Mr Tompkins In Paperback

When I was about twelve years old, on a raining afternoon, I went to visit my aunt in the university library. Back then I loved to visit my aunt at work, because it gave me a chance to duck into the big room with all the books for hours. Somewhere on the shelf I randomly picked up a book, flipped through it, and was instantly transfixed; I remember that moment vividly. I must have stood there read that book for a good hour and just could not put it down. What was so interesting? Well, it was about the adventure of a Bank clerk, Mr. Tompkins, who always somehow stumbles on these modern Physics concepts, with the help of a certain professor and his daughter. On top of that, it was all about relativity, fusion and fission, time travel - things a twelve-year old boy would just die for.

Although not too bright, Mr. Tompkins can dream well. And what dreams he has had! Witnessing a murder in a time-dilated world, playing quantum billiards with friends, or having a conversation with Maxwell's devil. It was absolutely fantastic! I couldn't help being pulled into this weird and crazy trip Mr. Tompkins was having. I remember hearing the rain drops outside, flipping the pages literally quivering with excitement, and totally forgetting about time until my aunt came to fetch me.

Ah, what fun that was! With all the innocence of a twelve-year old boy, I looked at the universe with wonderment.

However, it was a translation that I was reading. I never wrote down the name of the book, nor the author. Over the years I tried to find that book again but never succeeded. I could only remember bits and pieces of what I read, and they are not enough.

And then, out of the blue one day, as I was reading Wrinkles in Time, the author talked about an outstanding physics book written by George Gamow, and that many world-renowned physicists named it as the source of their inspiration during interviews. Some included quotes from the book jogged my memory instantly. Could this be my book?! Could it?

I rushed to my computer, ordered it from Amazon, and with breathless anticipation, waited.

And it is my book! So after 20 some years, I am reunited with my favorite physics book. As I read it for the second time, here in America, somehow I am transported to that distant library back in China, and I can almost hear those raindrops in my head.

Dubliners

James Joyce was one of those great writers that I never, well, dared to read. Sure, I knew about Ulysses , but who wants to read eighteen chapters of two guys wondering about in an Irish town? And as for Finnegans Wake, it simply has a reputation as being the most difficult and abstractly written piece of work. So I never read James Joyce, but I was Okay with that; after all, there were plenty of other great writers to read and life is short. Right?

Well, I thought so, until recently that is. I discovered this little gem of his called Dubliners and I just fell in love with it!

Dubliners is a collection of short stories. As you might have guessed, it is about people who live in Dublin, how they go about their lives, and how they cope with their dreams and fears. The characters are your everyday people: priest, schoolboy, teacher, mother, daughter ... and what they do are quite ordinary too - there are no heroic actions, in fact, almost no actions whatsoever. James Joyce just observes how they go about their lives, and captures a snapshot here and there. But that image, under the examination of unhurried eyes, is captivating.

A few things about the book that I found particularly charming.

First, James Joyce's mastery of writing. He is simply a great writer. He knows how to describe a scene, choose the right words, or tell you about a person. His characters jump right out of the page at you, full of blood and flesh. He can really take the readers to the center of his story.

Second, he really loves Dublin. And you can't help but love it with him. His passion for the city, for its people, is touching. He loves it not because of it is without faults, but despite of its faults. It is that love that made him write passionately about each story, and that becomes one of the central theme that holds all the stories together, and the reader.

Another central theme of the book is the state of paralysis of Dublin and its people at that time. Everywhere you look, there is decay, inaction, complacency, and idleness. You are gripped with this hopeless feeling, and suffocated by it. This theme is not in just one or multiple stories of the book, but all of them; it is pervasively present, which creates an ambient context that is most difficult to shake.

And lastly, the stories work together to put a group portrait right in front of the reader. Each story is unique and wonderful to read, but their combined effect is a powerful unique experience that I did not expect. I have not read another book that so effectively interweaves central themes through separate pieces like this. Each additional story adds another dimension to the tapestry, until he brings it all together in a superbly written story fittingly called "The Dead."

Beyond its brilliant and almost brutal realism, it is also a book full of enigmas, ambiguities, and symbolic resonances. Dubliners remains an undisputed masterpiece, a work that, in Terence Brown's words, "compels attention by the power of its unique vision of the world, its controlling sense of the truths of human experience as its author discerned them in a defeated. colonial city."