angel, Herta Müller

    5/5 [Literary]

    • Depict suffering and pain so lightly and heavily.

  23. Netochka Nezvanova, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    5/5 [Literary]

    • This is probably one of the Dostoyevsky’s books that I understood the most. The story came to an abrupt end, someone please finish!!

  24. 如雪如山, 张天翼

    3/5 [Literary]

    • 从书里的描写来看，女性可能比男性想象的更了解男性。

  25. 밝은밤 (Bright Night, 明亮的夜晚), 최은영 (Eunyoung Choi)

    3.5/5 [Literary]

    • 四代女性的故事，看到东亚女性在一代代延续中的挣扎、突破与痛苦。

  26. 河边的错误, 余华

    3/5 [Literary]

    • 余华早年的作品比近年的好许多。喜欢东野圭吾的应该也会喜欢读这本书。

  27. 权力，身体与自我：福柯与女性主义文学批评 (Power, Body, and Self: Foucault and Feminism in Literature), 黄华 (Hua Huang)

    3/5 [Feminism]

    • 总的来说没有看到太多作者自己的想法，类似综述。写得比较难懂，没有语言学/哲学基础的人读起来相对费劲。性别和其他identity一样，不该成为判断个体的标准。从大群体里提取普遍特征是合理的，但把普遍特征强加给个人是强盗行为。种族歧视、地域歧视等等歧视与性别歧视一样，把个人行为上升至群体行为是一种看似聪明实则无理的行为。

  28. The Power Book, Jeanette Winterson

    4/5 [Literary]

    • I kept thinking of the music by Cigarettes After Sex. There are more and more short but beautiful phases and moments in life, they are like summer camps. You can see there is a clear beginning and a clear ending, but it doesn’t affect all those who are in it to enjoy the short splendor. At the end of the day, everyone may go back to their own life, or go into another summer camp. But existence is eternity, and occurrence is profound. Moments of resonance never fade away. Yesterday’s sun couldn’t dry today’s clothes. We live in the moments.

  29. La Condition Ouvrière (Factory Journal), Simone Weil

    4/5 [History] [Politics]

    • A real and painful experience of working. Without a deep analysis of labor and individual value, you’ll never know how you’re being deprived.

  30. Tempo Curvo a Krems (Curving Time in Krems), Claudio Magris

    3/5 [Literary]

    • Quite similar as <The Order of Time>, but not as good as that one.

  31. Also Sprach Zarathustra, F. Nietzsche

    5/5 [Philosophy]

    • No need to talk about Nistzsche’s wisdom though. A philosophy book but somehow religious, feel like reading the Bible. It’s unbelievable that people from thousands of years ago were able to think so deep.

  32. Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson

    2.5/5 [Literary]

    • Honestly, one Winterson book is enough.

  33. 晚清女性与近代中国, 夏晓红

    3/5 [History] [Feminism]

    • 史料丰富但观点稀缺。感觉越读女性主义的书籍越不懂女性主义是什么，也不敢定义自己是女性主义者。看到一个观点还算认同：平权从来就不是在现有的父权架构之下两性攻击就能够得到的产物。

  34. 西湖梦寻，陶庵梦忆, 张岱

    4/5 [Literary]

    • 陶庵梦忆充满醉生梦死的气息，西湖梦寻就是纯浙江省人文山水讲解手册。整本书是典型浙江小资阶级的具象化：纵情山水，书画古玩，云里雾里又是一生。张岱也确实是难得的大才子。

  35. 小城三月, 萧红

    3.5/5 [Literary]

    • 被低估的萧红。寥寥几笔囊括千言万语，字字珠玑。表述是平静的，忧郁的，像愈合的疤痕。

  36. Where the Crawdad’s Sing, Della Owens

    4/5 [Literary]

    • A very poetic book. Before reading the book I thought the movie was okay. After reading the book I believed that the movie was just way worse than it could be. Women writers are actually very good at writing about women with respect and curiosity. Sometimes I read a book, I kinda wish the story really had happened.

  37. Una Muerte Anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold), Gabriel García Márquez

    5/5 [Literary]

    • A fiction without any BS. But I never am able to remember the names in Márquez’s books though..

  38. The Vegetarian, Han Kang

    5/5 [Literary]

    • This book was written in violent, aesthetic, and wild expressions. Those gazes for sex, the so-called “family first” rule for women, these oppression from the males that even males are not aware of. Existence does not mean its rationality. How should women resist men’s attempt to fulfill themselves through women? As the book says, if you don’t eat meat, others will eat you.

  39. 滔滔生活, 金爱烂

    3/5 [Literary]

    • 自尊是横在人心里的一把刀，那点可怜的虚荣能促成当然也能毁掉许多事。这本书看得都要喘不过气来了，像是走在全是鳞次栉比高楼的大城市里，却反复质问自我“真的值得吗”？却又吞下这个问句继续匍匐前进。感觉人就是在不断背叛自我里潦草地过完一生。

  40. 绝叫, Aki Hamanaka (叶真中显)

    4/5 [Fiction]

    • It really captures the depths of despair. Talking about the same crime through different perspectives reveals that, behind the blood there are broken hearts.

  41. Of Human Bondage, William S. Maugham

    4/5 [Literary]

    • People always are looking for a meaning of life at different stages. Life ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys, and at certain points, those desires to the see the world, eventually back to where we started. Is the meaning of life means nothing? Or does it all comes down to find another person as a final destination?

  42. Amusing Ourselves To Death, Neil Postman

    3/5 [Critics]

    • What’s truly frightening is not the loss of their ability to think, but the ignorance of realizing that they’re losing it. You thought you’re thinking, but actually you’re just choosing among whatever was presented by others.

  43. El río invisible (An Invisible River), Pablo Neruda

    5/5 [Literary]

    • Before I only read Neruda’s love poems. This one reveals more of him as a revoluntionary soldier. He’s truly a life as poetic as a poem.

  44. Slightly Out of Focus, Robert Capa

    4/5 [Documentary] [History]

    • The relatively true record of war y a battlefield reporter. Ironic, slightly sassy language made it easy to momentarily forget that war was brutal. But we feel the pain more when realize that it all happened during the war.

  45. Passion Simple, Annie Ernaux

    4/5 [Literary]

    • Sex is cheap and short peasure, but love is the right to inflict endless pain upon me and trample my dignity. Sex has never been able to keep love, and love is just the ever-changing lie of hormones. My life doesn’t need to have 100% rationality. I embrace craziness, madness, brokenness, and self-criticism. Instead of begging others not to leave, just enjoy the simple passion, and learn to face and heal selves after the passion.

  46. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

    4/5 [Literary]

    • I hope to grow fearlessly like a sapling, and thriving only for my self. An ordinary beginning doesn’t limit the sky I can fly, the twists and turns of the times can’t beat me down. As for love, it is what it is. Expectations only bring endless hurts.