About the Dry by Jane Harper

The dry is my first Australian novel. Setting up in a rural community in Victoria suffering from a long drought and then the tragic death of a farming family. The tragedy brought the Melbournian detective Aaron Falk, a childhood friend of the father of the victim family, but also a distant past of Falk that was still troubling him back to this small town.

Jane Harper proved her a talented writer in this debut. In the book, the cases, characters and landscape are equally intriguing, making the stories both captive and sympathetic. For me, reading an Aussie novel during a lockdown brought me close to feel the loneliness in this is vast place. Reading it during any given Australian sunny day, let alone summer day, while drinking sparkling water in my Melbournian flat. I was transported to the place and back, with a relieved sigh. Because I do not have to experience the harsh Australian farming life to learn that I cannot survive the environment.

This 2016 novel was made into a movie in 2020 and Falk was played by none other than the great Eric Bana (good to see him back in an Aussie movie!).  The movie brought the openness of the dry landscape vividly and the contrasting closeness of the small town life, slightly less so. Still a very solid and quite loyal adaptation.

Orlando Figes’ Revolutionary Russian is a condensed, easily accessible, yet eloquent summary of the one hundred years of the Russian communist revolution.

Behind the staggering atrocities and life loss, you found how a small group of ambitious communists (despite calling themselves ‘Bolsheviks’, the majority) finding themselves used means of terrors fighting against so-called enemies of the revolution, to build power. This was the first taste of violence and its power. Under the name of revolution, violence and terrors were considered necessary for the realisation of the Communist Utopia. Several consequences followed suit. Means justified in the building of the communist paradise (i.e. dictatorship, one party and police state, well i.e. totalitarianism) became the aims. Constant searching for and fighting against enemies of the revolution meant any intellectual ‘comrades’ who dared to speak differently were deemed as ‘traitors’. They were replaced with the new blood drawn from the public using arguments more easily understandable than communism – nationalism. Thus, the believers of communism, which is supposed to aim to destroy nationalism, became the defenders of the nation.

We can find all these phenomena in Communist China, seeing how while Stalin and Mao despised and distrusted each other, their deeds mirrored each other. Seeing how Mao’s follower Xi is playing these horrendous acts in an equally ridiculously grandiose way.

We should also know how obsessed the Chinese communist party are with the last chapter of the USSR and vowed more than once to avoid the same fate. The party’s doing in the last three decades reflects this obsession and their judgement on the causes of the USSR downfall. We, Taiwanese (if you self-identify yourself other than the more obvious Homo Sapiens) live under the constant threat of the authoritarian Chinese regime. If you consider the liberal democracy of contemporary Taiwan something worth protecting, you need to understand more about the CCPs mindset and I argue it is an effective way through understanding the revolutionary history of Russia.

So! It’s said it’s a New Year.  Considering I finished my VIVA before the Xmas holiday…hmm, for the first time, it’s kind of true,……to me.

Starting to increase reading time this year and that’s why I’m enlisting books to read this year, hopefully will update the lists and progress in a bimonthly time frame.

Jan-Feb 2017
1. the Rising Sun: the decline and fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945
2. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
3. Thinking, fast and slow (audio)
4. Honor code (audio)

Some really need to have closures (has been too long since last time spending time with these books, a bit lost in the middle, as a result) 😛
will be the target of March-April
1. Sapien: a brief history of humankind
2. Why nations fail
3. Dawkins vs Gould: Survival of the fittest

May-June 2017
1. Lost colony: the untold story of China’s first great victory over the west
(the story of our colourful Koxinga 鄭成功. Looking forward to reading this one, therefore, can be a reward if I manage to reach my goal in time, haha)

歡迎推薦書籍，科科。
a bit lack of literature, arts and architecture