I believe anyone who has read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland cannot deny its relentless absurdity. From the characters to the narrative, descriptionI believe anyone who has read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland cannot deny its relentless absurdity. From the characters to the narrative, descriptions, and dialogue, it's a journey into the nonsensical: mice and ducks arguing over meaningless pronouns; the enigmatic Caterpillar, smoking a hookah and asking 'Who are you?'; the perpetually weeping Mock Turtle; and, of course, the endless mad tea parties and pre-trial trials. What are these?!
And don’t be fooled into thinking Alice is the only sane one in this madness. She's the one pondering curtsies while plummeting down a rabbit hole and composing snail-paced poems before others even finish their stories. Absurdity is truly in her bones.
Despite this apparent randomness, Carroll’s work is not entirely without grounding. The tea parties and croquet matches were common social activities in Victorian England, and the Queen of Hearts, always demanding executions, was a clear satire of the era. It's even rumored that Queen Victoria herself was a fan of this book.
The nonsense verses about the 3 sisters eating sweets were inspired by the real-life Liddell sisters, especially the youngest Alice for whom the book was written. This rootedness in reality is what makes the story believable and enduring.
Unfortunately, the absurdist literature of the 20th century lacks this grounding. Modern absurdist authors present their work with a serious, often humorless tone, forcing readers to delve deep into the text for meaning. It's as if they expect us to be impressed by our ability to decipher their work, much like the subjects in The Emperor’s New Clothes These authors often seem more interested in exploring existential themes than in telling a good story. Their plays are typically filled with themes of deceit, despair, alienation, and exile.
Carroll on the other hand, simply told a fun story. His Wonderland is a vibrant place filled with strange and wonderful creatures. The illogical dialogue and events might seem "curiouser and curiouser," but they are also enchanting. While deeper meanings can be found, Carroll's primary goal was to entertain.
And we shall not overlook the literary sophistication of this book. Alice's stream-of-consciousness thoughts and Carroll’s witty asides in parentheses demonstrate a high level of literary skill. The nonsense verses, many of which are parodies of well-known poems, are also quite sophisticated. There are puns, jokes, and unique word choices throughout.
The beauty of Alice lies in its balance: the balance between fun and depth, absurdity and reality. When the story threatens to get bogged down in nonsense, Carroll deftly moves the plot forward. Of course, not everyone appreciates this "magic of nonsense."
Honestly, I wouldn't recommend this book for very young children due to its complex language and bizarre concepts. Even adults would not entirely appreciate the meanings of this book.
Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song is a gripping novel that pulled me right into the abyss. It received widespread acclaim as soon as it was published and evenPaul Lynch’s Prophet Song is a gripping novel that pulled me right into the abyss. It received widespread acclaim as soon as it was published and even won the 2023 Booker Prize.
The book tells the story of a mother trying to keep her family alive as society collapses around her. When the “end� times come knocking, the world is in chaos - land is ripped from the ground, the sun still shines, yet everything is in darkness.
What makes this novel so powerful is how Lynch uses poetic language to capture the clash between personal reality and looming disaster. It’s razor-sharp, almost like the teeth of some giant beast, making for a reading experience that’s both unsettling and deeply affecting. But rather than taking a straightforward, realist approach to depicting suffering, he crafts a chillingly original vision of Ireland slipping into totalitarian rule and eventual collapse. The book vividly captures the nightmare-like quality of living through such a catastrophe. where fear, disbelief, and resistance all exist at once. In a way, the apocalypse here isn’t some natural disaster; it’s man-made. And it feels eerily local, disturbingly close to home.
Potential Spoilers Ahead!
The novel is set in Ireland. After an unnamed epidemic, the ruling National Alliance Party (NAP) enacts an “Emergency Powers Act� under the guise of responding to an ongoing crisis. What follows is unrest, civil war, and a refugee crisis. The novel isn’t about politics; it’s about what happens inside a person’s heart at a given moment. Reading it, I sometimes felt trapped inside the protagonist Eilish’s mind, experiencing her fear and anxiety as the world crumbles around her. The claustrophobia is suffocating.
Eilish is a scientist. Her husband, Larry, is the deputy secretary of Ireland’s teachers� union. They live a comfortable life with their 4 children in a house with a garden on the outskirts of Dublin, planning an Easter vacation to North America. Then, 1 night, there’s a knock at the door - 2 officers, their faces barely visible, asking for Larry. “A knock at the door� is a classic literary device, signaling suspense and an impending shift. The officers are polite, even reassuring, but after they leave, Eilish senses that something invisible has seeped into her home. With this eerie, understated moment, Lynch sets the stage for a national nightmare - where small, personal sensations foreshadow a massive, uncontrollable collapse.
A few days later, Larry disappears after attending a teachers� protest. More and more people around Eilish - colleagues, neighbors - are taken, vanishing without a trace. Yet even then, Eilish’s focus isn’t on the turmoil outside - it’s on her family, on survival. She has to keep the fridge stocked with milk, get the kids to school, care for her teething baby and her aging father, even as curfews are imposed, mobs attack her car, and bombs fall on their home.
Her father, Simon, a fellow scientist, is one of the first to sense how bad things are getting. Despite his dementia, his warnings to Eilish are clear: You have to leave with the children. But leaving means abandoning everything, uprooting her entire life. She stays. She has no choice.
In times of crisis, people rarely grasp the full scope of the disaster unfolding around them. They cling to their routines, unable to see the bigger picture. Eilish convinces herself it’s all temporary, that if she just opens the back door, things will return to normal. She ignores her father’s advice, choosing instead to wait - for her husband, for her son, who later joins the resistance. Until, finally, when there’s nothing left to hold onto, she joins the flood of refugees. She closes her eyes and sees everything that has been swallowed, everything she has lost. She is just a body now - no heart left, just swollen feet carrying her children forward.
Prophets have always wandered the earth, singing their warnings, casting shadows over history. There’s nothing new under the sun - crises repeat, as if humanity shares a collective nightmare. Prophet Song is, in many ways, a prophetic novel. It doesn’t just show destruction; it makes you feel its urgency. It suggests that history is a cycle, that similar tragedies will keep happening, generation after generation. And yet, absurdly, people will keep ignoring them, burying suffering and bloodshed in the ground. What humanity learns from disaster is about as much as a lab rabbit learns from lab test.
But maybe - just maybe - this bleakness is also the starting point of awareness, of resistance. The title itself suggests that the prophets� lament never truly ends. The disasters of 1 era are just the beginning of the next crisis. Real change hasn’t come yet. But even so, individuals still have to take responsibility for their fate - because that’s the only way redemption can ever happen.
Lynch’s writing always begins at the edge of despair. He shows us powerless individuals who refuse to surrender, who still hunger for justice and dare to fight for it. He forces us to see a world dominated by horror and destruction, to witness humanity struggling in its cracks. In his stories, human nature is pushed to its extremes. no longer just a concept, but something raw and exposed. His novels aren’t just about historical facts; they tap into something deeper, something timeless. Whether it’s 19th-century tenant farmers, famine survivors, wartime refugees, or intellectuals in a collapsing Dublin, their fate is the same - being uprooted, displaced, forced to search for meaning beyond the world they knew.
By the time I turned the final page, I felt like I had just come up for air after being underwater for too long. It’s not an easy book - it doesn’t offer comfort, closure, or even a clear path forward. But that’s exactly what makes it so powerful. It lingers. It unsettles. It demands to be reckoned with.
I think Lynch doesn’t just want us to witness the collapse of a society - he wants us to feel it, to live inside it, to understand, even in the smallest way, what it means to lose everything. And in doing so, he reminds us that the world we take for granted is far more fragile than we’d like to believe.
Maybe that’s the real prophecy of Prophet Song. It’s not just about a distant, fictional Ireland - it’s about us, right now, wherever we are. It’s a warning, yes, but also a challenge: What would you do? How far would you go? What would you be willing to lose before you finally decided to run?
And maybe the most unsettling question of all: Would you even realize it was time to go before it was too late?...more
In the 1950s, young Eilis left her small Irish town for Brooklyn, diving headfirst into an unpredictable new life. She was brimming with youthful hopeIn the 1950s, young Eilis left her small Irish town for Brooklyn, diving headfirst into an unpredictable new life. She was brimming with youthful hope until a letter from home suddenly made her loathe everything around her.
The story itself isn’t complicated - it’s neatly divided into 4 chapters that mirror the natural flow of beginnings, middles, and ends. The first and last chapters tell the story of Eilis leaving and then returning home, while the middle 2 chronicle her coming-of-age in Brooklyn.
Potential Spoilers Ahead!
Growing up in a closed-off town, her world had been limited to her homemaker mother, a working sister, a bit of gossip among friends, and even her brothers working in Britain - symbols of a foreign realm.
Brooklyn, however, was an entirely different world. With help from a priest introduced by her sister, Eilis crossed the ocean and moved in with an Irish landlord. She even landed a job as a store clerk at a shopping center. Determined to one day work in an office like her sister, she attended night classes. For Eilis, her sister was the perfect mirror - lively, capable, and charming - yet she chose to stay with their mother, leaving this quiet, reserved sister to follow her own path. This deep sisterly bond is why Eilis’s letters to her sister were so much more intimate than the ones she sent to her mother or brothers. In them, she described the differences between American malls and Ireland, the pretentious airs of her landlady, the Irish Christmas dinner hosted by the priest, and even mentioned an Italian guy who had appeared in her life. Amidst a whirlwind of new experiences, Eilis gradually learned to keep pace with Brooklyn. But the future plans her Italian boyfriend proposed made her uneasy - it all seemed too fast, too far removed from the dreams of a small-town girl. And then, out of nowhere, the news of her sister’s death halted Brooklyn’s rhythm, forcing Eilis to return home for the funeral.
I found myself relating to Eilis. Moving far from home and trying to settle in a new city is something many of us face as adults. Yet, very few ever plan - or even think about - returning to their roots only to find that leaving once again isn’t so simple. And that’s exactly what Eilis encountered just a couple of weeks later.
On 1 hand, her mother couldn’t bear the thought of letting her go. Suddenly, loneliness had made her cling to the daughter she’d once regarded with indifference, sparking a silent tug-of-war between them. Having grown used to living on her own, Eilis felt awkward and trapped, especially when even her friends started trying to set her up with a local boy. It was like an Irish twist on Pride and Prejudice: the boy admitted he’d liked her for 2 years but, not knowing how to connect, his awkwardness made her mistake restraint for coldness. This contrasted sharply with her memories of carefree days on Coney Island beaches with her Italian boyfriend. Now, unexpectedly, she found herself caught in a group date in a familiar bay. That’s when Eilis realized she’d been half-pressured by her boyfriend into a sort of unspoken marriage - now, without any grand ceremony to seal the deal, she began to wonder if she was more attached to the familiar faces and lands of home than to this fast-paced new life.
If the delicate, measured rhythm of the first chapter - her ocean-crossing journey - feels like a long, steady adagio, then the emotional turbulence of the final chapter hits like a lively, rushed allegro. Colm Toibin’s strength isn’t in crafting an extravagant tale; he’s traditional and deeply in tune with the little emotions we all share. As I follow his words, I see 1950s Brooklyn as a melting pot of immigrants, each trying (and sometimes failing) to make a foreign land feel like home. I also witness a woman’s inner struggle - a dance between reason and raw emotion, where every moment of love is a choice. He captures these subtle shifts in feelings with rare clarity, not to mention the occasional wisp of homesickness that drifts through his narrative - a taste of unmistakable Irish longing.
In the end, I close the book with sea salt still on your fingertips - Brooklyn’s sea and Ireland’s sea blending into 1 unforgettable flavor.
Nine Perfect Strangers is a pretty ordinary book. It took me an indeterminate amount of time to finish reading it. I can't say it's badly written, butNine Perfect Strangers is a pretty ordinary book. It took me an indeterminate amount of time to finish reading it. I can't say it's badly written, but it was challenging to get into and hard to empathize with.
The head of the wellness center actually gave hallucinogenic LSD to guests with various problems. Is this a case of fighting poison with poison? However, I recently came across the book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, which explains in detail how LSD can treat depression, addiction, and more. If depression or addiction is severe, maybe psychedelic treatments are worth a try.
My favorite part of the book involves the family of 3. After their son hanged himself, their lives seemed to stop on that morning. The father regretted turning off the alarm that day; if he had woken up at the usual time, he might have stopped his son's impulsive act. The mother, a medical professional, felt guilty for not thoroughly examining the asthma medication prescribed to her son. Had she known about the potential depressive side effects, she would have closely monitored his emotions. The son's twin sister felt remorseful for arguing with him over trivial matters and, despite noticing his odd behavior, refused to speak to him out of stubbornness, allowing the darkness to consume him.
This part reminded me of the son in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, who also hanged himself. Suicide acts like a bomb, destroying oneself and shattering the family's happiness. Of course, people who commit suicide due to depression can't control their emotions. During a depressive episode, they can't think rationally and might believe that their disappearance would lessen the burden on their family and be the best decision for everyone.
Therefore, we should always pay attention to our loved ones' mental states and address any abnormalities promptly to avoid tragedies.
I’m someone who spoils book reviews pretty easily (without even realising), so when it comes to reviewing crime and mystery novels I have to be super I’m someone who spoils book reviews pretty easily (without even realising), so when it comes to reviewing crime and mystery novels I have to be super careful - not giving too much away. Honestly, crime and mystery novels aren’t really my thing; but as a book lover, it feels like you really have to have at least read 1 Agatha Christie’s work.
After finishing this book, what I gotta say is: this is mystery at its finest. The motives, the big picture, the tricks, and the settings are all so over-the-top that they hardly feel real. It’s like these crimes and punishments come from deep inside human nature but only really exist on the page. I mean, who in real life would design such an elaborate puzzle and pull off a crime so perfectly?
Christie basically set the gold standard for crime stories. No matter how clever later writers try to be, they’re just playing inside the little box she created.
Take And Then There Were None - it’s the ultimate “desert island� scenario. 10 people end up stuck on a remote island, and a mysterious recording accuses each one of having committed murder to escape justice. Following the pattern of a creepy nursery rhyme, they get picked off one by one. By the time the police show up, all 10 are dead - no survivors.
This book totally nails the genre and slices right into the heart of human nature. Christie doesn’t paint the murderer as some self-righteous judge; his final confession bluntly breaks down the 2 sides of our nature - the urge to kill and our sense of justice.
Christie clearly thought that, deep down, people are pretty messed up. That dark side, all tied up with our biology and hormones, is thrilling and only gets stronger the more we try to hold it back. Once that urge pops up, the usual moral satisfaction just can’t keep it in check.
And when it comes to picking his victims, the killer doesn’t come off as having some grand, hypocritical manifesto or self-delusion. He’s straight-up: he just wanted to kill a few people to get a thrill, so he chose some guilty folks to make it easier. That so-called sense of justice was just his way of deciding who to target - a way to comfort himself.
What’s really chilling is his calm, calculated approach - even towards himself. He never deludes himself by thinking he’s some kind of hero; he just wanted to create a crime mystery as flawless as a piece of art.
At the end of the day, we’re all selfish, acting according to what we want. Whether it’s for good or for bad, it’s just a choice to feel better. All 10 of these people, driven by different forms of selfishness, ended up committing murders that skirted the line of morality and the law.
So, if you didn’t have to worry about getting caught, if nobody ever knew - would you ever kill someone, even just once?
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