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Y Lee

@wilyylee

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a Canadian expat in Taiwan
📚 books, Books, BOOKS!!! 📕 📖 📜 📱
Fiction, Historical Fiction, Espionage, Mystery, Fantasy, History
☕ 🎦 🏰 🥃 🍺 🍫 🖋️ 🥖🪒 💈

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oh sweet, sweet december; a final rummaging through the stack and here’s the last three books of the year, fairly promising (we all know i’m only getting through two)

see you under the mistletoe, soon 🎄

haven’t done a tag post in a long long while, tagging a few accounts to show your final select(s) for 2025 & (for the love of jaysus if you want to comment where has the year gone, just do it, please, we all know we be thinking it) 🍷

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Some books just resonate. Very subjective, I know. But Biswas was one of those books that conversed audibly, even as until now I fail to adequately articulate what has made it so appealing.

Maybe because it showed the third world, post-colonial experience so accurately. I like that it wasn’t at all preachy—it gave the petty and the grandiose equal screen time. It portrayed indolence; prejudice; indecision; idiosyncrasies; bitterness; high hopes; shattered dreams, and demonstrated that all these amount to nothing and mean the world all at once; Naipaul provided comfort and disdain in equal measure, acutely depicting that remonstrance and resignation take turns in propelling this sentient species of house builders and census-takers towards the inevitable conclusion common to all—death. And death comes whether one has fulfilled all or part of his/her dreams; one inevitably ends up deceased regardless if in the course of a lifetime, they obtained a title in fee simple in one’s name over a parcel of land, with our without improvements, mortgaged, indentured, collateralized or not.

For most people the world over, owning property is a lifelong struggle. How many people can say, after all, that they’ve always belonged to the caste of the well to do, separated from the have nots, entitled to draw from generational wealth, heirs to a fortune amassed by their forbears. The vast majority of us have to take out loans, pay amortization, work our assess of until we vanquish the mortgage. And in doing so, do we preserve our youth, do we flaunt flawless skin, do we retain our figure, do we maintain a consistently pleasant demeanor?

Do you, like me, not grow warts, distend your belly, watch as grey hairs multiply while the amount of hair dwindles in general, observe gravity generate jowls, create enemies, piss off some relations, watch savings evaporate, see our children rebel, watch the spouse grow a little bit more disinterested and distant with each passing day?

And yet we persevere. We persist, we subsist. We retreat to our own comforts, nurse our prejudices, harbor our suspicions, maintain our sarcasm, right until the day our hearts stop beating.

That is all.

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@yy21283 Yong Yee,

When you gave me this (see photos of our tryst last year), did you know that it would somehow resonate?

Were you aware of what I had gone through, taking care of a sick father?

I too, along with my mother, and our relatives, had a hospital-centered existence for a period of around 9 months.

My father had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). You know, that thing involving the Ice Bucket Challenge back in 2014. Rare condition. Affects one in every Fifty Thousand. Remains uncurable.

But this book is not about ALS at all. But it does involve a dying father, a story of migration from Hong Kong to Vancouver, lots of things about being bedridden and funerals and good-intentioned but culturally-limited relations somehow meddling and Chinese traditions and stories of grandmothers of grandmothers and mothers and fathers raising their daughters.

I am just saying, that I have had my fair share of all those ICU tales. The good and the bad, the memorable, the unforgettable, the traumatic, the depressing. Those close calls with death, scenes that I’d rather but could never forget. Some are life-affirming.

Fung was unswervingly straight and transparent. What you see is what you get. It isn’t layered, but there is depth. A profound takeaway of mine: why not live happily? Life is fleeting. Let us make the most of what we have.

Let’s say what we must say, and do what we must do.

Life continues.

This is officially my quickest read of all time, litfic (novel) category. Exactly just an hour and twenty minutes. The writing was sparse, quiet, easy. It wasn’t a demanding read. It was heartfelt. It reminded me of Zauner’s Crying in H Mart a lot. But those two couldn’t be any closer when it comes to style. Zauner wants to go grab comfort Korean food and cry all day and she never wants to forget. Pik-Shuen wants to go home from the hospital, carry her experience with her, and write her second novel. Both had their respective support systems. One came out smiling, one was less whole.

In honor of this beautiful book we had Cantonese for lunch today. Did you know Hong Kong is my most favorite city in the world? I’ll see you soon. Thank you for this gift.

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🧺Sunday Book Picnic🧺

Happy Sunday, any one up for a picnic? At the beginning of summer @literarylife_of_linz tagged me in this fun challenge. There aren't so many weekends left to enjoy a picnic, so I took the opportunity to get it done.

WHEN? SUMMER⛱️
WHERE? On a SUNNY ISLAND🏝 at The LAKE HOUSE🏡
WEATHER? A Thousand SPLENDID SUNS 🌞x1000
WHAT? BUTTER 🧈 HONEY🍯 PIG 🐷 BREAD 🍞
WHO'S INVITED? The SEVEN HUSBANDS of Evelyn Hugo 🤵🏼🤵🤵🏻🤵🏾🤵‍♂️🤵🏻‍♂️🤵🏼‍♂️
WHAT DIO YOU HEAR? The ROYALS Next Door👸🤴

🔖Tagging a few friends to show us your bookish picnic, everyone welcome!

I enjoyed dusting off my picnic basket and using it as prop for my photoshoot. Once I was done, I enjoyed my snack, but I didn't open the wine😁. FYI, grass doesn't make the most stable surface for cups, wine bottles, and books🤪.

#picnicstack #picnicbookstackchallenge #BookishChallenge #bookishfun #bookishscavengerhunt #booksandpicnics #sundayfunday #summerbookfun #physicalbooks #tbrbooks

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🥃 Our Man in Havana (1958)

The title sort of gives it away (espionage). But then it is Greene and not Ian Fleming or John Le Carré so expect that signature blend of dry wit and earnestness and religion, producing a protagonist so unremarkable and yet against all odds so triumphant that you can’t help but root for him all the time. Half Ishiguro, half Rushdie, that sort of thing. Well, Greene is the master of British sensibility, after all.

It is the Cold War. Wormold, an Englishman through and through, runs the Havana branch office of a vacuum cleaner firm. Sales aren’t top notch, he gets by, but his convent-educated daughter Milly is becoming worldly and extravagant, horses and jewelry and all. MI6 contacts Wormold to set up a network in Cuba. He obliges—he needs the dough, expense accounts, reimbursements and allowances, the works. But Wormold is no spy; he’s actually an introvert. He ends up fabricating his reports, making up fictitious sub-agents (similar to ghost employees; he gets to pocket the cash), and sends plans of secret weapons to London by copying the vacuum cleaner schematics from the product manual. Home office is impressed. They soon send him a trained Secret Service agent as his Secretary, with a radio-telegram operator to boot. Meanwhile Wormold is slowly able to raise funds for Milly’s education in Switzerland. But then shit hits the fan, the cover is blown, he is revealed as a fraud and Russians, Germans, local police, even the Americans, they go after him. Real people he identified as his “agents” without their consent get “hit”, and Wormold falls for his Secretary, with Milly’s consent and encouragement, of course. London is unhappy about the best and the brightest in charge of national security being taken for a ride by a middle-aged vacuum salesman. They summon him home, but to keep him from saying a word or two to the press about his experience in Cuba, he is kept on retainer and is set to receive an OBE. All because a father wanted to have a college fund...

And did you know that all these preceded the Cuban Missile Crisis by a couple of years? Greene, a former M16 agent himself, may had been on to something.

Smart entertainment.

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This is a thriller, so there could be no spoilers. Otherwise I’m being vain and self-indulgent and cruel.

Just saying it is “a thriller” though is a massive understatement. It is one of the greatest thrillers of all time. It probably is the greatest spy novel ever made.

It has a brain. It has a spirit. More and most important, it has a soul. It has a heart.

The brain is that everyone is scheming and devious, with a goal in mind. The spirit is the motivation—national security, the cause, the ideology, the need, or what not. The soul is that it hits all thematic requirements for a novel to be considered a spy thriller (and not a detective novel or suspense-mystery or horror).

The heart? That’s for you to find out. This is as far as I can go while keeping true to my promise not to spoil anything for you (though I really would love to discuss this with you after you’ve experienced it).

Imho it is the pinnacle of the genre — it manages to wed the thrilling with the philosophical. Le Carré delivers a captivating, intense story about the biggest mission yet of a tired, old British Intelligence Service bureau chief whilst drawing the philosophical motivations of the personalities he encounters. My usual problem with spy stories is that they almost always try, more or less, to be either cool or melodramatic; nationalistic or coldhearted. This work is great because it is different: it is none of those, and most significant, it knows what it knows—and that knowledge reveals, rather reluctantly, that there is no such thing as the morally unambiguous act; everything is a product of necessity, and that all action is justified by the result. It implies that self-preservation is the one thing that moves us along, and for those caught in the wrong side of history, even love, even loyalty, lose their inherent value in the face of expediency. Principles become subsumed as statistics.

This work fascinates me, it consumes me, it broke my heart. In the realm of spy novels, Le Carré is the undisputed king, and this work his sceptre.

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It’s that sort of book: the one you bought for the cover (and the publisher). Irresistible cover art, a title that suggests the content, and an author that’s relatively unknown but somehow since it’s an NYRB, you just sort of put your faith into it that you will be in for a surprise treat. With all these assumptions coming in as you graduate it from the TBR pile to Current Read, what could go wrong?

Except that the novel itself is nothing special. You begin to realize that halfway through the book. I mean, it’s not that it’s bad, and it’s not as if that it had been hyped (again, other than for the cover, the title, and the publisher). There is no claim here that Manchette started a movement, nor that he perfected one that he already came across. There’s no assertion that he elevated crime fiction into an art form—not even that he created the concept of the femme fatale. This story is one for pure entertainment, if you’ve got an hour or two to spare, and if you’re into that sort of writing that I somehow associate with French stereotypes — villages, citroens and renaults and train stations and rental lockers and bicycles and hedgerows and wine and caricatures for townsfolk. Even the villains fumble with their guns and tenterhooks, and people who just got sprayed in their bulging bellies with pellets from a 12-gauge shotgun talk about the inconsequential past in hurried sequences before they suddenly realize they’ve already lost copious amounts of blood until it’s time they say, “alas, you’ve killed me.”

They then stumble, fall sideways, and die.

I was really expecting more, and frankly I was underwhelmed. There’s a certain undercurrent of unintended comedy running through this killing spree—not at all grim, not at all hilarious, and not at all thrilling. Killings by a killer woman at the backwaters of France sometime in the age of disco. A good try, charge to experience. Fortunately I had two hours to spare on a quiet Saturday afternoon. Having this book wasn’t the best way to spend this short period of reprieve from all the drudgery, but am lucky it wasn’t at all fatal. Not at all.

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As a kid Batman was always my favorite superhero. As an adult he still strikes me as the most complex character to ever appear in comic books and graphic novels. He spends years and sacrifices everything to train his mind and body to perfection; he is wealthy beyond measure yet denies himself all luxuries (minus a butler). And he does all this dressed like a giant bat… This book is a philosophical exploration of ethics, identity, friendship, and politics—using examples drawn from the enigma that is Batman.

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💙Blue Book Challenge💙

Blue is my favourite colour so I loved this challenge! It's also the colour of my football team Chelsea 🔵⚽

Books featured:
🔵The Diving-Bell And The Butterfly
🔵Call Me By Your Name
🔵All The Light We Cannot See
🔵Veronika Decides To Die
🔵The Portrait Of A Lady

Thank you for the tag @onemorechapter_03
I've tagged people but no pressure, and feel free to have a go if you aren't tagged 😊

#bluestackchallenge #bookchallenges #bluebooks #bookstack #chelseafc #polaroid #bookshelves #bookstagram #bookstagramasthetic #happiness #newbooks #oldbooks #fiction #nonfiction

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@wileyylee, Here they are. First shot was cropped by Instagram settings. Little Drummer Girl is next to the blue Volkswagen. I have a signed hardback of his penultimate novel, “Agent Running in the Field”. The TTSS bookmark was whipped up back in 1982 when I bought the BBC miniseries tie-in paperback copy, with Alec Guinness on the cover. I got about 30 pages in - Who’s this friggin’ Prideaux guy! - before putting it aside for almost 40 years when I bought it in hardcover and took another crack at it, and finally, a couple of nice hardcover editions. I think I have just about all of his work that I want to read. The Constant Gardener may be one of the few that’s missing. Regardless, these should keep me busy. #johnlecarré #spyfiction #readmorebooks

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E S S E N T I A L S with @wileyylee

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💧Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue💧

I was tagged by @onemorechapter_03 💙

I've tagged a few people, no pressure though!

Books featured:

💧Something Old: Little Women Wedded - from the 1940s.

💧Something New: Three Rooms a 2021 print.

💧Something Borrowed: Wuthering Heights - borrowed from mum.

💧Something Blue: The Best Of Lewis Carroll, my childhood favourite.

#bookchallenge #somethingold #somethingnew #somethingborrowed #somethingblue #littlewomen #threerooms #wutheringheights #lewiscarroll #bookstagram #matilda #bookishcommunity #bookstack #bookstagramaesthetic

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