Years of Poems and Spirits

Just finished reading Li Yiyun’s Vagrants.  It is a thick book but not that difficult to read. I don’t know what to think, actually.

In the novel, the best developed characters are two ugly ducklings that nobody wanted (Bashi and Nini). Their romance is as distorted as the age the story is set in. Some other characters, like that of Teacher Gu, is somewhat less well developed I think. He jumped from learned-helplessness to a cynic overnight then died a sentimentalist, all with little narrative development.  The other “righteous” characters, like Wu Kai and Jialin–the liberal independent thinkers–are weak and rootless. Feels like they belong to posters.

Maybe this is in sync with the society Li is trying to tell the world about: wicked, strange and dysfunctional.  So much so that there is little room for anything positive to grow organically. However, that is not quite the China I know. More importantly, that is not the humanity in China I know.

In terms of her writing style–as many have pointed out, she is very good at capturing details and human emotions. I have not read enough novels to compare her with others. But I will be surprised if that is not the first thing people say about her.

God gives life and Charles C. gives us Kindle. We received it as a surprise gift and love it from then on.

I was just thinking the other day after struggling with a hardcover book, “Five thousand years of human civilization later, is this the best reading experience we can come up with?” Here is a list of my problems:

• You can’t use ball pen to mark on a book while lying on the bed
• A beautifully bond book is the hardest one to keep open (to read, to write on, etc.)
• You don’t want to dog-ear or write on borrowed or rented books
• Books tend to have to small a margin
• You can underline, write all you want in a book, it is still a pain in the ass to look up anything you remembered as “somewhere in the book”.
• Books are heavy

The most important thing Kindle offers is a much superior reading experience: the book is light, you can order content at any time from almost anywhere (anywhere has a Sprint-competible wireless network, that is). The printing technology (the device is much more like a miniture printer behind a wipeable slate than a LCD display) make it very easy on the eyes. Another feature we like the most is that it allows you to send your content (in Word, text or HTML format only) to your Kindle.

Of course, there are things I would like in future versions, e.g. so far, all the contents are of the same font. It cannot handle the pictures embedded in a block of text in the original print. The device is super light yet not the most ergonomic to hold for a long time. So far, Kindle only supports 240K titles and many of the academic ones are not yet available.

But for $395, which includes all the wireless bills incurred forever, this is an incredible piece of machine that will change many people’s lifes, particularly those poor graduate students (I felt like someone just died before they came up with Penicilline). I am saying so with some confidence too. Bezos revealed on Charlie Rose that in the 14 month Kindle has been on the market, Amazon has sold 1/10 of the books on it already. WOW!

I am not a big fun of continental Euorpean movies. Nor are the holocaust ones. But Au revoir, les enfants is an exception. A very moving movie indeed. Unlike many French movies, it is full of outright conflicts and tensions. Yet still has the attention to details that is so French.

In the end, it is a new drama about the age old themes of friendship, loyalty, betrayal and lost innocence. The story is told in occupied France during WWII, of a Jewish boy hidding among a group of privileged Catholic boarding school boys. However, the suffering of the Jews and the evil of Nazism are used only to prop up an universal, perpetual theme–not vice versa. And that is why I like it.