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The Reluctant Fundamentalist By Mohsin Hamid
Reading since Nov 12, 2007

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Immortality By Milan Kundera
Why Do Men Have Nipples?: Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini By Billy Goldberg, Mark Leyner
The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy: And other stories By Burton Tim
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything By Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
Grimm's fairy tales By Jakob Grimm
A Long Way Down By Nick Hornby
Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix By David Gerrold
Plain Tales from the Hills: (Penguin Classics) By David Trotter, Rudyard Kipling
The No-Nonsense Guide to Sexual Diversity: (No-Nonsense Guides) By Vanessa Baird
Damage By Hart Josephine
Finished in Apr 2005

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being By Milan Kundera
  • 4 people find this helpful

    "If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibliy lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the id ... (continue)

    "If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibliy lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens.

    If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.
    But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

    The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the gorund. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simltaneously an image of life's most intense fulfilment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

    Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

    What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

    Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light / darkness, fineness / coarseness, warmth / cold, being / non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive..., the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?

    ...The only certainty is: the lightness / weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all." -- Part One, Chapter 2.

    If you, like me, are pinned down by this mind-blowing para, bring it home and you shall never regret it.

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    Posted on Jul 14, 2006 | Add your feedback

The Five People You Meet in Heaven By Mitch Albom
The Color Purple: (Women's Press Classics S.) By Alice Walker
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: The Classic Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex By John Gray
The Monkey King By Timothy Mo
  • Mocking is always fun

    Well, we always enjoy mocking at others cos we always think we're smarter.

    At one point I must say, as a local Hongkongese, there're some extremely unbelievable and yet absolutely hilarious incidents depicted in this novel did truly happen in my life. Yet on the other hand, I still can't avoi ... (continue)

    Well, we always enjoy mocking at others cos we always think we're smarter.

    At one point I must say, as a local Hongkongese, there're some extremely unbelievable and yet absolutely hilarious incidents depicted in this novel did truly happen in my life. Yet on the other hand, I still can't avoid from feeling unease whenever I read how discriminative Tim sounds towards Chinese (more specifically: the "Mao-Era-Chin") in the book ; while ironically he himself still got stuck in making use of the 20th century "best-seller" formula to get rich via a) writing about "THE Chinese" and b) playing around his Amercian-Chinese ethnicity.

    So if you can still stand on these typical storylines like "stupid Chinese syndromes" & "a whole new world by hybrids", then this is yet still - an enjoyable novel to read.

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    Posted on Jun 14, 2007 | Add your feedback

A Doll's House and Other Plays By Peter Watts, Henrik Ibsen
When We Were Orphans: (OME) By Kazuo Ishiguro
A Pale View of Hills By Kazuo Ishiguro
Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter By Adeline Yen Mah, Suzanne (EDT)
Mrs. Dalloway By Virginia Woolf
Kiss of the Spider Woman: (Vintage International) By Manuel Puig
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time By Mark Haddon
Type Style Finder: The Busy Designer's Guide to Choosing Type By Timothy Samara
Everything is Illuminated By Jonathan Safran Foer
I Think, Therefore I Laugh By John Allen Paulos
Atonement By Ian McEwan
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking By Malcolm Gladwell
  • 3 people find this helpful

    Disappointing...

    thought it would be mind-blowing. ended up looping in a single message with various examples...

    thought it should be finished in a "blink"(!?)

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    Posted on Jun 14, 2007 | Add your feedback

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