The little white attic

In an earlier blog post, I wrote “I actually had more trouble trying to understand the characters in The Tale of Genji (about 1,000 years ol...

1/ Amidst all the shock and horror on twitter over people never having heard of The Odyssey , arose a new quarrel about Emily Wilson’s trans...

I have complaints. Before we get to that, it must be said that I do think Proust is a great writer, which you can see in my previous 5 blog ...

1/ I have been rereading Anna Karenina but not written a word, because of writer’s block.  8 years since I first read the novel, 8 years si...

In The Genius of Shakespeare , Jonathan Bate pretends to raise the question of what’s special about Shakespeare when he almost never comes u...

2020 somehow became my year of East Asian literature and I’ve just realised that I forgot to put up a list of the works I read. Here it is: ...

If you’ve been reading my blog or following me on twitter, you may have guessed correctly that the 2 greatest novels I’ve read this year are...

Perhaps you have heard of Hong lou meng by Cao Xueqin, better known in English as Dream of the Red Chamber , A Dream of Red Mansions , or Th...

1/ The first 80 of the 120 chapters of  Hong lou meng   were written by Tào Tuyết Cần (Cao Xueqin). What about   the last 40 ?  This has bee...

1/ Chapter 79 has 2 characters getting married . Giả Nghênh Xuân (Jia Yingchun) is the first one to leave the garden, marrying Tôn Thiệu Tổ ...

1/ It’s funny how in chapter 74, the Giả (Jia) family or mostly phủ Vinh quốc (Rongguo house) create so much ado about a little bag with som...