Momo (Tái Bản 2014) tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Paulo C _aulo_sampaio — Definitely read this if you're interested in Buddhism and Management techniques! One of my favorites...

Salvatore Verazzo designdictatorship — laugh out loud funny

Ming Chiang 72777099861fe — British novelist Paul Torday is a retired businessman who launched a successful second career when he published the bestselling Salmon Fishing In The Yemen (2007). His follow up, The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce (2008), proved popular as well. The former was a comedy, the second a tragedy. His third is something like a horror story. The author has a knack for creating a sense of unease in his narratives, and The Girl On The Landing is his darkest effort yet. It is also his most uneven – now that he is an established author, his editor seems to have gone light on him, resulting in awkward patches of prose and even simple spelling errors. But for all its flaws, this slow-boil thriller certainly keeps you turning the pages. The novel initially reads like a mix between Gothic fiction and a study in British upper-middle class ennui. Our protagonists are Michael and Elizabeth, a wealthy, middle-aged married couple who take turns narrating the chapters. Theirs is a dull marriage, to say the least. Elizabeth, the only child of a fickle father, was drawn to her husband precisely because of his mind-numbingly boring stability, though even she had doubts before accepting his proposal: “On the one hand, could I really face spending the next forty or fifty years with a man whose idea of an adrenaline rush was playing bridge at his club?” As the novel opens, they are dutifully visiting acquaintances at their country estate in Ireland – Michael and the owner are members of the same conservative London gentleman’s club. Going down to dinner, Michael notices a small painting hung along the corridor. The painting depicts a staircase landing, and he thinks he sees a figure of a woman in green in the background. Later that night, his dog is afraid to go past that spot in the corridor. The next day, when he re-examines the painting, the woman is no longer there. Elizabeth notices that Michael starts to change after the trip. Once meek and mild, he becomes bold and moody, telling off an irritating houseguest. He also periodically utters mysterious things like “Lamia”, which he later does not recall saying. Then, Michael – or “Mikey”, as this improved version is dubbed – becomes a lot more fun and passionate. Surprising his wife with kisses and romantic gestures, he gives their 10-year “workable” marriage an unexpected renaissance. On his part, Michael starts encountering a mysterious woman dressed in green. The weather becomes wild and violent at night. Walking among the hills of his childhood estate, he is suddenly “seized by a feeling of horror, as if something from the outside had come into the world”. It is slowly revealed that Michael has a disturbing past of “behavioural problems”, which he himself has been made to forget until now – one with more than a touch of madness. This is more than a novel about schizophrenia, though. The overall Gothic mood is aided by an interesting concept – that there are other ways for an individual to perceive the world, one that would be perfectly suitable in another society, but not ours. As a doctor told him: “You know, it’s your bad luck that you are probably an evolutionary misstep, or sidestep. Your brain chemistry has reverted to that of the very earliest hunter-gatherer, before a social brain became the evolutionary path forward... In any case, I can’t let you out into the community as you are.” The story climaxes with a series of unfortunate events, startling revelations and a creepy, if hackneyed wait-for-the-sequel ending. But it is testament to the author’s powers of storytelling that this is one book you may not wish to read as you sit alone on a rainy night.