shauna > Recent Status Updates

looking for something cosy

as someone with affection and reverence for languages and learning them, the workings of babel is a real treat.

i would kill to have been part of a college community where i could introduce myself by way of "shauna. korean, french, chinese (mandarin, cantonese)"

understand (3): flowers for algernon but make it short and snappy and with pizzazz. a lot of it went over my head near the ending, but alas how could i a mere mortal even begin to fathom the workings of a superintelligent being's mind

tower of babylon: the firmament

fascinating vivid endearing characters. not a sentence where i'm unengaged. resilient friendship!! young adults!!! making video games!!!

don't know why gamer techy books bore me so much, despite their wit and exciting premise.
see ready player one..
maybe its their esoteric references...? or maybe cause they're the action films of lit...?

this book is great. speaking out about shame to counter shame.

helpful! learning to live in a way that maximises fun and pleasure

"sycamore trees" hits on a nerve

this is a lot harder to understand than I thought...

One of the saddest bits of fiction I've read this year.

Amir is a boy who is good with words and deprived of his father's affection. He resents his servant-friend (the pure Hassan), because Hassan is able to garner such from Amir's father.

Amir is a Pashtun Sunni, and Hassan a Hazara Shia, and the gulf between the two groups are made evident in their master-servant relationship.

Excited about this read - haven't read anything from Afghanistan before.

What the hell.

W meets girl, finally knows what it feels to savour sensations.

She's a decade-ish younger than him. Represents a generation depoliticised & apathetic about Inner Circle. Born in time when BB was already in power. Doesn't think about the fall of the regime - rather, how she can live and enjoy herself now despite restrictions.

Everything they do for pleasure is never for pleasure alone, has a political side to it.

Absorbed in this nightmarish world where "truth" is not what your eyes, ears and head tells you, but the people up there.

W experiences a small victory where he pep-talks himself into holding on to the unswayable and unalterable Truth that he believes to be real.

Fascinating look into a world of oppression. Interesting to see how ruling party tries to control thought by placing limits on language. Wonder whether that would work IRL. W seems to be doing an adequate job of thinking deviant thoughts - that he has the appropriate vocab for such thoughts + vague memories of a BB-less time might contribute to that. ESL students might have an easier time w Newspeak than English lol.

slavery... very bad. morrison... good writer.

I like how Murakami writes about remembering the past. He seems about right - a moment that while in it, seems insignificant, but years after, if you close your eyes tight enough and concentrate, you can find it and live in it again for two minutes or so. Of constructing people from your past in your mind's eye, bit by bit. The inhaling deep into strong cologne, a hazy glimpse of a side profile, tender hands.

this is starting to look a lot more doable (read: normal) than 1q84.

the past remains very much magically haunting & alive in this one.

"Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it's you thinking it up... But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to someone else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if every tree of it dies."

other's memories are tangible.

How should I describe my experience with J-lit? Gentle, slice-of-life, little adventures away from adults. The youth are kind and purehearted, and the ones from the city happily play with their cats, while the rural ones happily grow vegetables.

In Chapter 2, we reminisce about Satoru's junior high days with his friend, Yoshimine.

C2 reminds me a bit of Gatsby. Stephen feels a certain vague purposelessness in his youth, does not want to become like the older male figures in his life who seem to have wasted their lives and to be preoccupied with meaningless things. He strives to structure his life by various self-improvement means but fails. He ends up giving in to one of his base instincts, finding release by having sex with a prostitute.

Actually, this book gets a lot easier once you get past Chapter 1. I'm even starting to like it a little.

This is quite difficult to read :(

Couldn't fall asleep tonight so I picked up this one. Is very soft and wholesome thus far. I've decided that the cat sounds like a middle-aged British man (or a grandpa) - he is polite and uses terms like "dyed-in-the-wool". :~)

Operation Spectrum. Really unfair.

When Stella is threatened with imprisonment unless she acts out the story her detainers want to hear, she ultimately chooses to play the part of repentant Marxist, worn down by the emotional manipulation, the loaded, circular questioning, the torture, the insanity that comes with prolonged isolation and little stimulation.

Revathi's chapter. Born in Singapore, raised in the UK, she heads to Malaysia to get the scoop on how locals truly felt about British measures during the Malayan Emergency. Revathi is moved by what she hears and publishes their voices in British newspapers, reopening the patch of history for international scrutiny. However, the British government decides that their conduct then was above reproach, case closed.

SL & NT both seem pulled into the communist movement as impressionable youngsters. It seems like the community and the ideology provide a steady sense of purpose and structure to these people, which they find is much better than remaining stuck within capitalism, and its cycle of being exploited by bosses to earn too little to spend it on unfulfilling products; the inequality; the comfort & apathy of the elites.

Nam Teng, Malaysian village boy, finally makes it to the city. Leaving his innocence and his mother behind.

Tiang writes the warm, emotional moments between people well.