Living with Boredom: The Reading Life of Xisan in 2021

Writer Xi Shan. (Photo/Photo provided by me)

I have long given up writing diaries, and it took me nearly two years to feel that this habit has its benefits. The ups and downs of the pandemic are tiresome, and you can only remember that it took a year to go through the sporadic reading notes of the year, oh, and it turns out that those things happened in 2021.

Turning to August, after reading "How We See and How We Think" (by Richard Maaslan), I wrote a passage:

One of the big problems with modern society is that the world we feel is far greater than the world we actually live in — because our feelings are somewhat subject to the ever-present media. Many times it is the medium that chooses and decides what we see and hear and what we feel. In this way, we drift in the world of feelings, forgetting what the real world is like. "It's true that we seem to know everything about the situation in the United States or Afghanistan, but we may not know who our neighbors are.

In an online article in April, I wrote: "There are many good books on history, but very few words make me feel refreshed. The most memorable was Barbara Tuchman's "August Gunshot," which I read in the hospital a few years ago. Recently, I read David Fromkin's "Peace that Ends All Peace" and found a sense of proximity. In a Weibo post in May, I lamented when talking about Kai Bowen's recent book "Care": "Talking about reading books on the Internet is like talking about philosophy in KTV, it is really stupid to go home." ”

In May, a group of friends ate hot pot, and a friend told a small story. When Golding wrote "Lord of the Flies" and handed it to Penguin for publication, he did not expect to meet the editor who was stunned and asked Golding to "tear off" the first fifty pages of "Lord of Flies", otherwise it would not be published. Golding exploded, and after many fruitless negotiations with the penguins, he had to agree to "tear up" the fifty pages. Later, Golding won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "Lord of the Flies." So what we see now is that there is no first fifty pages of fiction. The friend asked, if those fifty pages are left, will "Lord of the Flies" be very mediocre? The frustration of the reader can only be comforted in such a "stratosphere".

By the second half of the year, everyone was talking about the metaverse, as if it were the antidote to chaos and division. I deepened my doubts as I reread What Is Populism (by Jan Werner Miller). Miller argues that the label populism has been abused, and in fact Trump-style populism must meet several conditions at the same time: first, hatred of the elite, even if it is also an elite; second, self-proclaimed "people", others are enemies of "We the people"; third, opposition to pluralism. I think that populism is actually a narrow way of thinking, and as long as it is monopolized, "We the people" can also be replaced by "metacosm".

Of course, the most common object of monopoly is history. 2021 is probably the year I read the most history books: "The Political System and Political Culture of the Late Northern Song Dynasty" (by Fang Chengfeng), "Between Chang'an and Hebei" (by Qiu Luming), "Crisis and Reconstruction" (by Li Biyan), "The Rise and Fall of Intelligence" (by Michael Warner), "The Great War: The World in 1914-1918" (by Helfrid Minkeller), etc. Although there is no rules, it is also quite rewarding.

Among them, the German political scientist Helfrid Minkler was a discovery that struck me. In addition to the book "The Great War", which recounts the history of World War I from the political perspective of the defeated countries, I also read two other books very well, namely "The Logic of Empire" and "The Germans and Their Myths". The latter, in particular, is a rather thorough deconstruction of various political myths in German history, which helps me to understand and criticize the so-called collective memory.

The comparatively systematic reading of history is related to my trip to Turkey, which has not stopped in recent years. Reading Norman Davis's Under Another Sky this year, I mainly wanted to look at Turkey's geographical location and historical positioning from a macro perspective. With similar thoughts in mind, I also read The End of the Ottoman Empire (sean McMikin), The Great Game (by Peter Hopcock), Muslim Discovery of Europe (by Bernard Lewis), Anatomy of Empire (by Izkovitz), Peace over All Peace (by David Fromkin), and others.

I've been reading my Paris Syndrome for almost a year, and although it was only published in October, I've read every article carefully, and I hope they're worthy of readers. Also carefully read is Ximen Mei's "Sketching of All Things", behind the words that discuss writing techniques, there are hidden our personal experiences and life stories.

When it comes to the story of life, I have to mention "Ten Lectures of Su Shi" (by Zhu Gang), and I think the core of this book is a moving story about life.

Many times, the meaning of life is given and shaped. If James Suzmann's The Meaning of Work illustrates this from the macro perspective of human history, Richard Hofstader's The Anti-Intellectual Tradition of America provides a concrete illustration, while the popular science work Greedy Dopamine (Daniel Lieberman/Michael M. Thompson) is a concrete illustration of this. E. Lang) reduces all this to a physiological level, and its fatalistic tone is even darker.

Interestingly, I also read three books related to reductionism. One is The Great Turn (by Stephen Greenblatt), which discusses Lucretius's atomism in relation to modern society; one is Nobel Prize-winning medicine author Eric Kandel's book on avant-garde art, Why You Can't Read Abstract Painting, which the author believes can bridge the gap between science and the humanities; and the other is Cunning Cells (by Athena Actipis), which explores cancer and cells from a reductionist perspective.

Notable readings also include Shen Hao's "Ten Thousand Waters and a Thousand Mountains", Charles Rosen's "Boundaries of Meaning", Leon Ross's "Spinoza", Janet Conant's "The Great Secret", Zhang Jingwei's "Field", Lingzi's "Melancholy Common Sense", Green Tea's "If There Is No Bookstore", Yang Zhao's "Yuan Zhou Ji" and so on.

I've also spent a lot of time on the kindle this year, and the words don't mention it, but it's just a way to live with boredom.

West Flash