Những Vụ Kỳ Án Của Sherlock Holmes - Tái bản 29/04/2010 tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Ahmed Smara hawdan — Good book!

Humberto Albarrán hjalbarran — Le Guin handles this concept gorgeously: a man can shape reality (it's taking all my strength not to put quotation marks around that noun) through his dreams, but he does not want to. A doctor learns of his ability and tries to harness it to improve a broken society. Each iteration of the dreamscape and something new is broken, evil never goes away, but the doctor's ambition makes him blind to that. Le Guin does an amazing job evoking the *feel* of dreams in her rendering of the changed world. By the end of the book, she starts invoking the Australian concept of dreamtime, that all the world is a kind of communal dream (not just a human one, but one that incorporates the landscape as well), and I dug that a lot. Her prognostications about environmental and political catastrophes were even grimmer to read while mourning the BP spill in the Gulf, so her messages about anthrocentrism and the dangerous force of the illusion of progress rang heavy and true. It's a harrowing read with lots of momentum and yet still grace. The opening passage about a jellyfish is so beautiful, and she uses this creature as a spiritual image throughout. Sometimes her prose gets a little didactic, the allegory explicit, the evils of Dr. Haber Orwellian and unsubtle. (those two adjectives should not seem synonymous, I should add here) But I love her critique of the Enlightenment and the supposed rationality of man; by having the world change through dreams, there is always a nightmare element, always a tinge of the irrational, which I think Le Guin is saying is always true when it comes to the individual's relationship to his world. She also suggests that our longing for individualism and ambition is misplaced; Zen Buddhism plays a big role in this text, and the ability to ride the currents of history (rather than try to shape them) is prized, which makes Orr, the main character, rather an unusual and passive protagonist. A haunting book, but one that also shows signs of its late 1960s / early 1970s conception. For example, it celebrates racial diversity, but its essentialism can be a bit uncomfortable (like when Orr's whiteness is treated as a sign of his fitting in anywhere and Heather's mixed race is treated as a source of her feistiness). I would still highly recommend this book, esp. if you can sit and read it in one sitting.