Yet more photos of Zhizhang Bridge!
Month: March 2025
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The book is about the titular character, and is set in a town in 1840s Missouri. While I have been a Southerner, I have never have been a mischievous little boy. Therefore, I find Tom Sawyer’s daily life a little difficult to relate to. But that’s what books are for: they let you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Or bare feet, as the case may be.
Even if you’ve never read a word of the book, or watched a movie adaptation, you probably already know about Tom’s cleverness in getting his pals to paint a fence on his behalf. But did you know that Tom witnesses a murder? And goes on a holiday from civilization on an island in a river? And finds stolen treasure in a cave with miles of tunnels? There’s plenty of entertainment in the plot.
The themes relate to honor and honesty, about doing the right thing when it matters, and not worrying too much about phony social rules as long as you take care of the people you care about.
Meanwhile, throughout the novel, Mark Twain (or Samuel Clemens, if you prefer), offers, in deadpan style, a number of sharp observations of human nature. See below for some examples.
Continue reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
When and Why I Read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Time to read some Mark Twain.
Genre: American literature
Date started / date finished: 18-Mar-25 to 20-Mar-25
Length: 248 pages
ISBN: B072F1WKW1
Originally published in: 1876/2017
Amazon link: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels, originally published in 1727, is in the public domain. Using the Android Kindle app on my phone, I read the AmazonClassics ebook shown above, which I downloaded during the Covid lockdowns when Amazon made a bunch of classic ebooks available to download for free. However, this Amazon ebook does not include the illustration in Part 3, Chapter 5 of the automatic writing machine, which features in another blog post of mine. I therefore recommend the Standard Ebooks version of Gulliver’s Travels, which does include this illustration, and which, moreover, is free. (Standard Ebooks offers a growing selection of Gutenberg ebooks that have been noticeably improved in terms of proofreading, typesetting, cover design, etc. All free.)
Where does Gulliver go? Are his travels funny? What’s Jonathan Swift trying to say, anyway? (Do I even like satire at all?) Does the book resemble the 1939 animated film adaptation? Find the answers to these questions below.
Continue reading Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
When and Why I Read Gulliver's Travels
I know a little about Gulliver's Travels by cultural osmosis, but that's not the same as having actually read it! I know that Lilliputian means 'diminutive' because Lilliput is a place full of small people who famously tie Gulliver down (and that brobdingnagian means 'huge' because Brobdingnag is a place full of huge people). I've heard of houyhnhnms, and about some kind of mechanical word machine that people use for writing. It's time to fill in the gaps.
Genre: English literature / satire
Date started / date finished: 10-Mar-25 to 17-Mar-25
Length: 306 pages
ISBN: B073WW8W3R
Originally published in: 1726/2017
Amazon link: Gulliver's Travels
Chicago (2002)
Recently I made the mistake of listening to the soundtrack of Chicago on my computer. The songs are incredibly sticky. Hearing the songs echoing in my head for several days, I decided I wanted to rewatch the movie itself. This, of course, just reinforced the echoes in my head.
Watching the movie, I decided my favorite song, because of its sheer energy, was “Cell Block Tango,” which repeatedly insists that “he had it coming.”
Also, I remembered that, although the movie is incredibly good at what it does, I actually really don’t like the characters. See below for more on that.
According to Wikipedia, the movie is based on a 1975 stage musical, which is based on a 1926 play, which is based on some actual events in the news.
John Wick Chapter 4 (2023)
I remember bits and pieces of the previous John Wick movies, perhaps the first one especially, but they don’t have a lot of plot or dialog. They are mostly full of stylized violent action. Some of it’s cool and some of it’s too brutal for my taste, but I like the character, and I like Keanu Reeves.
Siqi and I saw this movie when it was newly released in theaters in China (two years after its US release). According to Wikipedia, it’s the first of the series to be released in China at all. Apparently the reason it was allowed to be shown, and the basis for a lot of the marketing, is the fact that it stars popular Hong Kong Chinese actor Donnie Yen.
Mind Matters by Michael S. Gazzaniga
The famous Berkeley psychologist David Krech once made the observation, “There is no phenomenon, however complex, which when examined carefully will not turn out to be even more complex.”
—Mind Matters (page 175)
How much has our understanding of brains progressed since the publication of this popular science book in 1988? Maybe a little, but many studies serve to reveal effects without shedding light on their causes, or otherwise uncover new unknowns. Complete understanding of the connection between the brain and the mind, and the mind/brain’s connection to the body, will, I think, always be just over the horizon, like world peace, the cure for cancer, and flying cars—especially if we keep talking about brains as computers (which Gazzaniga does in the first paragraph of his introduction), but that’s another story.
Meanwhile, brain scientist Michael S. Gazzaniga offers his thoughts, informed by his professional experience, on twelve relatable subjects:
- Pain
- Memory and Thinking after Forty
- Intelligence
- Crazy Thoughts
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Obsessions and Compulsions
- Addiction
- Love
- Sleeping and Dreaming
- Stress
- Healing
It’s an interesting bunch of topics. The chapter on addiction was surprisingly political. Gazzaniga makes a case for legalizing drugs (and taxing them) to prevent the harms that arise from black markets (and funding programs for treatment of addiction). He says addiction is not the sort of thing that can snowball into an epidemic. From his standpoint, some small, stable percentage of people will inevitably be addicts; meanwhile everyone else is pretty much okay.
Gazzaniga’s writing is informed in part by his work on split-brain studies. Ever heard about those? Some epileptics have undergone surgery to disconnect the two normally connected brain hemispheres to reduce the occurrence of debilitating seizures. Studies conducted on such subjects involve presenting a picture or instructions to only one half—the left half—of the visual system (thus to only one half—the right half—of the brain). The result is spurious explanations supplied by the left half, which controls language, for the individual’s response. Somewhere in the left half of the brain is a mind module that really wants things to make sense, even when they don’t. Gazzaniga calls this module “the interpreter”.
The book offers a framework that considers both psychology and neurobiology in explaining “a wide variety of very personal mind states we all experience at one time or another.” It acknowledges individual differences due to brain development as well as genetic influences on brain chemistry.
I’m looking forward to reading a more recent book by Gazzaniga: The Consciousness Instinct.
When and Why I Read Mind Matters
Another brain-related book!
Genre: cognitive science
Date started / date finished: 28-Feb-25 to 13-Mar-25
Length: 244 pages
ISBN: 0395500958
Originally published in: 1988
Amazon link: Mind Matters
She: A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard
How did I come to read this book?
I read Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne because it’s on a lot of lists of classic books, and I’ve read other top Verne books, but not this one.
Then, because I somehow thought Journey to the Center of the Earth had more dinosaurs in it, I read The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, which is possibly the one I was thinking of.
The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle made me think of Michael Crichton’s novels The Lost World and also Congo, which I read in 2010.
Congo was (according to Wikipedia) inspired by King Solomon’s Mines, a novel by H. Rider Haggard, which I’ve also repeatedly seen on lists of classic books, so I read King Solomon’s Mines.
Then, because the novel She is by the same author as King Solomon’s Mines, and I’ve seen it on lists of classics (some indicating that it was an early science-fiction or early feminist novel), I read it too.
Phew!
Overall impression? What a creepy story. Really not my style.
There were some interesting psychological/philosophical observations, and some poetic, if melancholy, descriptive passages, but mainly the atmosphere was, in general, unpleasantly macabre. The physical surroundings of the characters consisted almost entirely of caves and tombs, except when the characters were traveling on stormy seas or across mosquito-infested swamps. There is no joy in this book whatsoever; the survival of the narrator is a matter of narrow escape—of relief rather than victory. But maybe that’s the point? Reading the book is like passing through a haunted house: you frighten yourself thoroughly with impossibilities, and then return to the real world with a new appreciation for normalcy.
So yeah. Well done, H. Rider Haggard. Thanks, I hate it.
See below for some more specific observations on this unsettling book from 1886.
Continue reading She: A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard
When and Why I Read She: A History of Adventure
This is the other famous book by the author of King Solomon's Mines.
Genre: classic adventure
Date started / date finished: 28-Feb-25 to 08-Mar-25
Length: 245 pages
ISBN:
Originally published in: 1886/2006/2020
