What are you currently reading? (part 2)

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-09-24, 22:07

I guess that means you finished 『金閣寺』, too? How was that?

In addition to the books I'm already reading, I think I'll also start reading Heritage and Remembrances, a book by my dad's dad's brother about our family history. My brother adapted it into a comic book, but I've never really read the original book, only bits and pieces of it. It's also partially autobiographical. I'm especially ignorant about his account of his own life. He has a picture in it where he'd dressed up as a maharaja smoking a pipe for a magazine ad for tobacco or something.

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby linguoboy » 2021-09-25, 2:37

vijayjohn wrote:I guess that means you finished 『金閣寺』, too? How was that?

Yeah, I pushed through and completed it in five days, worried that if I slackened and lost momentum I might end up not finishing it again. A solid work, but definitely not my favourite Mishima. On a philosophical level, he's very concerned with the problem of Beauty, which I can't say is one that interests me too much, and though he made Mizoguchi a more interesting figure than I suspect his real-world model was, he's not that intriguing a protagonist. I'm not sorry I read it but I don't really think I missed anything but putting it off this long.
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-09-25, 17:05

I started reading Heritage and Remembrances but haven't managed to get anywhere with it because of too many distractions on the Internet. :P

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby azhong » 2021-09-29, 8:11

I have been lately reading "Falling Leaves" (published in 1997) by Adeline Yen Mah. I've finished six chapters, thirty-two in total, and I like it.

The author is a Chinese woman, born in a rich family but had an unhappy childhood living with her step-mother and with her siblings while growing up in the time when China was weak and unstable. The political family events described are vivid and unpleasant. It was a real-life version of an eastern Cinderella. At any rate, she got her PhD degree as a doctor in British and wrote this autobiographical novel. I guess she wrote it first in English and then translated it into Chinese on her own. The Chinese version, which I am reading, is entitled as 落葉歸根, literally "falling leaf return root".

The beginning scene started in late nineteen century in China, where you might be attracted by the Chinese culture and customs. That's what I've known so far.

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-10-01, 22:19

azhong wrote:At any rate, she got her PhD degree as a doctor in British

Do you mean in Britain? (By the way, I noticed that Wikipedia just says she "studied medicine," but your phrasing is much more precise and easier to understand).
That's what I've known so far.

I would say "that's what I know so far."

I'm more than halfway through മലയാള വ്യാകരണം now even though there are eleven chapters and I've only read five. The next four chapters are much shorter than Chapter 5; one is only 2-3 pages and I think basically just a short list of examples or definitions. Currently, I'm going through 聊斋故事. I generally don't read very carefully, but this time, I made an effort to slow down so I actually understood the stories.

When I pick random stories to read in Chinese and in Malayalam, the ones in Chinese seem far more likely to be compelling. Maybe that's because foreigners are much more likely to try to learn Chinese than to learn Malayalam, so there are various bilingual books and readers for students of Chinese with stories designed to attract the learner's interest. I have never seen anything like this in Malayalam apart from a few Donald Duck comic magazines translated into Malayalam (and sold alongside the originals in English). Most books I've ever read in Malayalam are much more boring. To be fair, the same would probably be true of most books in Chinese or any other language; I just haven't started reading novels in such languages yet. I can definitely say that most literature I've read in French, and much if not most of what I've read in English, also have very forgettable plot lines and/or parts that just make my eyes glaze over.

azhong

Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby azhong » 2021-10-02, 7:10

vijayjohn wrote:
azhong wrote:At any rate, she got her PhD degree as a doctor in British

Do you mean in Britain? (By the way, I noticed that Wikipedia just says she "studied medicine," but your phrasing is much more precise and easier to understand).

I have finished the novel, and I find now my previous introduction basing on the information on the back cover might be wrong. She did study medicine, and got two advanced licences in internal medicine after her college degree, but I am not sure if it meets already a phD degree. The related description is in Chapter 14. This is not the focus of this book, anyway; her life experiences are. They are so unbelievably miserable.

Just for fun, I've recorded in Chinese a passage of the novel for my collegemates. I know most of you are unfamiliar with Chinese, nor am I a professional audiobook maker. So, Just to share!
https://youtu.be/-uN1gepNOHs

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-10-02, 16:05

azhong wrote:This is not the focus of this book, anyway; her life experiences are. They are so unbelievably miserable.

Oh dear... :(

I'm almost halfway through 聊斋故事 and hope to finish reading half of the stories today. I also started rereading part of the second book in the Yookoso! series. (The first book was my textbook when I took Japanese in college. I found the second one once at Half Price Books, a bookstore where all books are sold at half the original price or less (often much less)).

azhong

Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby azhong » 2021-10-11, 1:53

Malice, twice together. And then The Miracles of the Namiya General Store for the second time. Both are written by the productive Japanese writer Keigo Higashino well known mainly for his mystery novels. The reading pleasure is mostly from the story that is developed , is twisted and finally ended in a way out of your predict.

I read them in Chinese, but I know the English translations of the two can also be free accessed on the internet, if you are seeking some soft reads for fun, interested to understand human natures, or studying to write a story. I believe some of you have also read Higashino's books ever, have you not?

The theme of Malice is about something dark of the mind; that of the other work, on the opposite, love.

P.S. If you don't know me yet, pls be kindly informed that I am a Taiwanese chiefly learning English in this forum now, and thus any language corrections on my post are always appreciated.

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Yasna » 2021-10-11, 20:51

azhong wrote:I believe some of you have also read Higashino's books ever, have you not?

Indeed! I read 容疑者Xの献身 (The Devotion of Suspect X) with great pleasure. I also watched the TV adaptation of 白夜行 (Journey Under the Midnight Sun), but haven't gotten around to reading the novel yet. Do you have a favorite Higashino novel?

Incidentally, I'm currently reading a Taiwanese novel called 抵達夢土通知我 (Call me up in Dreamland) by Wo Fu. It's a blend of social critique, magical realism, and detective novel which somehow tie together quite well.
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-10-12, 5:29

I am now 3/5 of the way through 聊斋故事 because I've read the first 12 out of 20 stories. I also read the first 7 out of the 15 chapters of Practical Chinese Reader IV and am now reading chapter 7 out of 11 in മലയാള വ്യാകരണം (the grammar in Malayalam I've been reading).

I'm also in the middle of Chapter 4 in Heritage and Remembrances. It's called "Family Patriarchs," and it's a long chapter because it's exactly that: a description of all the patriarchs in our family according to the author, my great-uncle (first cousin once removed?). He just can't seem to stop talking about how much he hates the Roman Catholic church because of the Inquisition! It's hard for me to read his account of the Inquisition in Kerala without laughing, honestly. You can just hear him gnashing his teeth in utter fury as he describes Catholics and even Jacobites. I'm very skeptical about a lot of what he says about our past.
azhong wrote:Malice, twice together.

Do you mean "twice altogether"? I.e. you have read Malice a total of two times?
Both are written by the productive Japanese writer Keigo Higashino well known mainly for his mystery novels.

I would say "prolific" rather than "productive." "Productive" to me sounds like an adjective I might use for someone working for an employer.
The reading pleasure is mostly from the story that is developed , is twisted and finally ended in a way out of your predict.

Do you mean that the pleasurable part of reading it is the story that is developed, is twisted, and finally ends in a way you wouldn't predict?
I read them in Chinese, but I know the English translations of the two can also be free accessed on the internet,

I would say "be accessed for free on the Internet."
if you are seeking some soft reads for fun, interested to understand human natures, or studying to write a story.

I would probably say something like "if you are looking for something fun to read, interested in understanding human nature, or learning to write..."
I believe some of you have also read Higashino's books ever, have you not?

I'd say "haven't you?" "Have you not?" sounds formal and almost archaic to me.
The theme of Malice is about something dark of the mind; that of the other work, on the opposite, love.

I'm a little confused by this, especially by what you mean by "that of the other work."

azhong

Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby azhong » 2021-10-12, 9:33

Yasna wrote:I also watched the TV adaptation of 白夜行 (Journey Under the Midnight Sun), but haven't gotten around to reading the novel yet. Do you have a favorite Higashino novel?

Journey Under the Midnight Sun is not the first Higashino's book that I read, but it's the one that touches my soul the most with its heavy, dark plot. I've grabbed it back and am reading chapter one.

vijayjohn wrote:
The theme of Malice is about something dark of the mind; that of the other work, on the opposite, love.

I'm a little confused by this, especially by what you mean by "that of the other work."

I give it a try again:
The theme of Malice is about something dark of the human mind. The theme of the other work, on the opposite, is about love -- not the moving love between a couple but the more selfless one between friends or even strangers.

***
Is it still a valuable information to anyone here that 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber), published in the mid-18th century, is a classic Chinese novel and definitely worth reading? it's highly esteemed as one of the Four Greatest Chinese Novels. (I add this to meet the topic of this thread, so as not to get disliked by anyone of you for me revising my sentences here. ^_^)

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-10-12, 16:39

That's nice of you, but you don't have to do that. This is UniLang. Discussions here go off-topic all the time. One time, someone said that anyone will see that the discussion always goes off-topic on UniLang if they just read through one thread. Then he illustrated this by randomly asking whether anyone liked lasagna. :lol:
azhong wrote:I give it a try again:
The theme of Malice is about something dark of the human mind. The theme of the other work, on the opposite, is about love -- not the moving love between a couple but the more selfless one between friends or even strangers.

Ah, okay. I would say:

I'll give it another try:
The theme of Malice is something dark in the human mind. The other work, on the other hand, is about love...
Is it still a valuable information to anyone here that 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber), published in the mid-18th century, is a classic Chinese novel and definitely worth reading? it's highly esteemed as one of the Four Greatest Chinese Novels. (I add this to meet the topic of this thread, so as not to get disliked by anyone of you for me revising my sentences here. ^_^)

紅樓夢 is internationally very famous; I even remember the same person who joked about UniLang going off-topic also making a joke here where the punchline was Dream of the Red Textbook. :) (Unfortunately, I don't remember the joke itself!). I've never read it yet, only seen part of a Huangmei opera performance on YouTube, so I would say that is valuable information. Maybe I'll try reading it sometime!

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby md0 » 2022-01-23, 17:45

I started reading The Velvet Rage today (it seems to be quite popular at the Berlin Public Libraries, I had a hold on it for two months).

To summarise it to an extreme degree, it's an attempt to explain why most gay men are perpetually unhappy even in the absence of direct homophobia through the eyes of a gay clinical psychologist in the US and Canada. It's an interesting experience - my reactions oscillate between damn, that's how I feel too and that's essentialist bullshit. For sure this book should tone down its claims of universality and admit the obvious facts that it only explores the experience of upper-middle class and upper class gay North Americans. There's a lot of experiences described in there that I can still empathise with a continent and two social classes away, but the author loves to use descriptors like "all of us" and then go on to describe fancy parties at mansions.

I'm still reading the introductory chapters, but I think I'll use the structure of the book to write something between a review and my own experience under this new lens that we developed in therapy over the last year.
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-01-23, 21:26

vijayjohn wrote:I am now 3/5 of the way through 聊斋故事 because I've read the first 12 out of 20 stories. I also read the first 7 out of the 15 chapters of Practical Chinese Reader IV and am now reading chapter 7 out of 11 in മലയാള വ്യാകരണം (the grammar in Malayalam I've been reading).

I'm also in the middle of Chapter 4 in Heritage and Remembrances.

I finished reading all of these books and have lately been reading the following:

A novel in Malayalam by Ekalavyan called കടലാസുപൂക്കൾ [kəɖəlaːsɯˈbuːkəɭ] 'Paper Flowers'
Practical Chinese Reader V
经商宝典, also available in English translation as Golden Rules of Business Success
Teach Yourself Ancient Greek
Medieval Latin
Ourika
Querschnitt: Dichter des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts

A bunch of Uncle Scrooge stories in German
A Ditadura Envergonhada
La muerte de Artemio Cruz

An old bilingual Croatia Airlines in-flight magazine :P
A trilingual travelers' guide to Yakutsk, I think originally written in Russian and then translated into Sakha and English, with the text being presented in those languages and that order
Kızlarıma Mektuplar, a set of letters by a Turkish professor to his daughters I think after they grew up and left to study abroad
ألف ليلة وليلة (known in English by such titles as One Thousand and One Nights and Arabian Nights, but the edition I'm trying to read is in Arabic)
نابینا شہر میں آئینہ Nabina Shehr Mein Aaina, a book of Urdu ghazals by Ahmad Faraz
Quechua Cusqueño: Year One

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby linguoboy » 2022-01-24, 5:11

Just reached the halfway point of Bowen’s Court, Elizabeth Bowen’s history of her Anglo-Irish ancestors. Overall it’s pretty fun reading though some of the legal disputes get tiresome.
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-01-24, 22:45

Oh, and I'm currently reading the old in-flight magazine. :lol: In particular, I'm reading the one article that's actually about a place I visited in Croatia: the Neanderthal museum in Krapina. Several years later, I still don't quite understand why this museum exists.

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Rí.na.dTeangacha » 2022-01-24, 23:30

I'm currently reading How To Read A Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. It was recommended by Prof. Arguelles (I'm sure some of you are familiar with his YT channel, if not definitely chrck him out!). The book was written 82 years ago basically as a kind of study guide. The main point of the book is to exhort the reader to try to read well, as opposed to lazily or quickly. The part I've just read past seems to go beyond even how to read and actually goes into how to think, how to be intellectually honest and fair to an author in your criticism. I really like it, there is much food for thought in there even just for how to deal with discussion in general that I think makes the book worth a read.

Anyway, one passage I've just gotten to which surprised me was the following:

The question "Is it true?" can be asked of anything we read. It is applicable to every kind of writing, in one or another sense of "truth" - mathematical, scientific, philosophical, historical, and poetical. No higher commendation can be given to any work of the human mind than to praise it for the measure of truth it has achieved; by the same token, to criticize it adversely for its failure in this respect is to treat it with the seriousness that a serious work deserves. Yet, strangely enough, in recent years, for the first time in Western history, there is a dwindling concern with this criterion of excellence. Books win plaudits from the critics and gain widespread popular attention almost to the extent that they flout the truth - the more outrageously they do so, the better. Many readers, and most particularly those who review current publications, employ other standards for judging and praising or condemning, the books they read - their novelty their sensationalism, their seductiveness, their force, and even their power to bemuse or befuddle the mind, but not their truth, their clarity, or their power to enlighten. They have, perhaps, been brought to this pass by the fact that so much of current writing outside of the sphere of exact sciences manifests so little concern with truth. One might hazard the guess that if saying something that is true, in any sense of that term, were ever again to become the primary concern it should be, fewer books would be written, published, and read.

...well, there go my rose-tinted glasses about a pre-fake news, sensible before-time!
Last edited by Rí.na.dTeangacha on 2022-01-25, 17:14, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby azhong » 2022-01-25, 14:36

Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote: ...well, there go my rose-tinted glasses about a pre-fake news, sensible before-time!
I hazard the guess that it's a humourous ending. If I'll introduce an anticlimax by asking the writer to explain his own humour, I can just leave it as a humour I don't understand because of the language gap. :)

BTW, back to the theme of the quoted passage:
so much of current writing outside of the sphere of exact sciences manifests so little concern with truth.
Does anyone have any idea of the books the author talks about, books about one century years ago?

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-01-25, 20:00

Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:I'm currently reading How To Read A Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. It was recommended by Prof. Arguelles (I'm sure some of you are familiar with his YT channel, if not definitely chrck him out!).

I know who he is, and there was even a time I considered e-mailing him, but I'm not sure I realized until now that he has his own YouTube channel. Honestly, I think he's a bit overrated. He has a rather unique style of learning, but it's only one style and by no means the only valid one. Many of us are no less interesting than he is, yet he's the one who gets so much attention whereas the rest of us get none at all.
The book was written 82 years ago basically as a kind of study guide. The main point of the book is to exhort the reader to try to read well, as opposed to lazily or quickly.

I tried to do this with books in Malayalam, and all it did was make me take forever to read a single book. I recently decided to abandon this strategy entirely. It is working out very well.
azhong wrote:
Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote: ...well, there go my rose-tinted glasses about a pre-fake news, sensible before-time!
I hazard the guess that it's a humourous ending. If I'll introduce an anticlimax by asking the writer to explain his own humour, I can just leave it as a humour I don't understand because of the language gap. :)

I think Ciarán is only half-joking here. If I understand correctly, he's pointing out that even in the 1940s, when this book was written, people didn't care about whether books were telling the truth or not and believed all kinds of things that weren't true. A lot of people these days believe many things that are not true, and it's a problem that a lot of other people complain about often, but as this book shows, this isn't really a new problem.
BTW, back to the theme of the quoted passage:
so much of current writing outside of the sphere of exact sciences manifests so little concern with truth.
Does anyone have any idea of the books the author talks about, books about one century years ago?

Well, since this book was written in the 1940s, I guess he's talking about books written at that time, but honestly, this is true of books in general. People rarely are very concerned with learning the truth about things.

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Re: What are you currently reading? (part 2)

Postby Eireannach » 2022-01-28, 14:33

I have been attempting to read "Silver in the Wood" by Emily Tesh for several months but I keep forgetting to continue it.

My reason for reading it was seeing some cool artwork in a d&d subreddit and someone saying the character in the art, reminded them of this book. So I bought it on a whim haha.
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