Angels & Demons

1.Dan Brown

    He was an English teacher before he became famous overnight for the well-known novel──The DaVinci Code.

    His works are mainly thriller fictions(驚悚科幻小說) which combine cryptography(密碼學), science, and religion.

the first edition's cover

(The title is an ambigram!)

2.Story

    One of CERN's(歐洲核子研究組織) scientist, Leonardo Vetra, is murdered. His chest is branded(烙印) with an ambigram(雙向圖) of the word "Illuminati"(光明會). And the antimatter(反物質) was stolen. If it self-destructs, the exposion can lay a city flat.

    Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist(符號學家), is requested to help them find out the bomb, of course, and the murderer. But this makes him get into the fatal trouble between the science and religion...

3.My Thought

    The main character, Robert Langdon, first appeared in this story, but this book was not famous until The DaVinci Code was published. Although I think that this story is much more exciting and intricate.

    Although the science part is a little bit exaggerating( The security may not be so poor, and we cannot make such a huge antimatter for some legally or technically reason. Am I right, 杜毅修?), some of the part is so true to life that makes you believe the crisis has really happened.

    The most interesting part for me is the ambigram, it's so amazing that it is still the same word after it turns 180 degrees!

    I am going to put all the pictures in the book and some other pictures I found. Hope you enjoy it!

illuminati

earth

air

fire

water

from top to bottom is "earth, air fire, and water"

Turn your head to see what it becomes!!

You can also make a Chinese one, too!

http://truston.blog.163.com/blog/static/6057566220080309580132/

He is a genius of ambigram, if you want to make special words just view the blog to get some thought!

    By the way, the movie is totally a shxt, it cuts many important parts and make the whole story's pace to be too fast and puzzling.
    Go read the novel!!!

Robinson Crusoe

1.Daniel Defoe

    He is an English author and a reporter. His works are mainly about a person uses his knowledge and courage to conquer the difficulty.  Daniel Defoe is seem to be the pioneer of English novels.

2.Story

    Crusoe sails to the Queen's Dock in Hull in August 1651, against the wishes of his parents, who want him to study law.

    After a storm, his ship is wrecked. His lust for the sea remains so strong that he sets out to sea again. But the ship is taken over by Salé pirates and Crusoe is enslaved by a Moor(摩爾人). Two years later, he escapes in a boat with a boy named Xury; a Captain of a Portuguese ship off the west coast of Africa rescues him. The ship is en route to Brazil.

    After a few years, Crusoe joins a trip which is about to brings slave from the Africa. But the ship is wrecked in a storm AGAIN!! 

    He takes out the weapons and food in the shipwrecks, and then starts his life on this island and the fight against the cannibals(食人族)...

3.My Thought

    I read this novel after I watched the movie Cast Away (浩劫重生), and I found that there are some interesting similarity between them (although they might be totally different for some people).
    Everyone knows "Friday" is the volley ball's name in the movie. But actually in the novel, Robinson save a slave from the cannibals, and named him "Friday".
    Tom Hanks (the cast in the movie) makes the things and gets the food all by himself. But Robinson get the thing he needs in the shipwreck!
    This book is perfectly conformed the Hero's Journey (people who don't know can google Joseph Campbell)──starting from a shipwreck, life on an island, fighting against the cannibals, beating the traitors (叛徒), and finally coming back home and enjoying the wealth and the wonderful life with his wife and son.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

1.George Orwell

    "Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism."

──by wikipedia

    Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are the two most famous novels of his. Both of them are talking about the Totalitarianism(極權主義) and the power-follower, they are considered to be the classic work of the political allegory.

2.Story

    In 1984 (the future in the author's mind), Winston Smith lives in Airstrip One (一號空降場) (the former United Kingdom), a province of Oceania (大洋國) after a global atomic war, one of the world's three superstates.
    "Big Brother is watching you."
    It is a world that whatever you done is monitored by the telescreen(雙向電視) of the Party, which believes in the boss──Big Brother.
    Winston Smith hates the Party, he writes the true situation of the world in the diary and want it to last until the Party is destroyed, because every facts can be tampered(竄改) by the Party.
    Then he falls in love with Julia, although having a lover is not allowed for the Party member.
    They enjoy the illicit romance, and go to one of the Inner Party's member, O'Brein, who they consider to be a rebel, to see if they can destroy the Party.
    But he is actually a thought police, he arrests them, and re-education them by some cruel punishment.
    Then he let them out, but they can't face to each other because they are forced to betray each other.
    The last sentence of the novel is,
    "I love Big Brother."

3.My Thought

    As a person who lives in a peace world, the Totalitarianism government in the book is shocked for me. It really predicts some countries like Russia in the WW2.
    And the technology in the story is very interesting, the novel machine and the poem machine still can't appear today. It seems that human's brain still can't be replaced. Some like telescreen is developed, not being used for monitoring but for chatting.
    Maybe the future we predict in the novels nowadays will be discussed by the future people, too!

2013 Nobel Laureate in Literature 

──Alice Munro

    For the citation(表彰), "master of the contemporary short story", Alice Munro won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.

    In 1968, her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, won the Governor General's Award, which is Canada's highest literary prize. It also opened the writing career for her.

    Most of her stories are set in her hometown, Ontario, telling about the love and the daily life of the civilian, involves illness and death.

    A few theme of her early stories are the narratives of a girl growing up and the compromise with her family and the town she lives in, such as Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and Runaway.

    "She has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone, and of the elderly. It is a mark of her style for characters to experience a revelation that sheds light on, and gives meaning to, an event."

(from wikipedia)

    Because of the special writing style, some critics have discussed whether Munro's works are short stories. But Alex Keegan gave a simple answer, "Who cares? In most Munro stories there is as much as in many novels."

    Her most famous collections are Dance of the Happy, Shades Lives of Girls and Women, and Who Do You Think You Are?

My thought

    Many authors are never known by us until they won the Nobel Prize, Alice Munro is an example. But their works must have high enough level, or some special characteristics to won this prize.
    I will choose one of her collections in the bookstore, and spend my free time to immerse in the sincere emotion she brings to me.