"Friends, it's been a long time!"
On February 12, the Sinan Reading Club, which was suspended due to the epidemic, officially restarted at the special event for the eighth anniversary. In the face of the full number of public readers, the host and critic Li Weichang said affectionately: "From the first issue of sinan reading on February 15, 2014 to today, we have done 383 issues. Eight years on, which means that there used to be 383 Saturday afternoons we spent together, and every time we spent together was turning into art. ”
On February 12, the Sinan Reading Club, which was suspended due to the epidemic, officially restarted at the special event for the eighth anniversary. (If there is no explanation, Sinan Reading Club photo)
The Sinan Reading Club is sponsored by the Shanghai Municipal Press and Publication Bureau, the Shanghai Writers Association, the Propaganda Department of the Huangpu District Committee of the Communist Party of China, and hosted by the Sinan Mansion. It is extended from the Shanghai Book Fair and Shanghai International Literature Week, and is known as Shanghai's "Urban Literature Parlor" facing the world.
In the past eight years, it has welcomed more than 1,500 guests and more than 70,000 readers, and has also gone abroad to appear at the 71st Frankfurt International Book Fair. On many Saturday afternoons, everyone lined up early in the Sinan Literature House, often there was not enough space in the back room, and some people simply stood or sat on the ground to listen, and they witnessed the feast of literature and thought with Naipaul, Alexievich, Peter Handke, Mo Yan, Wang Anyi, Ah Lai, Ge Fei, Bi Feiyu, Han Shaogong, Jin Yucheng and other outstanding writers at home and abroad.
It is also in these eight years that "Sinan's Story" has also entered everyone's life in a richer and more diverse way: in February 2017, the Sinan Literary Anthology, with the purpose of finding, identifying and sharing contemporary high-quality texts, was launched; in October 2021, the Sinan Literary Anthology and the Novel Circle Magazine jointly established and awarded the "First Short Story Biennial Award"; in January this year, in order to try to reconstruct the close connection between literary reading and a broader humanities and social science vision, the Sinan Reading Club and the Sinan Literary Anthology jointly established and awarded the "First Short Story Biennial Award"; in January this year, in order to try to reconstruct the close connection between literary reading and a broader humanities and social science vision, the Sinan Reading Club and the Sinan Literature Anthology were jointly established and awarded. The first "Sinan Book List" initiated was officially announced.
On the day of the special event for the eighth anniversary, Critic Jin Li, Professor of the Department of Chinese of Fudan University, Writer, Translator and Art Critic btr, Economist and Professor Liang Jie of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Critic and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Sinan Literature Anthology Huang Dehai, Critic and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Sinan Literature Anthology Fang Yan met at the 383rd Sinan Reading Club to start a sharing of reading and life with readers. The atmosphere of this event is particularly relaxed and lively, and some readers say that it is like participating in a happy Chinese New Year event.
Sinan Book Club 8th Anniversary Special Event
I hope that literature will establish a relationship with a living society
The topic naturally began with the first "Sinan Book List", and the guests and hosts on the stage happened to be the judges of this selection. Fang Yan, the first to speak, said bluntly: "Sinan's book list is the best book list in all the book lists in 2021!" ”
Why do you have such confidence? He further said that first of all, this list of books is not only about literature, but also tries to establish a connection between literature and other humanities and social sciences, and the judges include writers, critics, translators, humanities and social science scholars, art curators, etc., many of whom also have multiple identities. Second, considering that the list of books in the voting may still miss some truly important works, each judge is invited to select their most exciting works from the unsuccessful works, and set up a "special recommendation list" in addition to the common "positive list". The combination of the two lists can be described as a balance and echo of "consensus" and "prejudice".
The first "Sinan Book List" two lists in one
"We will find that today's 'literature' is getting narrower and narrower, and eventually it becomes some kind of taste, imagery, or meaning. However, 'Sinan' has always wanted to pull all the spiritual excellent texts into it, such as the Sinan Reading Club not only discusses literature, but also discusses the topic of humanities and social sciences and even some social phenomena, and the Sinan Literary Anthology will also select articles in the field of humanities and social sciences, and we have always hoped to restore the long-standing vitality of literature. Huang Dehai said that the first "Sinan Book List" was selected into many bibliographies that are not "literature" in the traditional category, which are inclusive, open, and hope to establish a relationship with a living society, rather than being confined to a small circle of individuals.
He cites Xu Hong's Discovery and Reasoning: The End of the Archaeological Chronicle (I), a chapter in which he says that the discovery of Miyagi Castle in Erlitou was not dug up, but "thought out." "We all think that archaeology is about digging out something to break the generation, but now archaeology is not all like this." Xu Hong is the leader of the Erlitou Archaeological Team. Erlitou culture has not found the city wall, if you do not find the city wall there is no way to conclude that it is a city, its degree of civilization needs to be discounted, Xu Hong then launched a reasonable imagination, according to the location of the palace speculated how many miles to the left, how many miles to the right should have a city wall, they did excavate the city wall along this direction, the entire Erlitou culture formed the structure of the city, so as to conclude that the Erlitou culture can be used as a sign of mature civilization. ”
"Why are we trying to restore these humanities and social sciences to literature? Because in archaeology, these 'thoughts' have a literary component. In the rich humanities and social sciences, we will find that there are also 'literary elements' such as reasoning and suspense, which contain things that are even better or wonderful than we imagined. Huang Dehai said.
The first "Sinan Book List" is a bibliography
How do we see the world and how do we relate to it?
In this selection, Kinri particularly recommended Keiya Abe's "The Magic Flute Bearer: The European Middle Ages Behind the Legends". On June 26, 1284, a "rat catcher" dressed in flower clothes lured 130 children from the city of Hameln to flee and disappear en masse with the sound of a flute. Half a century ago, the Japanese historian Abe also read this legend of the piper at the Göttingen State Archives in West Germany, and began to trace this fact into a four-hundred-year-long research history in Europe after the legend. In terms of today's discipline classification, this book involves medieval history, communication, folklore, social history, and history of mentality, but the author's original intention is precisely to reflect critically on the usual ways and paths of knowledge work.
Liang Jie, who came from an economic background, recommended Fei Sheng's "Reinventing the Golden Mountain: Chinese Immigrants and the Ecological Transformation of the Australian and New Zealand Colonies". In his view, the book's re-integration of the ANZ region into the picture of world history can not only recover a lost history, but also conduct a deeper reflection on the framework of world history. This is especially important for the Chinese, whose history is not only in the Central Plains, but in almost every corner of the world.
"Correspondingly, Chinese writers are not only in China, but also in every corner of the world." BTR said that he particularly recommended the Malay Chinese writer Lai Zishu's novel "Flowing Place" in the selection, because the novel's highly recognizable narrative voice solidly and calmly depicts the life of the grass people in the torrent of the upheaval times.
The judges in the first "Sinan Book List" specially recommended the works. Watchmaker: The Paper's reporter Luo Xin
Fang Yan specifically mentioned that under each category of the Sinan Book List, Chinese original works will be placed together with translated works. They are designed this way because they want to examine the forms of foreign cultures in the context of contemporary Chinese, and they will find many interesting topics in the comparison of each other. For example, in the main list of novels, Li Hongwei's "Guide" and Kazuo Ishiguro's "Clara and the Sun" are all thinking about a question, if we stand in the current situation, what is our deduction and imagination about the future? When human beings reach a certain level, how should they live with themselves or with the world around them? From this point of view, our Chinese original or translated, in fact, they are the same destination. ”
Take a breather from real life and look at the "next door guy" from time to time
Jin Li said that one of the reasons for participating in the first "Sinan Book List" selection was that "I would like to know what my peers have read this year." Unlike other book lists that were "completed" by making recommendations and writing reviews, the final review of the "Sinan Book List" took a whole afternoon. The judges sat face to face and discussed the candidate bibliography one by one. In the end, after three rounds of voting, the final "positive list" was finalized. It was also in this process that he also learned about the "most greasy book of the year" and "the most disappointing book of the year" in the minds of other judges, and he felt that the harvest was particularly great.
In BTR's view, the book list is like a "bookstore that does not sell books", and people can get recommended content from the book list. "When you buy books online, the above will recommend five books that you may also like, and these five books are actually a 'book list', but such a book list is based on algorithms." If you buy books like this, your taste will become more and more narrow, narrow enough to only like the type of things you like, I think the meaning of the 'Sinan book list' is precisely to subvert the cold book list, while expanding your horizons. Because we have so many people from all walks of life, so many pairs of eyes, then such a book list is a bit like a collection of buyers' shops, bringing together all kinds of colorful things. ”
He also joked that the stock market fell to hundreds of points a day, and may lose thousands of dollars a day, at this time you may wish to think about how much a book is, "Reading always has such a function, let you breathe a little from the tragic real life." 」 In the thousands of dollars you lose, it is not a big deal to take out a few dozen yuan to buy a book, but you can look at the world again, and maybe you can buy a good fund. Reading is not the whole of life, but it allows you to see something else in your daily life, just like when we are in a restaurant, eating in a bowl, and also want to see what is eaten on other people's tables, and it looks good and comes to a portion. So the 'Sinan Book List' is very good, for us, it is a good 'next door family'. ”
Sinan Book Club readers
The surging news reporter also learned that this year is not only the eighth anniversary of the founding of the Sinan Reading Club, but also the fifth anniversary of the founding of the "Sinan Literary Anthology", and the "Reading World in Sinan", which simultaneously records the development process of the reading club, has also published 5 volumes, and the 6th volume that is being edited will preserve the reading memory of the Sinan Reading Club during the epidemic.