“‘Classics’ – books people praise but don’t read”, said Mark Twain with his wan humor. Yet, according to Stephan Kind, all books are “portable magic.” A negotiation between these two great men is to choose the right book, not the impressive book, and read it voraciously. This is especially true if you plan on lying in bed during the sweltering summer of a Covid-19-ridden Beijing, for a list of intriguing volumes should decorate your afternoon.
Here are five recommended books, which can not only be bought via apps like Taobao, JD, or DangDang, but can also be downloaded free in numerous formats (such as PDF, EPUB, and MOBI) from https://z-lib.org/
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a 2018 literary fiction by Ottessa Moshfegh, has been all the rage in American high schools and colleges. The prose is wry, New-York obsessed, depressingly beautiful and curiously distinguished.
The young, pretty protagonist is a recent Columbia Art graduate with inherited wealth and tries all sorts of medications to sleep continuously for one whole year. She records the journey of her ambition in a diary, where the longings and flaws of privileged young people alike are whispered poignantly without truly leaving our minds, yet if they do, it is through a trail of eternal echoes.
The Secret History by Donna Tart is regarded as a cult leader for the burgeoning “Dark Academia” aesthetic and lifestyle on social media in the 2020s.
It is florid in language, suspenseful in storytelling, and full of the esoteric allure of Greek and Gothic arts. The young Californian student Richard is enrolls in a liberal arts school in New England, fictionally named “Guardian College” and in reality was modeled on the Bennington college in Vermont. Richard pursues a Greek major, and in turn joins four classmates and a mysterious professor to explore the depth of intellect, friendship, murder, and most of all, the beauty searched for and inevitably found in terror.
The Secret History seems to be inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, a classic novel written by Oscar Wilde which explores the philosophy of art: aestheticism. This argues “art for art’s sake” in order to free the purpose of art from Victorian morals, yet still makes art an expression of purposeful or purposeless beauty.
This tale of love, suicide, and killing, of bewitching talkers, lovesick scholars, boring artists, and arrogant socialites, resulted in the book first being criticized as immoral. Later, it became the epitome of social satire and clever language. Nowadays it a philosophical and psychological thriller, recording the disintegration of a portrait and its person of muse: The devil-souled and angel-faced Dorian Gray.
Delayed Rays of a Star is a 2019-2020 Henfield prize winning fictional novel written by Singaporean writer Amanda Lee Koe.
It’s about two actresses and one female director in the WWII era: Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl (respectively). Within their periphery in Berlin, New York, Paris, Beijing, and Los Angeles are incredibly fleshed out secondary characters that touch on illegal migration, political controversies, cultural discrimination, and so much more in that nostalgic, turbulent flow of time.
Norwegian Woods is perhaps the most realist novel written by Haruki Murakami, peaking as a true tragicomedy. Set in the politically progressive late 60s and early 70s of Tokyo Japan, the pen pinpoints on three college students grappling with love, depression, societal shifts, and the meaning of life. The melancholic bildungsroman is told through a simple, intimate prose that does not pour out tragedy, but rather soaks the reader quietly with its tart, pitter-pattering rain.
To all the splendors of the old and the young in this city’s summer, may you always possess the unassisted power of dreaming, the unrestrained desire for romanticism, and may you always indulge in it through the paragraphs of a book as much as you do on the face of earth.
Images: Ann Carter-Cash, Wikipedia, Aesthetic Wiki, Rakuten Kobo, a, Amazon, Livinia, Sofia S, Owen Zhang
