“I feel pity for these batteries that worked so hard for my benefit, and I can’t throw them away. It seems a shame to get rid of them the moment they die, after these batteries have given me light and sound, and run my gadgets.”

“Indeed, it’s a shame that young people have such limited vocabularies nowadays.”

“Tsukiko, when you see a handsome man, even if you cannot understand what he says, you still think, Oh, that guy’s good-looking, don’t you? Handwriting is the same.”

[22]
守靈夜時吃到的壽司、便當及啤酒，都是這樣的感覺。
我也漸漸到了知道變得有點硬的壽司、冷掉的便當和微溫的啤酒能緩和人們多少情緒的年齡了。

[24]
我想，是他（餐廳老闆）以前去過許多美食、想過許多特色的經驗，才做出那樣引以豪的味道吧。所以，近中年期的人開的餐廳，今後會越來越有意思。

只講吃飯的事情100篇多一點：食記百味

“London seemed so measured, so predictable; the America the rest of my émigré family lived in seemed so content; while the real Russians seemed truly alive, had the sense that anything was possible.”

The remarkables
Yana Yakovleva vs FDCS (Drug Enforcement Agency)
Gold Digger Academy
Vitaly Djomochka
Black Widows
Jambik Hatohov
Ruslana Korshunova vs Rose of the World
Anastasia Drozdova
Post-Soviet Sects
Ostankino Tower

“The English stack their sentimental junks and dirty secrets far away in the garden shed; the Germans have “Keller”, basements, deep underground to hide all their dark memories. But in Russia you just throw it on the balcony; just as long as it isn’t in the flat itself, who cares if the neighbours see? We’ll deal with all that rubbish some other time. It’s not even part of us.”

Book reviews
The Wall Street Journal
The Guardian
The New York Times

David Sedaris suggested Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea / Harry Potter audiobooks read by Stephen Fry / Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

Dave Eggers mentioned Stories Not for the Nervous (a Hitchcock collection).

Scott Turow loved Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was reading Incognito by David Eagleman.

“I’m always close to tears reading Judith Kerr‘s delightful children’s story The Tiger Who Came to Tea. It tells of a tiger who turns up, quite unexpectedly, at teatime at the house of a girl called Sophie and her mother. You’d expect them to panic, but they take the appearance of this visitor entirely in their stride– and their reaction is a subtle invitation for us to approach life’s unexpected challenges with resilience and good humour.” –Alain de Botton

“The most pleasurable reading experience I’ve had recently was just last week– jogging on the beach with an audiobook of Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw. I was so engrossed in his essay “The Ketchup Conundrum” that I ran an extra mile just to find out how it ended.” –Dan Brown

Christopher Buckley is the author of Thank You for Smoking, Losing Mum and Pup, and But Enough About You, among other books.

(Interview with Sting)
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius––Stoicism and the limitations of power.
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own– not of the same blood of birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.”

(Interview with Amy Tan)
What book has had the greatest impact on you?
Probably the Bible… …Many of my stories also relate to undoing handed-down beliefs, whether they come from religion, society, or mothers. And my writing sensibility was also warped by a steady dose of gothic imagery, often related to religious sins or virtue: David braining Goliath, Samson’s bloody head missing a lock of hair, a stinking corpse arising to be kissed by relatives.

jacket illustration by Jillian Tamaki