Aaron Chin từ Këllez, Albania

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12/22/2024

Dữ liệu người dùng, đánh giá và đề xuất cho sách

Aaron Chin Sách lại (10)

2018-06-16 10:30

36 Bài Thơ Thăng Long - Hà Nội Và Lời Bình Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Nghiêm Huyền Vũ

I've really enjoyed Derting's other series. And while this one sounded like a drastic difference from her other work, I was looking forward to what it might offer. I was impressed. The story actually dragged a bit at the beginning. While I got the impression that this is more of a dystopian novel, it read more like it was set in the past. But, as the story picked up the pace, I feel in love with the storyline and even the characters. I also decided that it had a fairy tale sort of feel to it, which made it that much more interesting. I found Charlie to be a very interesting character. She's born in the middle class, so she has more privilege that most, but not as much as the high class (and of course the royalty). The fact that she can understand any language spoken constantly puts her in danger since no one is suppose to understand a language above their station. I liked how protective she is of her family and her friends. And while we see very little of it until late in the book, I got the impression that she would do anything to protect those she cares about when forced too. But, she's seems mostly cautious about it all. I liked the rest of the cast of characters. I especially liked Max, even though I knew who he really was way before Charlie did. There was something about him that just really worked for me. It was interesting that most of them seemed to be from the middle class, but I enjoyed the inclusion of the girl for the high class. I would be curious to see if more of the low class make it into the series. I thought the setting was interesting. The queen's life is different that the normal story and her policies are extreme. It's all done to keep this country cut off from anybody else, because the people might see that there might be something better out there. While, I dislikes how the classes were separated and how those who acted out of their station were treated, I understood how it fit into the story. Overall, I just really enjoyed this story. It was fun and had many of the elements that I enjoy. I'm looking forward to more of it!

2018-06-16 14:30

Phúc Ông Tự Truyện (Tái Bản 2018) Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Fukuzawa Yukichi

Inspired by Bernard Schweizer's recommended reading progression for newbies to Rebecca West over at Pages Turned, I ran right out (metaphorically, since I found I had to order this online) and bought the first suggested volume, The Essential Rebecca West. Schweizer recommends starting here "to get a taste of just how multi-talented and brilliant [West] is," and The Essential Rebecca West is indeed fairly staggering in its diversity. Consisting of formerly-uncollected prose from the inter-war years through the 1970s, its scant 167 pages contain everything from book reviews and other criticism, to a chronicle of the first encounters between Montezuma and Cortés, to an account of trying to navigate London on an ordinary day during the WWII bombings, to a delightful and deeply-felt meditation on the practice of owning cats. Practically the only skill this volume does not demonstrate West possessing, is the ability to go into great depth on a single topic over a long period, which was never its intention; I suspect that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon would demonstrate that skill admirably. It's always difficult to write about a collection of short works; even more so in this case, when the goal of the exercise is diverse representation. A few qualities did cohere across all these pieces, though. Primary was West's wittiness, which is in a style I associate with Harold Ross, Dorothy Parker and the early years of The New Yorker. (Indeed, West did have pieces published in that magazine among very many others.) In a review of a collection of essays attempting to "popularize" the great philosophers, for example, West quips: Such are the overtones of our language that the sub-title, "Twenty of the World's Outstanding Thinkers Reveal the Deepest Meaning they have Found in Life," conveys to the experienced that this is just what the twenty authors involved do not do. In one of my favorite pieces, "Aspects of Love: Mutual Dislike," West offers a similarly scathing reading of Milton's Paradise Lost which, while I don't entirely agree with it, I do find both funny and thought-provoking. As Milton put it in his prose gloss on the poem, Adam was "exhorted to search rather things more worthy of knowledge," and he accepted the advice by consulting the angel on his sexual life, at enormous length, for it was much on his mind; so much that Eve may well have been not only the first woman but the first woman to express the opinion that Men Want Only One Thing. She may also have been the first woman to use the phrase "I've Never Been So Insulted in my Life." Although I tend to read Milton's Adam and Eve as more genuinely loving toward one another than West does ("When Adam and Eve speak to one another they always begin by a statement of devotion which can only mean that this emotion has left them forever"), I do find her feminist reading compelling—especially in the section when suggests that "the serpent" in this poem is not so much a knowledge of good and evil, as a female desire for solitude and breathing space which both Adam and Milton himself find extremely threatening. The serpent in all Paradises is not a condition of the mind but a matter of hard fact: the power possessed by any human being to leave another human being who does not want to be left. When Adam became aware of Eve's desire for separateness, when weak females flagged and failed under the intolerable burden of being one with Milton, Adam and Milton suffered as if they felt they serpent's fang. "Mutual Dislike" is a good example of something that impressed me throughout this book: West's ability to combine a light, often humorous tone with intellectual rigor. She is being witty, making it easy for her readers to enjoy her pieces, but that doesn't mean that she's not taking seriously her subject matter and her own thoughts on that subject matter. She may not mean every word she says, as in the provocative beginning to "Aren't Men Beasts" ("There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that one sometimes needs help in moving the piano"), but she believes firmly in her over-arching arguments, however pithily they may be delivered. This is particularly true when she is writing about issues relating to feminism, (anti)Communism, or literary practice. In my opinion, the urge toward censorship is one of the most effective targets for attack via satire—it's at once pernicious and also rife with human absurdity. I was therefore delighted at the inclusion of "The Age of Consent," which skewers the censor with the dirtiness of his or her own mind: I myself have been accused of the graver offence [indecency] when I hardly expected it. In an essay on Henry James, I happened, when discussing his indifference to abstract thought, to use the phrase, "He never felt an idea with the sensitive finger-tips of affection." I was startled to receive a press-cutting from an American newspaper, in which a reviewer protested against the use of "this sensual metaphor in connection with a writer of the known purity of Mr. James." None of us can provide that our innocent inventions may not be seized on by such persons as this and used as bases for the horrid dreams of their own engendering. "The horrid dreams of their own engendering"! Priceless. In reading up on the history of censorship one encounters this difficulty again and again: the mind of the censor glimpses reprehensible filth in every nook and cranny, including places nobody else would ever think to find it. In the censor's attempts to rid the world of indecency, he runs the double danger of exposing himself to this dangerous obscenity in the first place, and of adding to the sum total of dirty thoughts by imagining offenses where in fact none existed. I find this unnamed American's criticism particularly ironic given that James's characters conduct conversations as if they're physically picking up and caressing each comment made by their interlocutors, in a kind of tedious verbal intercourse: "Well then," said Kate, "it's what has wound me up. Here I am." He showed with a gesture how thoroughly he had taken it in; after which, within a few seconds, he had, quite congruously, turned the situation about. "Do you really suppose me in a position to justify your throwing yourself upon me?" [Wings of the Dove] West's original metaphor strikes me, if anything, as overly mild. (Also, it's dialogue like this that makes me want to stab myself with rusty forks whenever I try to read James.) There is much more to love in this little volume, from the funny and touching "Why My Mother Was Frightened of Cats" to West's trenchant observations on the importance of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and the obliviousness of Richard Nixon. A quick, rewarding read, and one that has me curious to progress to The Return of the Soldier, the next stop on Schweizer's Rebecca West train.

Người đọc Aaron Chin từ Këllez, Albania

Người dùng coi những cuốn sách này là thú vị nhất trong năm 2017-2018, ban biên tập của cổng thông tin "Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn" khuyến cáo rằng tất cả các độc giả sẽ làm quen với văn học này.