Instead of the Lunar New Year Readathon I did last year, I’m considering trying to work my way through China Miéville’s list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read over at Fantastic Metropolis. Some of those books will be difficult-to-get, but I just got a credit card approved, so it might be possible to order them, used, if I really want to make my way through the whole list. (Meaning, the books I haven’t read, which is the majority of Miéville’s selections.)
Tag: Lunar New Year Readings (2005-06)
Lunar New Year Reads, #46: 1×1 by e.e.cummings
I attended a wedding during my visit to Montréal last summer; it was my friend Medrie’s wedding, and at it was read a poem by e.e. cummings, a beautiful thing that ended with the stunning lines, “… alive / we’re alive) / we’re wonderful one times one”. All the next day, the poem stuck in my head, and when I stopped by one of my old haunts, CDement, a used CD shop, I noticed that they’d expanded by adding a lot of used books to their stock. Imagine my shock when I found an e.e. cummings text with the title …
Lunar New Year Reads, #45: Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe by Martin Rees
First off, yes, book #45. Book #44 is in a private post, and you may, if you wish, login to see it. Well, here I am: this weekend is Seolnal, which is the Lunar New Year. I took up the challenge to read and post about 50 books in one Lunar New Year, which is a little difficult, since it’s a shorter span of time than a Solar New year by about a week or so. So I am picking up the books I have read halfway during the last year, and finishing them; I’m pushing myself to get a …
Lunar New Year Reads, #44: The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
While I did not technically “read” this text, I did spend more time listening to it than I would have spent eyeing the text. As it was, I downloaded it from Emule, but it’s a free audiobook available from Librivox. I do not know whether it is legal yet in Korea to circulate this text, although I am quite certain it was on a list of banned texts not long ago — just as were Camus and Sartre in my mother’s childhood in Quebec. I suspect it probably is legal here, though, since I managed to buy a heavily abridged …
Lunar New Year Reads, #43: Conjure Wife by Fritz Lieber
Damon Knight claimed that conjure Wife was “[e]asily the most frightening (and necessarily) the most thoroughly convincing of all modern horror stories,” and while I’m not sure the praise sits quite so steady nowadays, I do have to give Conjure Wife a big thumbs-up as far as diabolical imagination goes. This is my second reading of the novel: I read this book back in undergrad, the very same edition, actually, which I bore back to Korea from a box in my folks’ garage. When (back in 1997 or 1998) I mentioned the basic concept of the story to an RPGing …