Ten Books I Can't Lose

Reading is my key. When I was a child living in Taitung, there were no children nearby. Imagination was a survival skill for children in the countryside. My home was full of picture books and toys. When I got to elementary school, I most looked forward to opening Mandarin Weekly every week, looking for unfamiliar place names, and rotating the globe to locate it. , along with words and pictures, fantasy footprints have arrived, or reading a paragraph of a novel before going to bed, the dreaming director, audience and actors seem to have experienced another life, reading carries my desire to explore the world. The relationship between the family and business, I move every two years, from Taitung to Kaohsiung, from Kaohsiung to Taoyuan, from Taoyuan to Taipei, no news from friends who keep talking, practice several times, face unfamiliar environment, get used to pretending Adults come crazy with pistachios, dance with each other, parting several times, and become more and more cautious about friendship, but before writing, they can always be naked, and reading is the most reassuring companion. Of course, I don't mean reading naked.

Now I mostly buy e-books. As a renter, every time I move, I face a bookcase full of books. I donated all of them, and only one box was left to send back to my hometown. The following is my memory. The remaining books, except for the tenth book, are e-books.

1. The Harry Potter series (1997, JK Rowling, UK)

Elementary school likes to do two things the most, list the characteristics of each college and help students assign colleges; after reading the latest episode, go everywhere to explode. I still remember when I was in senior year, my friends and I would buy the English version before the Chinese translation came out, supervise each other’s progress, read out the plot direction without understanding, and show off our notes to everyone (what’s wrong with it now that I think about it).

I am familiar with "Ha", and I read Greek and Roman mythology in my freshman year, but JK Rowling made a lot of reference to mythology when structuring the story, and every time I have a feeling of deja vu.

2. Brokeback Mountain: Wyoming Tales (1999, Annie Proulx, USA)

The high school history teacher is very fashionable. She will quickly show us the key points in the textbook. After explaining the concepts to us, she will start her extracurricular supplementary textbooks. At first, she asked us to read Yu Qiuyu. What is the meaning of the eight masters who understand and memorize the ancient texts of the Tang and Song Dynasties? More often, I feel that the problem explanations and annotations are fundamentally messed up), and I began to face Chinese literature squarely. Later, I read "Second Nature" and found my deep-rooted patriarchal ideology. As I write my report at the end of the term, I look at Annie Proulx's collection of short stories from the perspective of what I read in The Second Sex.

The first thing that attracted me to this book was her ability to master words, sometimes poetic, sometimes straightforward, sometimes grass-roots, and then narrative, focusing on Wyoming, writing anecdotes about strange people in the American South, and speaking in a more vulgar way. Local gossip records with great artistic techniques. If you like this type of style, there is a genre in American literature called Southern Gothic . Among them, I recommend William Faulkner (very handsome) and Cormac McCarthy , who has a novel "The Long Road" that I love very much. , describes the father-son relationship and the brilliance of humanity at the end of the day.

3. Pride and Prejudice (1813, Jane Augustine, England)

Jane Austen's "Pride" describes the life of the squire and the middle class in the early days of the British Industrial Revolution. Although this novel was written before the Victorian period, you can still refer to this book if you want to understand the fashion of the Victorian period. Class props up the snobbery, prejudice, arrogance, and ignorance of this romantic comedy. Every time I read this novel, I feel a little mixed. If we lived in better times, should it be harder to read the instructions in the novel? involved? After all, the novel was written in the 1800s! Even BJ's Diary of a Single can modernize the archetype so easily.

Austin is one of my favorite writers. In such a complex plot, it's hard to find a piece of fat. Every dialogue confrontation is so sharp, and there is no deviation in the shaping of the characters, mockery, contempt, sarcasm, The rhetoric is perfect.

And every time I reread it, I want to change my name to Elizabeth, hahahahahahahaha.

4. "Open Secret" (1994, Monroe, Canada)

I only started reading Meng Ruo this year, and Gong is my first book.

Meng Ruo is definitely one of the most storytellers in the contemporary era. Just like "Brokeback Mountain", Meng Ruo writes local (countryside) strange anecdotes, so critics like to put Meng Ruo in the Southern Ontario Gothic school of Canadian literature. It is also a short story. Meng Ruo's language is straightforward and smooth, but it is more difficult read. If the story has the smallest basic unit, it should be called Meng Ruo. She disassembles the story that can only be told in 500,000 words into units that are only a little larger than a sentence, and uses letters, newspapers, media, dialogues and other styles to collage, actuarially every time It is necessary to change the narrative angle and timing, and condense it into a short story. This is her incredible place. She is the top artisan of the narrative.

5. The Lighthouse Row (1927, Woolf, England)

This book is really too famous, I don't need any introduction, I just want to advertise around the fire and treasure literature . I'm about to discuss this book. I will discuss it from the background of the times, themes, narrative techniques (stream of consciousness), and symbols. If you are interested, you can Track it first.

6. Too Loud Loneliness (1977, Hrabar, Poland)

"Lighthouse Row" and "Too Loud Loneliness" are ideal types of novels for me.

This novella is the first novel I don’t really want to read in the context of the times. Just by touching the cover, I can relive the thrill of reading it for the first time, because I haven’t reread it for a long time, and I’m not familiar with the context of the times and the novels in the book. Lao Tzu thinks, without commenting, I sincerely invite everyone to read this novel of less than 200 pages, how to tell the most heavy things in life with light self-deprecating humor.

7. "Art Works in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Selected Works by Benjamin" (Banjamin, Germany)

It's Anli time again, and this week around the fireplace , we will enter the final discussion of a small paper by Ben Yaming.

The subtlety of Benjamin’s comments and short essays is that he disdains norms, academics cannot tolerate his love for non-mainstream subjects (such as German tragedies), and the media and academics have a headache for his lack of left-wing remarks, and often have to reject the manuscript , Ben Yaming is flesh and blood. Seeing his friends are soaring, of course they are jealous, but they are still the same. Because of his disdain for norms, his writing can think before theory and does not obey any ideology, which also makes his thinking ambiguous and prescient.

8. Who's Afraid of Woolf (1962, Edward Albee, USA)

The theater has been dominated by scripts for a long time, which reduces many possibilities. Especially when the audience starts to go to the cinema, the theater naturally has to make a corresponding market segmentation, kick out the playwrights, and allow the director to do various experiments, such as actor improvisation, physical theatre, dance theatre , Albee made his fortune in such an era, I want to see that his mastery of language is able to go against the trend and stand the test of time.

"Who" has nothing to do with Woolf at all. It is about the illusoryness of the American middle-class family, how it is paralyzed and disintegrated in the language game.

9. SCRUM: Doing twice as much in half the time (2015, Jeff Sutherland, USA)

This book is to be taken with my next recommendation. It is two powerful prescription signs.

Scrum is a working method, the concept is simple, it responds to the following three questions:

• Are things going in the right direction?
• Whether it can improve the way of doing things that is currently being used.
• What are the factors that might be holding back?

Sutherland thought of a teamwork method that could avoid office politics, poor communication, and unclear goals, and try to make small failures happen earlier to increase the chance of success. Of course, Scrum is mostly used in the technology industry or the software industry. For example, when I worked in e-commerce customer service before, there was no way to apply it directly. However, the previous company had problems with cross-departmental cooperation (communication) and office politics. I used the Product Backlog mentioned by Scrum. Concept, communicate a set of indicators with other departments, manually create dashboards in the initial stage, and then ask the data team and information team to build an automated dashboard. The short-term effect is to reduce the loss caused by communication by 20%. In the long-term, it is to build a mechanism that can be tracked in real time. The original intention of Scrum is simple enough and powerful enough to be so effective.

10. "It's the company's fault that I'm stupid! : Seeing How Organizations Can Destroy Smart People" (2020, Gunter Dick, Germany)

Does Scrum work save time by doing more work? wrong!

I used to work in a start-up company. After watching "Blitzscaling" , I expected myself to be a multi-tasking talent, ready to accept job transfers, accept new challenges, and adapt to changes in the times, but I am in the company. What I saw was the transfer of human resources into a business, and even the existing manufacturers could not be maintained, or the customer service was transferred to the general management office, and it took half a month to replace the lamp. All this confusion made me think, am I the only one who should expand? patience? In this book, Dick talks about how ridiculous it is for companies to use OKR to set unattainable goals, how unrealistic it is for team leaders to pursue high staff utilization, how scary it is for a group of people to play idiots together, and how departmentalism can make companies decline. , The knife cut down on what I saw and heard. Dick did not intend to provide a solution, but to have "awareness" before it was possible to achieve the ideal state of group wisdom in the book.