YoungForest's blog

The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

Recommended by Luoji Siwei. The author’s left-wing tendency is quite serious: he beautifies the Democratic Party and demonizes the Republican Party. The writing is so beautiful that it is almost excessive. It reminds me of the Grand Historian, and I cannot help wondering whether it is also “half hearsay and half imagination.” Just kidding. I had just reached Roosevelt’s election in 1932. American history has gone through many challenges far greater than today’s. Roosevelt was also a person who changed America, moving it from liberalism toward statism, from isolationism toward globalism. It was also the moment in America’s 250-year history when it came closest to the risk of dictatorship. This is what happens in a crisis. Liberal democracy is hard-won and should be cherished. Today, on the news and across the internet, people are always worrying about America’s severe division, deglobalization, and the rise of the right. All I can say is: too young. Take history as a mirror. America is trustworthy.

The whole book is a chronological account. For foreigners, many parts are passed over briefly and still feel quite unfamiliar. This is especially true of the history of entertainment and mass life. Those stars, films, and novels: I know none of them. It is a very long book, four thick volumes, the longest book I have finished this year. Another long book I am reading is Les Miserables, which I have not finished yet.

A review of the changes, lessons, and experiences that shaped 2024, plus plans for 2025.

Weekly book 24: Shi Nan Zhi Tu by Ma Boyong

The author seems to be using the Han dynasty’s Nanyue issue to map onto the Taiwan issue. Ma Boyong is still as good as ever at taking a few scattered words from historical records and imagining a complete suspense story out of them. His earlier The Longest Day in Chang’an and The Lychees of Chang’an are both like this.

It is a very good full-length novel, especially in its descriptions of food, which feel sincere and mouth-watering. The ending is just too tragic: “Gaozhe’s” whole family dies. The old case is ultimately never solved or cleared, although both readers and the male protagonist know the truth. The punishment, delayed by more than 20 years, comes far too late. If the male protagonist had arrived a few years later, the murderer would have ended his life peacefully. But he still abused power for so many years and harmed many people.

Weekly book 22: Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life

A book recommended by Poor Charlie’s Almanack. It understands the universe, life, and society from the perspective of chaos, which is a very interesting angle. Through chaos, a mathematical concept, the book strings together many things in the universe. Although we have a lot of physics knowledge and seem to understand the world quite well, enough to predict history and the future as Laplace believed, facts and theory prove that this is impossible. The best and only solution for computing the universe is the universe itself. It is impossible to create a machine or life inside the universe that can compute and predict the universe. This is a mathematical limitation. If, as many sages have said, mathematics is the language of God, then it seems this language also has innate limits and is not omniscient or omnipotent. Of course, mathematics has always been progressing, but judging from current proofs, many equations do not have analytical solutions. Iterative solutions are destined to encounter the butterfly effect. It is slightly worse than A Matter of Degrees. Although I think I have some mathematical and scientific background, the mathematics and arguments in this book still left me somewhat confused.

Interestingly, the previous book mentioned a solution similar to The Wandering Earth. This book begins with the three-body problem. The three-body problem is unsolvable, not because physics is wrong, but because mathematics is at fault, and mathematics has already proved that it is unsolvable. Therefore, if the Salvationists in Remembrance of Earth’s Past had read this work, they would have given up the idea of saving the “Lord.” Of course, in The Three-Body Problem, the Salvationists eventually proved this point as well, and failed in the struggle against the Adventists. One can say their strategy was impossible from the root and doomed to fail.

A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals about the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and Universe

Douban link

Excellent. It is a book recommended in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, and I came to it from that book. Munger emphasized the importance of multidisciplinary knowledge, and perhaps that is why he recommended this book. Indeed, this book gathers the achievements of many disciplines and explains them deeply yet accessibly. It is an excellent popular science book. Although much of the knowledge and history was already familiar to me, by using the physical variable of “temperature,” it connects medicine, biology (including evolution), physics (light, heat, quantum mechanics), geology, and chemistry. When different disciplines integrate with one another and historical developments interweave, one cannot help marveling at the greatness of science and human civilization. As the book says, from the Big Bang, to the birth of the solar system, to the birth of Earth, then to life, and finally to humans who think about all these things that indirectly and directly created us. Reading it made me clap my hands in delight many times. I could not put it down and finished it in three days. Being born human, I am lucky and proud, especially living in the 21st century, standing on the shoulders of so many giants, enjoying their discoveries and creations, and living a comfortable and happy life.

Notes on Antifragile and its lessons about randomness, experimentation, redundancy, and real life.

Ma Boyong’s new work. Excellent, recommended. In the afterword he says it is a leisure piece, and it indeed reads smoothly and recreationally. I finished it in two days and could not put it down. Personally, I think its quality is second only to the long novel Mystery of Antiques, and better than The Longest Day in Chang’an, The Longest Day in Chang’an: Fifteen Days in Two Capitals, The Lychees of Chang’an, I Read Too Little, Do Not Lie to Me, and The Ming Dynasty Under the Microscope. I have read quite a few of Prince Ma’s books. He counts as my favorite contemporary Chinese writer. Among writers whose books I can read this many of, abroad there is also Keigo Higashino, and domestically there is Jin Yong.

It deconstructs one of the four great classical novels, Journey to the West. With insight into human nature and officialdom, the story it writes is actually more convincing than the original and more in line with modern narrative. Miscarriages of justice, factional struggles, and checks and balances of power are all brought out vividly. I heard a theory very early on, probably on early Zhihu, that the reason Sun Wukong caused havoc in Heaven was that Heaven deliberately made it happen. By taking advantage of the incident, various departments could shift blame onto the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, especially the underworld’s Register of Life and Death, which probably already had many loopholes, so they used the opportunity to destroy evidence. Tai Bai happens to expand this view, using the performance of the journey to fetch scriptures to reveal the truth behind the Havoc in Heaven 500 years earlier. It expands the idea into a 100,000-character novella. The writing is humorous and makes one laugh, but thinking carefully is terrifying. It contains no small amount of exposing reality and satirizing the present through the past, while also being full of Ma Boyong’s usual compassion, suspense, and reversals.

Weekly book 18: Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

Charlie Munger passed away at the end of last year at age 99. I am ashamed that I only now read Poor Charlie’s Almanack, which gathers the essence of his thinking. It can be considered the product of 80 years of his intellectual wisdom, since the third edition of the original book was completed in 2008. Recently I have read too many success books, and I am truly full of expectation and confidence about the future and myself.

Read biographies and study those successful lives, as well as those lives that left regrets or met failure.

Douban link

The first half is about wealth, suitable for reading before age 35 to change one’s current situation. Much of the wisdom is also widely recognized and easy to accept around the world. The second half is about happiness, suitable for reading after 35 to accept the current situation. But that part is more subjective and differs from person to person. It belongs to greater wisdom and is more rare. Finally, Die with Zero (also a book).

It connects with many books I have read before. It really is an almanack. Much wisdom is explained clearly in just a few words. For example, Atomic Habits discusses how to build good habits, discard bad habits, and the importance of habits; The Psychology of Money discusses the definition of wealth and how to obtain wealth; and books such as evolutionary psychology and The Evolution of Desire discuss human psychology and gender psychology. Of course, those books are much more detailed and more actionable, belonging to the “technique” part. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a collection, a summary of the wisdom Naval, as a smart person and a person who has read many books, accumulated over decades. He explains it to everyone using the Feynman Technique, which he advocates. Different people, with different life experiences and reading histories, will feel completely different things. I truly wish I had encountered it earlier.

It has the feeling of Dangnian Mingyue’s Those Things in the Ming Dynasty. I do not know whether it is intentional imitation or unintentional resemblance.

It often interacts with Jin Yong’s novels, especially with the same compassion for the world.

Yue Lingshan: “Self-pity, self-sorrow, and self-resentment; no regret for true feeling, no regret for foolish devotion.”