currently reading

i came to hong kong equipped with a collection of short stories by ernest hemingway, but have been temporarily sidetracked by steven levitt's freakonomics. saw it in a book fair here and promptly bought it after a few pages. difficult to give a good, quick summary because each chapter vary in topic, so here is an excerpt of publishing weekly's review:

Forget your image of an economist as a crusty professor worried about fluctuating interest rates: Levitt focuses his attention on more intimate real-world issues...There isn't really a grand theory of everything here, except perhaps the suggestion that self-styled experts have a vested interest in promoting conventional wisdom even when it's wrong... [deconstructing] everything from the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to baby-naming patterns. Underlying all these research subjects is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we find the right perspective.

it sounds a bit on the dull side, but it's such a fun read. not nearly as dense as it seems... in fact it's easy to read and very humorous at times. started it on the way to bangkok and i am already halfway through. highly recommended for the curious minded.

on the road

on the plane coming to san francisco, i began to read the first of my many designated summer reading books. just thought i would jot down this passage:

"i woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when i didn't know who i was - i was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room i'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and all the sad sounds, and i looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who i was for about fifteen strange seconds. i wasn't scared; i was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. i was halfway across america, at the dividing line between the east of my youth and the west of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon."

looking forward to the haight today.

what i want for my birthday

an original copy of the diary of a century... hardcover, bound in gold foil, edited by richard avedon, published in 1970. took me a long while to track it down in the l.a. county library system, but i want it for myself!

i guess i'm a long way from owning a home, but i dream of having deep mahogany wall-to-wall bookcases in my living room some day, along with marigold walls in my kitchen and an antique chandelier in the dining room. still can't stop buying clothes but these days i'm a bit more interested in collecting books. it will be beautiful.

subject to change

books to read (or re-read):
- on the road by jack kerouac
- walden by henry david thoreau
- the feminine mystique by betty friedan
- grapes of wrath by john steinbeck
- everything hemingway ever wrote

movies to watch (or re-watch):
- amadeus
- who the fuck is jackson pollock?
- amelie
- ghost world
- frida
- sid and nancy
- this is spinal tap
- bottle rocket
- basquiat
- welcome to the dollhouse

this might have to wait until the summer...

ernest hemingway

"walking across the square to the hotel everything looked new and changed. i had never seen the trees before. i had never seen the flagpoles before, nor the front of the theater. it was all different. i felt as i felt once coming home from an out-of-town football game. i was carrying a suitcase with my football things in it, and i walked up the street from the station in the town i had lived in all my life and it was all new. they were raking the lawns and burning leaves in the road, and i stopped for a long time and watched. it was all strange. then i went on, and my feet seemed to be a long way off, and everything seemed to come from a long way off, and i could hear my feet walking a great distance away. i had been kicked in the head early in the game. it was like that crossing the square. it was like that going up the stairs in the hotel."

i am having the best winter break. if i'm not out & about with lovely people then i'm in reading great books.