directory
1. "Fireworks Roll" ★★★
2. "One Day, Three Autumns" ★★★★
3. "A knife, a thousand words" ★★★
4. Driftwood ★★★
5. "Ordained" ★★★
6. "Dr. Zhang and Dr. Wang"★★★☆
7. "The World of Man"★★★☆
8. "All Realms" ★★★
9. "Ten Years of Liangzhuang" ★★★★
10. "Dust" ★★★★ ☆
11. "To be alive is to shout into the sky" ★★★★ ☆
12. "Heart Dwelling" ★★
Long time no see. Let's report on my recent situation, this time is a bit busy in the next year, while working with a baby. I work with my lover, he picks up and drops off children, does housework, I cook, tutor children, daily is filled with chores, fortunately, the two sides have stable working hours, tacit understanding, but also did not feel very difficult. It's just that there is almost no time for recreation, and the practice and sports can only be one of them every day.
The book has been reading, but not as diligently as before, and has spent some time studying the camera, after all, I don't want the once beloved camera to be shelved all the time. The following is a three-month reading report. In these three months, I read 12 books and 5 magazines.
"Fireworks Roll"
At the end of last year, at the beginning of this year, I concentrated on reading some of the "New Northeast Writers Group" - several books by Shuang Xuetao, Ban Yu, and Zheng Zhi. Later, a friend brought this northeastern writer Chi Zijian's "Fireworks Scroll". Chi Zijian is not unfamiliar to me, I read her "The Right Bank of the Erguna River" and "All the Nights in the World" a few years ago, but the content has been forgotten, and only a few fragments are remembered.
"Fireworks" is a novel written by Chi Zi in 2020 that focuses on the lives of the people of Harbin. The protagonist, Liu Jianguo, is a black ambulance driver who lost his friend and Jewish descendant Yu David entrusted his son, the copper hammer, to his care many years ago, and has been alone since then, doing good things while looking for the copper hammer. During this period, he met Huang E, a village woman who had come to the city with her son to look for a husband, and Liu Jianguo's sister placed her in the old mansion of Yuyingyuan. One of Liu Jianguo's customers, Weng Zi'an, a patient with a successful career, fell in love with Huang E at first sight and moved in with him, and later found that Weng Zi'an was a copper hammer. The book uses the "grass snake gray line method" and was not revealed until the end. Chi Zijian's detailed portrayal of the lives of the people in Harbin is quite readable, and the brushstrokes are delicate and vivid, but the storyline is general, far-fetched and illogical. Far less amazing than "The Right Bank of the Erguna River".
"One Day, Three Autumns"
The year before yesterday, I watched a documentary film called "The Hometown of Literature". It tells the story of several contemporary familiar writers: Jia Pingwa, Ah Lai, Chi Zijian, Bi Feiyu, Liu Zhenyun, and Mo Yan returning to their hometowns, telling the relationship between their growth process and their hometown, and restoring the "birth scene" of literature. Literature and life are inseparable, the hometown gives birth to literature, and literature records the hometown.
Liu Zhenyun's books also often revolve around his hometown of Yanjin, after he won the Eighth Contradictory Literature Award for "One Sentence top 10,000 Sentences" and "One Day and Three Autumns". "One Day, Three Autumns" is a magical realist novel, written with the memory of Uncle Six as the motivation for writing. Uncle Liu painted many paintings about Yanjin before his death, and after his death, the paintings disappeared. The author uses imaginary stories to reproduce the paintings of the sixth uncle in his memory, and explores the roots of the humor of the people of Yanjin in his hometown. In the novel, there is a "flower girl" who appears in other people's dreams to ask for jokes, and if the joke is funny, he will reward you with a persimmon to eat; if the joke is not funny, he will kill you.
The whole book revolves around the three people who sang the Yu opera "The Legend of the White Snake", and the "Flower Second Lady" walked through it. Chen Changjie originally played Fahai in "The Legend of the White Snake", and later worked as a furnace on the train; his son was named Chen Liangming, nicknamed "Newton" when he was in junior high school, but when he became an adult, he opened a restaurant to stew pig's trotters. Both father and son left their hometowns, maintained their families by driving trains and stewing pig's trotters, tasted the bittersweet and sour spicy of the world, and realized at different times and places: an important moment, three autumns a day in life, but this moment will never come again. In the final analysis, it is the same as the main idea of "Ten Thousand Sentences in One Sentence".
"A Knife, a Thousand Words"
Wang An recalls his 2021 work. Previously, I had only read her "Planting Red Diamonds and Planting Lotus Roots" more than ten years ago, and the content had long been forgotten. Even her most famous "Long Hate Song" has not been read, and she does not know anything about its style and achievements.
The book is divided into two parts: the first and the second part. The first part writes the story of Huaiyang cuisine chef Chen Cheng in the United States after the 1990s, and the second part writes the story of the family of intellectuals in northeast China in the early years of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Wang Anyi's writing on Shanghai is often praised, and this time it radiates to the whole world, laying out the space so grandly and powerfully. "A knife" is one of the three knives in Yangzhou, a kitchen knife, "a thousand words" taken from Yuan Ming's "Moon Reflection Bamboo into a Thousand Words" written by Yuan Ming, borrowing to refer to the bamboo shadow that Chen Cheng stepped on in the first half of his life and his childhood playmate. Half about the present, half reminiscing about the past. Look at the family from the personal history, and peek at the society from the family history.
Nowadays, I rarely read novels, and several books I have read recently have the same feeling, the writing is more than enough, and the plot is not attractive. I no longer encountered the feeling of sleeping and forgetting to eat when reading "White Deer Plain" or "Tianlong Babu".
Driftwood
Driftwood is a sequel to Autumn Garden, from the Benfen Yang trilogy. Yang Benfen is an octogenarian grandmother, and the author tells the story of her and her mother, family, relatives and villagers through memories, showing the perseverance of Chinese people's livelihood. In those days, people rose and fell like driftwood in the water. Personally, I don't think the first "Autumn Garden" is good.
"Ordained"
"Ordained" is a long novel of Zhi'an, telling a story of "revenge", the protagonist Bingfeng learned the details of his father's death more than ten years ago from his mother, and began the process of revenge on the enemy who "killed" his father, but in the middle of the way, the enemy's life was finally dead, and finally "revenge" could not be, and the process was like the experience of Wu Zixu, who was drunk in Zhi'an.
Known as a publisher, essayist, book reviewer, etc., Shinan is undeniable in its literary nature, but the plot of the novel is simple, the interest is insufficient, and the description of the last century cannot resonate with young people.
Dr. Zhang and Dr. Wang
The interview documentary class tells the respective struggle experiences and family fates of Dr. Zhang and Dr. Wang, two high school students, and takes the intergenerational and class mobility in the life course of the two families as the starting point, with the intention of encompassing the changes in Shenyang and even the social changes in Northeast China. The narrative ability of the two media people, Yi Jianfeng and Yang Ying, is very strong, and the growth experience of the two doctors is spread out one by one, and they enter the professional discussion, which is slightly inferior. Narrative and theory are not perfectly integrated, and the text quotes a lot of sociological theories (most of which are skipped when reading this part), describing Shenyang from different aspects such as industrial city, unit society, scarcity economy, working class culture, masculinity, major historical events and changes in the times, trying to analyze why Shenyang and even the entire northeast will decline. Probably because I came out of an industrial town and had a little understanding of the decline of the industrial city in the book, but the families of the two protagonists were not typical enough, and the theoretical analysis was not perfect enough to support the author's ambitions. Readable, but not excellent.
"The World"
A drama of the fire at the beginning of the year. In the process of chasing the drama, I watched Liang Xiaosheng's original work, whose works are designed for "winning awards", full of positive energy, in line with the main theme of the moment, and the tone indicates that film and television works will have extraordinary achievements, especially in these years. It tells the growth experience of the three brothers and sisters of the Zhou family, at the end of the original work, Zhou Bingyi died of a stomach disease after demolishing the light character piece, and the eldest sister-in-law Hao Dongmei remarried to a foreign shoe dealer. Zhou Bingkun and Zheng Juan took the lead in moving to the new district and rewarded the façade house to start an early business. After Zhou Rong returned to China (before Feng Yue followed her father to France, Zhou Rong stayed in France for twelve years) became a secondary school teacher. In general, individuals can only go with the flow in the torrent of the times and cannot dominate their destiny. And for thousands of years, China has always been a humane society, pessimistically speaking, "lying flat" is not impossible.
"All Things"
I kind of grew up reading Baby Anne's books, and there was a time when I was a teenager who was really fascinated by her words, her personality. After getting married and having children, they went through various things and gradually became pragmatic. No longer indulge in personal complicated and delicate feelings. In the world, trying your best to survive, no one cares about your emotions, no one cares about your sensitivities. But personal observation of emotions is necessary.
Anne later changed her name to the current "Qingshan", studied Buddhism, had a rich material life, and constantly sought inward. The book is her daily record, in the form of a diary essay, with no uniform theme and no fixed format. Go with the flow. Some of the content is about raising daughters to be nurturing, grounded, and adding a touch of "human" nature to the "Buddha" nature. Although I don't like Gyeongsan now, I won't be disgusted, and I will always trust her works (at least in terms of the beauty of the text), and I won't be too disappointed.
"Ten Years of Liangzhuang"
In the past two years, I have read some rural documentary literature. I also came out of the countryside, but emotionally I never blended into the city. Especially as I grew older, I continued to have the idea of returning home. One is that there is basically no human connection in the city, and the other is an escape from real life. The third is the nostalgia for the place where he grew up, and even the grass and trees and food in his hometown often appear. That's the "root."
This is the fourth book to read Liang Hong after "China in Liangzhuang", "Out of Liangzhuang", and "History and My Moments". In this book, Liang Hong re-becomes Liang Zhuang's daughter, recounts Liang Zhuang's story, and pays attention to the women who go out and marry in Liang Zhuang and lose their names. It surprised me to read, and it was. Chinese women have always been hidden behind their backs, bearing the names of "xx mother", "aunt" and "XXX family", becoming accessories to their husbands or children. And the girls who marry out of the countryside are mostly only left with the title of "XX daughter". In my village, almost no one knows my big name, the older one calls me a small name, and the one who forgets my nickname is "XX Family Second Lady". In the countryside, I was also one of those who had lost my name.
This year's Women's Day, many people should be confident in the initiative, it is called Women's Day. Because in cognition, "women" are already a member of the vulnerable groups, losing the "youth and beauty" that women are most proud of. And it seems that only on this day, they are the "queen" and "goddess", they are seen.
The book mentions that some women went out to work early and lived a good life by chance, but they fell into a bad reputation in the countryside, and then they were simply separated from the countryside and completely separated. Fame, in the hearts of women who grew up embracing traditional culture, is even more important than life. In order to preserve their reputation, they may endure domestic violence for a long time, and they may be wronged, abused, and embark on the path of self-sufficiency. They have no ego and live their whole lives for others.
"Dust"
The book is very good and I especially like it. The author is Chen Nianxi, a demolitionist poet. The book is a collection of 21 of his non-fiction essays that recount what he saw and heard during his 16 years of mine blasting work from 1999 to 2015. This is the story of a group of ordinary and simple laborers, they are demolition workers, stone masons, country carpenters, farmers, back foot workers, parents, children... We are all a speck of dust, living hard and seriously.
The overall sentence is plain, but you can really feel the author's emotions. Especially love the mother's article, he wrote: The so-called mother and son, but she opens up life and future for you, and you uncover the silent yellow soil behind her. I wept several times, thanking all those who have a passion for words and a reverence for life, and thank you for the poets of this era.
"To live is to shout into the sky"
After reading "Dust", I read another collection of non-fiction stories by the author, "To live is to shout into the sky". The title of the book makes people desperate at the same time have a glimmer of hope, yes, to live is to shout to the sky, to do their best to not waste this life. Almost every one of them dies in a different way, and the author records their departure with great restraint and calmness, the patience and strength of a middle-aged man.
For health reasons, the authors left the mine and were eventually diagnosed with pneumoconiosis. Having previously read Yuan Ling's account of pneumoconiosis patients, although Chen Nianxi's writing skills are not as good as Yuan Ling's, plain emotions can also touch people's hearts.
"Heart Dwelling"
When I am tired for a few days, I will find some variety shows or TV series to adjust. I didn't want to click on "Heart Residence", watched a few episodes and felt that it was too time-consuming, so I simply found the original book to read. It is far from urban life like Shanghai, and I can't understand what Feng Xiaoqin and Feng Xixi have done to stay in Shanghai. Pass the time as a story.
magazine