8:45. In less than four hours, Tuesday sinks to sleep and Wednesday begins a slow awakening. I wonder if my own break from consciousness would fall within this deadline. Already my fingers feel unwilling as one hand rises to give my cheek a quick tap. It’s like suspended animation: I feel the smack before my hand registers the lift. I [ . . . ]
Carver Saved My Reading Life
I don’t think I can explain it. For a time I feared it was dyslexia, then thought it was the late onset of a pre-acquired attention disorder. Now I guess it was mental exhaustion, or maybe the constant apparition of tomorrow’s work hovering behind me like a shadow to my thoughts. Whatever it was, for some long distressful weeks, reading [ . . . ]
Taking a Break
Hi, everyone. This blog will be on a break for a while. Because of life’s innumerable distractions, I’ve been increasingly inactive around the blogosphere lately. And now I’m afraid I have to put blogging on hold. But I hope to be back in a month or two, hopefully with fresh content and a better format. Enjoy the summer!
The Maid
It’s the picture of a happy household. The Jimbas are gathered around the table, all thirteen of them, smiling and talking cheerfully over dinner. The maid enters the scene and the mother promptly offers compliments for her hard day’s work. The children give her approving glances, their expressions marked with appreciation, their faces free of the hostility that a live-in [ . . . ]
The Things They Carried
For a few months now, I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to say about The Things They Carried. A cousin of mine sent over a copy after reading one of my earlier posts which made her think about this book. Since then, I have scribbled several pages of notes, and have pondered a countless times why to [ . . . ]
Rue de la Nuit
It occurred to me that when I said I became a reader just two years ago, it wasn’t exactly the truth. As a little kid, I loved reading books—picture books. I remember how excited I got each time I saw my dad coming home with several purchases in his hand, and one of them happens to be book for me. [ . . . ]
Notes on CraftThe Critical Review
In this post, I talk about “An Essay in Criticism” by Virginia Woolf, as published in the anthology The Story About the Story. The essay, which originally appeared in the New York Herald Tribune in 1927, is an examination of Ernest Hemingway’s short story collection Men Without Women. There must have been a time when getting featured in the Sunday Book Review [ . . . ]
To Read, or Not to Write
Writer Jessamyn West makes a rather interesting statement in her Paris Review interview. “Sometimes I think a writer should make up his mind whether he’s going to be a writer or a reader,” says this prolific author. “There isn’t time for both.” But it’s not really that a writer shouldn’t spend his time reading other authors. It’s just that time, [ . . . ]
The Good Earth
It was his day off from work. Da Wei was sitting outside, staring at a book beneath the light of a late seaward sun. He thought for a while and found it amusing that he read The Good Earth in that coastal town of his kin. In that narrow stretch of land they have ports and markets and schools and [ . . . ]
The Glass Room
Back in 5th Grade, I was sure I wanted to be an architect. Coming home from school, I would usually spend the afternoon alone at the little balcony above our living room where I kept a steel desk and a wooden drafting board, a can of fine-tip pens and sharpened pencils, and a pile of square-ruled sheets scavenged from my [ . . . ]