# Laijie Ji > Software developer in Valencia, working through a master's in AI at the UPV. This site is his journal (book reviews and the occasional essay), his photographs, and a few projects. --- # A Year Since Munich https://laijie.dev/blog/a-year-since-munich/ 2026-09-30 ## A talk I went to out of curiosity A year ago today I landed in Munich to start an Erasmus semester at the TUM. Sure it was something nobody had asked me to do, and funny enough, a few months before that I was not even sure I really wanted to. It started with the usual talk our university gives about exchange programmes. I went mostly out of curiosity with some colleagues, without any real plan to apply for anything. They went through the list of options, and Erasmus was among them. Over the next few days, maybe just because of curiosity, the idea kept coming back until I ended up asking myself the simplest version of the question: why not try it? I did not know where to go, though. Going through the list of universities, only two of them stood out: Munich and Lausanne. I was fairly sure Lausanne was out of reach, so in my head it came down to Munich or nothing. Meaning that if Munich worked out, it was fine. If not, I would stay in Valencia and nothing would be lost. They released the results, and I saw that I had been accepted into Munich, and from then on everything started moving. There was a visa to get, with all the paperwork that comes with it(I still remember myself wondering how the blocked account worked), the usual bureaucracy of these exchanges, and flights. The hardest part was the accomodation: my flatmate, a classmate from UPV who was going too, and I spent a long time searching across several websites (HousingAnywhere, WG-Gesucht, and some other sketchy ones) before we finally found a suitable one whose landlord was open to renting to foreigners(it seems like a lot of them didn't trust foreigner students). I set the flight for the 30th of September, a few days before the semester, to have some time to explore the city first. And sooner than I expected, the day finally arrived. ## Expectations, and one fear I had high expectations about the people I was going to meet: The TUM had a reputation, and I wanted to see what the students there were like-specially, to see if they were as tryhards as I thought haha-, and also explore Bavaria, which from everything I had read was famous for its beautiful nature and landscapes. The fear was the other side of the same thing. I was afraid of not being at the level of everyone else, of falling behind and having a much harder time academically than I had planned for. ## A different kind of university I studied Informatics subjects, and in the end I took four: Computer Vision, Efficient Algorithms and Data Structures, Semantics, and Applied Deep Learning for Medicine, this last one being a practical course, a concept I hadn't seen before at my university. It was the year that counted as my fourth year of the Bachelor's degree, from October to February. The first difference I encountered was the freedom they give to students at the time of choosing the study load. You build your own semester from the courses you like, as long as you meet the credit requirements and don't do anything crazy, and some of those courses had enormous groups. The second one took me longer to notice, but it mattered more. Every ECTS credit assumes a number of hours of work at home, and at UPV you can often get by doing the minimum. At the TUM you cannot. In many UPV courses we solve exercises together in class, while at TUM you were expected to arrive at the session with every exercise already done, the session was only aimed for discussing the solutions each one had reached. The course I enjoyed the most was Applied Deep Learning for Medicine, mainly because it was a practical course rather than a lecture. It was a real project, at a real scale, and it was the first time I saw what I had been studying in other subjects actually being applied. At UPV most course projects are small and manageable. On the other hand, this one took us months: we used the university's cluster to train Stable Diffusion and Latent Diffusion models, generated images, and trained a classifier with ConvNeXt. I wish there were more universities offering this kind of courses, the ones that are genuinely hands-on. As a funny anecdote, there was a guy that was hoarding all the resources every single day, all the *slurm* jobs we pushed were left in an already long queue, to wait for this guy's experiments to finish. ## The presentation If I had to keep one moment from the whole semester, it would be the day we presented the projects of that practical course. It was the end point of months of work, the PhD students who had been supervising the course gave us their feedback. Hearing people who do this for a living(well, I am pretty sure they don't get paid too well) go through what we had built, what worked and what they would question, was one of the most interesting parts of the whole experience. It was the closest I had come to seeing what research in this field actually looks like from the inside. ## The exams I failed The same semester, I failed some exams. The reason is not complicated. I did not put in the effort it needed. Between wanting to see more of Munich and everything that was going on around me, and working at the same time, I never found the hours to study and review the way I should have. Therefore, when the exams came, there was simply too much to fit in my head in too little time, and I didn't make it. The fear I arrived with was about not being good enough. What actually happened was simpler than that: I did not put in the hours. It frustrated me a bit at first, but with time I accepted it. At the end, I believe it was more satisfying to spend my time on discovering more about this region and the people who had come from all sorts of places from the world. What I find hard to separate, looking back, is that the thing that cost me those exams is also most of what I remember. The weekends out, the lakes, the walks through a city I did not know yet. I would not trade those for nothing at all. ## Ordinary days For the first three days we stayed in a hotel, until we could move into the flat, and we spent them walking around: Marienplatz, the Englischer Garten, Starnberger See. I knew a bit of German from a course I had taken in my second year, but everyone in Munich speaks English perfectly well, so communicating was never a problem. After that, the days became quiet and fairly routine. Depending on the day, I would take the S-Bahn to Marienplatz and then the U-Bahn to class. In the afternoon I did my shift for work, at the time with EBHealth3, either sitting at some table in the faculty or back at home. I spent time with other Erasmus students, but most of it was with my flatmate. In the building that became our base at the TUM, there was always an NB Miata parked outside, and more than once I stopped just to look at it. Munich is full of cars I had only ever seen in pictures, and somewhere in those months I stopped seeing cars as just a way of getting from point A to point B. That shift ended up somewhere [I did not expect](/blog/a-miata-of-my-own). On weekends I tried to walk somewhere new. My favourite place in the city was, and still is, the Englischer Garten. The Monopteros monument had very nice views, and it had a charm that attracted you whenever you passed next to it. Funny enough, it was the place I immediately went to after finishing the last exam I had. We sat there, enjoying the first strong rays of sun after the cold winter, while we were starting to feel better emotionally. ## Outside the city Outside Munich I went to Starnberger See, to Schliersee and from there on to Tegernsee, and later, with the exams over, to [Herzogstand and Eibsee](/photography/hiking-bavaria). The two that stayed with me are Starnberger See, for how beautiful and calm it is, and Herzogstand, for the views, and because it was the first real hike of that kind I had ever done. I also think it woke something up that has not gone back to sleep. A few months after coming home, one Sunday, I booked a trip to [Trieste](/photography/trieste) for the next day, on my own and without much of a plan. I do not think I would have done that before Munich. ## A year later What I learned, mostly, is that I underestimated the whole thing before that talk. Sometimes the riskier decisions, the ones you make without being sure how they will turn out, end up being the ones that give you the most, or at least the ones that change you and the way you see things the most. If I could say something to myself on the 30th of September of 2025, it would be to get out of Munich more, even more than I did, and to enjoy every trip as much as possible. But also not to lose sight of the academic side. And I would do it again, without thinking twice. --- # Book Review - To Live https://laijie.dev/blog/book-to-live/ 2026-09-30 · To Live by Yu Hua · rated 4/5 ## The story Xu Fugui is the spoiled son of a landowning family in rural China, and when we meet him in his youth he is busy gambling away everything his family has, the house and the land included. That is only the beginning. From there the novel follows him through several decades of the last century: the civil war, the arrival of the Communists, the collectivisation of the countryside, the famine, the Cultural Revolution. We hear all of it from Fugui himself, now an old man ploughing a field with an old ox, telling his life to a young man who travels the villages collecting folk songs. And what he has to tell is, one after another, the losses of his family. ## A new Kindle and four metro rides I picked this one because I wanted to read more Chinese authors, and what caught my attention was that it was said to be full of the rural life of China in the last century. That is the kind of life my grandparents' generation belongs to, and I was curious to see some version of it on the page. Beyond what you learn in history class and general knowledge, I did not know much about the period. It was also the first book on a Kindle I had just bought on a good discount. I read the Seix Barral edition, where the title becomes *¡Vivir!*, and it took me two days, or more precisely four sittings: two metro rides from home to work and two from university back home. It is not a long book, and it does not need to be. ## Fugui, before and after At first I could not stand Fugui. There is something hard to forgive in the way he throws away, night after night at the gambling table, everything his family had worked for. But the change starts early. From the moment his wife Jiazhen is taken back to her father's house, he begins to reconsider, and slowly he turns into a different person, one who does everything he can to keep his family alive, because they are all he has left and the only reason he gets up each morning. I do not think the point is to forgive him. It is to understand him. He grew up with every comfort, and that made him arrogant. When the harshness of life finally opened his eyes, he regretted all of it, and to me that regret matters more than anything he did before. ## The homecoming If I had to keep one scene, it would be the moment Fugui finally makes it back home. He has been away for a long time, and in that time the children have had to contribute whatever they could to keep the family going, at an age when nobody should have to. And Fengxia, his daughter, has been left in the condition she will carry for the rest of her life. That scene broke my heart. It is also the moment you understand that this will not be the only misfortune this family goes through. The poor peasants in those villages did not live comfortably. They lived off breaking their backs from sunrise to sunset, with their children working alongside them from a very young age. And that is not entirely a thing of the past: you can still see it in many Chinese families who emigrated, where the children help in the family business from very early on. The scene made me realise how raw life was for these people, and for their parents before them. ## Youqing's shoes The death that was hardest for me to swallow was Youqing's. He was a fighter from the very beginning, a boy who looked after his animals and tried never to cause his family any trouble. The detail I remember best: he ran to school barefoot, carrying his shoes in his hand, and only put them on when he arrived, so as not to wear out the pair his mother had made him. He was not the brightest in his class, but he had a great deal of emotional intelligence, and an innocence that made him feel like a small light in the middle of the book. He did not deserve to die like that, and the circumstances of his death make it even more terrible. ## Too much, or just enough I will admit that the amount of misfortune can feel exaggerated. This family has barely recovered from one blow when the next one is already landing. But the more I thought about it, the less exaggerated it seemed. The deaths in this book are not isolated tragedies; in that period, people died in such numbers that you could not even keep count. It was the day to day. And considering the conditions so many people still live in today, what happens to Fugui's family does not feel very far from the reality some families lived through back then. What reads as excess is, I think, the most honest thing about the book. The frame helps with this too. You know Fugui survives, because he is the one telling the story, so you assume the family made it through as well. Only slowly do you realise that it did not. ## Not a single happy day There is one passage I have not been able to shake. When Jiazhen dies, Fugui looks back over everything that has happened in his life, and says: > Thinking about that, the tears came to my eyes again. How quickly the time had gone! From the day she married me, Jiazhen never had a single happy day. And in the blink of an eye, her time to go had already come. *(My translation from the Spanish edition.)* It is a thought Fugui has many times throughout the book, that Jiazhen never had a single happy day with him. And yet, for all the years she spent at his side, she never stopped smiling. She traded a comfortable life for one of constant suffering, but she was with the man she loved, even though that man at times mistreated her. It made me realise that love in that period was different from the modern kind. Most people today would have walked away after the beating he gave her when she came to find him at the gambling table, and even more so once he had lost everything. Jiazhen came back, some time after her father took her away. I do not know whether it was love, the way society saw divorce back then, or something else. But through the whole book, whatever came, the two of them never stopped fighting side by side. ## Not heroic, just alive What surprised me most is how they carry all of it. I reviewed [*The Old Man and the Sea*](/blog/book-the-old-man-and-the-sea) not long ago, and Santiago's endurance is almost epic, one man refusing to give in to something far bigger than him. Fugui's family does not endure like that. There is nothing heroic in how they go on. It is more as if they had already accepted it, as if they were saying: > We are not well, but life is like this. We keep going until we can no longer stand. They have not died, so they are still alive, and if they are still alive they have to keep living. That, as far as I can tell, is what the title means. The prose works the same way. It is incredibly simple, with no complicated structures or grand words, and it is very easy to read. Even the deaths are told almost plainly. And still, you cannot help building a vivid image of everything that happens. ## Final thoughts *To Live* gave me a different perspective from the ones I found in [*The Stranger*](/blog/book-the-stranger) or [*The Death of Ivan Ilyich*](/blog/book-the-death-of-ivan-ilyich). With Ivan Ilyich the situation is the exact economic opposite, a comfortable official instead of a ruined peasant, but both books capture an important part of the society of their time. What I take away from it is how lucky we are to live with the comforts we have today. The generations before us went through extremely hard things, pushed by the gap between rich and poor, by the structure of society, and by an economy where you grew what you ate or you went hungry. It makes you appreciate what you enjoy now, knowing that many people fought, and many others died, so that the ones who came after could afford these "luxuries". --- # Book Review - The Sorrows of Young Werther https://laijie.dev/blog/book-the-sorrows-of-young-werther/ 2026-08-26 · The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · rated 4.5/5 ## The story A young man named Werther leaves the city and settles in a small country town, and almost everything we know of him arrives in the letters he writes to his friend Wilhelm - my Spanish edition is an old translation that turns him into Guillermo, and Lotte into Carlota, which I ended up finding charming. At a country dance he meets Lotte, a young woman raising her many little siblings after their mother's death, and he falls for her completely, in the total way he does everything. She is engaged to Albert, a kind and sensible man. Werther knows it from the start, and he stays anyway. What follows is probably the most famous ending in European literature, so I will not tiptoe around it: the book closes with Werther's suicide. ## The debate of the 12th of August If I had to keep one scene, it is this one. Werther visits Albert, picks up one of his pistols, and the talk drifts into suicide. Albert says what most sensible people said then and say now: that it is weakness, that it is easier to die than to bear a painful life with courage. Werther answers with an analogy that has not aged a day: nobody calls a man a coward for dying of a fever, so why call him one when the sickness is in the soul? Human nature has its limits, he says; suffering past a certain point destroys a person exactly the way an illness does. I side with Werther here, and not because the book asks me to. You cannot judge what you have not lived. Every person is a world, and there is no instrument for measuring someone else's suffering; Albert's tidy verdict is delivered from a settled life, by a man who has never had to test his own theory. But the scene has a second floor that I only saw afterwards: neither of them is really arguing philosophy. Each one, without knowing it, is describing his own destiny - Albert the resolved life he will go on living, Werther the door he will eventually use. Nearly three months earlier, in the letter of the 22nd of May, he had already written it down, talking about the man who knows > that he can quit his prison whenever he likes. The permission was signed long before the debate. The conversation with Albert only read it aloud. And the pistols are the same ones: at the end of the book Werther borrows them from Albert with the excuse of a journey, and it is Lotte's own hands that give them over. ## A being of light On my shelf this book sits next to *No Longer Human*, *The Stranger* and *Notes from the Underground*, and it belongs there: another young man who does not fit the world he was given. But the resemblance ends at the door, because those narrators are sombre, and Werther is almost a being of light. He writes like a poet even when he is only telling Wilhelm about his day. He drinks the landscape, adores children, finds a whole world inside himself, and describes the energy he takes from nature with a passion that none of those other books contain. Reading Dazai you watch a man hide from life; reading Werther you watch a man love it too much to accept it in halves. The letters I keep going back to are from that early, luminous stretch. On the 22nd of May he looks at respectable adults and sees big children, stumbling through the world without knowing where they come from or where they are going, led by sweets and punishments, and nobody wants to admit it. On the 26th he takes on rules themselves: a man formed by rules will never produce anything senseless or bad, he concedes, but never anything remarkable either, because every rule prunes the shoots before they can grow. He has a point, and so does the other side: conventions limit the individual, and they are also what lets us live together at all. It is a debate as old as living in towns, and the book states it better than most philosophy does. ## The same flame Here is what I ended up believing about Werther: his virtue and his flaw are the same thing. What makes him luminous - feeling everything without a filter, at full volume - is exactly what destroys him. Wilhelm warns him more than once to clear his head and stop chasing a woman who is already promised. Werther even half-obeys: he takes the diplomatic post he had been postponing until he had no other choice, lasts a while, and comes straight back to the couple. A more practical man would have stayed away; a more practical man, in some other life, might even have been the one standing beside Lotte instead of Albert. But a more practical Werther would never have written these letters. You cannot feel a sunset that hard and expect to feel a rejection softly. I cannot wish the intensity away without losing the poet, and neither could he. ## Lotte's part Was it love? Partly, I think, and partly an obsession he built himself. Everyone around him says the obvious thing - the world is full of people still to meet, someone else will set him alight the same way - and near the end even Lotte says it to him. He cannot hear it, because the obsession has long since stopped being about her and become the room he lives in. And yet honesty requires one more sentence: Lotte is not weightless in this story. She was engaged from the first day, she saw perfectly well what was happening to him, and she did not truly push him away until practically the end. I do not blame her - she was young, and being adored is warm - but the tragedy has more than one author. ## The editor steps in The last stretch of the book does something I had never seen before. The letters stop, and a voice calling itself the editor takes over, reconstructing Werther's final weeks from notes and testimony. When I saw the heading I honestly thought for a moment that the actual publisher was talking. Then you realise it is part of the work itself, and the change of temperature is the point: after two hundred pages inside Werther's head, someone describes him coldly from outside, down to the workmen carrying the coffin and the absence of any priest. After all that fire, the book ends in plain administrative frost, and it is devastating. ## The fever that left the book What I did not know while reading is what this little book did to the world. Goethe wrote it in 1774, at twenty-four, in a matter of weeks, out of his own hopeless love for a woman engaged to his friend - writing it was his exit, the door he opened instead of Werther's. The novel became Europe's first modern bestseller: young men dressed in Werther's blue coat and yellow waistcoat, there was Werther merchandise and Werther pilgrimages, and Napoleon told Goethe he had read it seven times and carried it on his campaign in Egypt. And there was a darker echo: reports of young readers taking their own lives with the book nearby, enough for it to be banned in Leipzig, Denmark and Italy. Two centuries later, in 1974, the sociologist David Phillips showed statistically that widely publicised suicides are followed by a rise in imitations, and he named the phenomenon the Werther effect. It is the reason newspapers today follow strict guidelines when they report a suicide. A stack of letters from 1774 ended up founding a concept modern sociology still uses, which is more afterlife than almost any novel gets. ## Final thoughts The reason this book has not aged is that it walks through stations almost everyone passes: the first love that feels like the only love that will ever exist, the advice of friends you cannot hear, the debate between what the soul wants and what life demands. I could not help feeling recognised in Werther's obsession. All of us have loved someone that way once (whether it was returned or not is nobody's business), and the lesson I take is to learn what Werther could not: that kind of total surrender does more damage than we imagine, and there is always more life, and more people, than the one person we cannot have. His mistake was never the loving; it was refusing every exit that life kept politely offering him. I read it in a single day, a stretch in the morning and another in the afternoon, and it never once felt like homework. The people I would press it on are the ones who have just arrived at adulthood, because that is the only age at which you read it from the inside, with Werther. Ten years later you will read it from Albert's chair, or Wilhelm's, and it will be a different book, probably a wiser one, certainly a colder one. Both readings are worth having, but the first is only possible once, and it is the one Goethe wrote the book for. --- # Book Review - She and Her Cat https://laijie.dev/blog/book-she-and-her-cat/ 2026-08-25 · She and Her Cat by Makoto Shinkai, Naruki Nagakawa · rated 4/5 ## The story A young woman named Miyu lives alone in the city, and her cat, Chobi, tells us about her days: the commute, the empty flat, the small weather of an ordinary life. From that little seed the book grows four linked stories, four women and four cats, each chapter alternating between the human voice and the feline one. There is Reina, who cannot work up the courage to sit her fine-arts entrance exams, and her cat Mimi; there is Aoi, who has shut herself away after the death of her best friend, and Cookie, the cat who ends up in her hands; and there is Shino, in the quietest season of her life, with her old black cat Kuro. The lives brush against one another as the seasons turn, mostly without the women ever knowing, and the cats are the ones carrying the connections. ## The scene at the door There is a scene in which Aoi decides to leave the house. She has been shut inside for a long while by then, caught between the desire to return to the world and the fear of losing anyone else, and her reasons are the heaviest in the book. Nobody argues her out of that room. There is no friend with the right words, no speech, no revelation. What finally gets her out is Cookie, doing the only things a cat knows how to do. It is the best page in the book. And everything I want to say about the book, the thing it does brilliantly and the one thing it struggles with, comes out of that single page. ## A five-minute film, and a whole book to fill I knew Makoto Shinkai's films already, which is the only reason this book caught my eye on a bookshop table, one day when a friend and I were killing time before lunch. What I did not know then, and the cover does not make obvious, is where it actually comes from. *She and Her Cat* is not a novel by Shinkai: it is a novelisation, written by Naruki Nagakawa from Shinkai's material, and the original is a five-minute short film from 1999, in which a cat narrates his life with the girl who took him in. That is the whole inheritance. Five minutes of voice-over and afternoon light. So Nagakawa's problem was not artistic but arithmetic: how do you turn five minutes into a book? His answer was to multiply the structure by four. Keep Miyu and Chobi, then add three more women, three more cats, three more wounds, and let the chapters pass the voice back and forth between owner and animal. The entire novel stands or falls on that one decision, and the curious thing is that it does both at once. ## The cat as the camera If you know *5 Centimeters per Second* or *The Garden of Words*, you know Shinkai's method: the characters never say what they feel. The framing says it, the light says it, a passing train says it. He has spent over twenty years making films about people who cannot put themselves into words. Prose has no camera, and the real discovery of this novel is what it puts in the camera's place: the cat. The cat sees what the woman cannot say and says it for her, plainly, without analysis, and without any character having to deliver the explanatory speech that would ruin the scene. That is why the page at Aoi's door works. Nobody explains to Aoi what is happening to her; it is shown to her by an animal that does not even know it is showing anything. This is narrative economy of the first order, and it is what lifts the book above the shelf of comforting Japanese fiction where it usually sits. ## Fifty pages per wound But the same arithmetic has a cost. Four stories in two hundred pages works out to roughly fifty pages each: fifty pages to set up a wound, bring in a cat, and close. It is not quite enough, and so each wound has to arrive already formed. You feel it most with Aoi herself. Her friend's death, the engine of her whole chapter, appears practically out of nowhere: no build-up, no accumulated weight, just a fact the text needs you to accept so that the later scene can move you. Compare that with what Shinkai does on film, where a single separation can fill the entire movie. Here, grief is a premise rather than a process. And there is a gentler objection, one that is harder to voice: the cat protects the book a little. If you point out that a kitten cannot simply unlock a person paralysed by guilt, you feel as though you are arguing with the kitten itself. I say this with real affection, because I did like the book. But the comfort it offers arrives, at times, a little before it has been earned. ## The flaw and the virtue The two are the same mechanism, though. The compression that short-changes Aoi's grief is what makes the scene at her door shine. Fifty pages leave no room to explain anything, and so the story cannot talk its way to the ending it wants. > With no room left to explain, the story can only act, and acting is the only thing a cat knows how to do. A cat cannot deliver a speech about grief, cannot reason you back into the world, cannot promise that everything will be all right. It can only scratch at the door and wait for you on the other side of it. The book's weakness and the book's best page are one thing, seen from its two sides, and there is no version of the book that has one without the other. ## Final thoughts For all my nitpicking, this is not a sad book, and it never felt heavy. What it left me with is simpler: the understanding that sometimes the best companion is not a human one. The four stories quietly answer each other, a cat slipping into a story where the humans never quite meet, and that thread is a real pleasure to follow. The whole thing bends, always, towards comfort. That is also the honest way to recommend it. Give it to anyone who has seen Shinkai's films and wants to watch his method working without a single image to hold it up, to anyone who loves cats, and to anyone who wants a short, warm book for a single day. Just know what you are picking up: nothing here resists you; everything consoles. As for me: I am allergic to cats. I love them, my friends have them, and if I fuss over one too long my eyes start to itch. I will probably never live with one. A book like this is about the closest I will get to sharing a room with a cat, and for one afternoon, it was more than enough. --- # Book Review - The City and Its Uncertain Walls https://laijie.dev/blog/book-the-city-and-its-uncertain-walls/ 2026-08-24 · The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami · rated 4/5 ## The story At seventeen, the narrator falls in love with a girl who tells him a strange thing: that the person he knows is only a stand-in, and that her real self lives in a far-off town surrounded by a high, shifting wall. Together, in long conversations, they build that town between them, and then one day she simply vanishes. The rest of the novel follows him across the years that grow around that absence: into the walled town itself, where he must leave his shadow at the gate, and where he spends his evenings reading old dreams in a library, beside a girl who does not remember him; and back in this world, into middle age, where he quits his Tokyo job to run a small library in a mountain town, and meets an old librarian in a beret and a skirt who turns out to be rather more than he seems, and a silent boy in a Yellow Submarine parka who knows about the walled town without ever having been told. ## A love story that isn't one What I most want to say about this book is that it wears the clothes of a love story, and it is not one. What it really tells is the slow liberation of a man from the belief that he would never again find anything like the love he lost at seventeen. That is the whole journey, and it takes him decades. Murakami roots it in first love on purpose, I think. It can happen at any age, but that teenage love is the one so many of us mythologise, probably because it is the first, and so it feels like the most intense thing that will ever happen to us. The book's argument is that we cannot hold on to that love eternally, because there is far more left to live, far more people still to meet, and love can arrive again from anywhere at all, even somewhere as unremarkable as a small coffee shop in a mountain town. The book knows how absurd the spell is, too, and lets one wink of humour through. When the woman from that very coffee shop asks about the girl from his past - *but she must have been a wonderful person, right?* - he answers: *Was she? Who was it who said loving someone is like having a mental illness that's not covered by health insurance?* She laughs quietly. So did I. ## The town within the walls I will be honest: at first the town felt strange to me, and I could not tell what half of it was for. Slowly I realised it was not supposed to all make sense. The town is something our minds build out of our own experiences and thoughts, and you read it the way you would walk through someone's memory, accepting what you find there. What I ended up feeling is that the town is a refuge that turns into a prison if you stay. Inside the walls you are calm. There is a routine, a purpose, nothing to worry about, and the noise of the world cannot reach you. But it is the calm of a sealed room, and if you keep living in there, tending an old memory while your self out in the real world goes unwatched, it becomes genuinely dangerous. The wall does not hold you in; your own comfort does. Where *Kafka on the Shore* let the magic pour into the real world, this book does the opposite: it builds a sealed world you can retreat into, and then asks, very gently, when you are planning to come back out. ## Mr Koyasu, a ghost who teaches you to live The heart of the middle of the book, and my favourite presence in it, is Mr Koyasu, the old librarian with the beret and the skirt. He has lived through everything the narrator is feeling and far worse, having lost his little son and then his wife in the cruellest of ways, and he has come out the other side of that grief as a man who simply cannot bear to watch other people suffer. You see it in everything he does: the way he looks after Mrs Soeda, the children, the library he built as a warm room in a cold town. And so, without ever announcing it, he takes on the quiet work of guiding the narrator's spirit through the same passage he once made himself. There is an exchange between them that I have not stopped thinking about. The narrator confesses that he sometimes feels he has lost sight of himself, that he is *merely a shadow*, that he is *simply tracing an outline of myself, cleverly pretending to be me*. And Koyasu answers that the real self and the shadow are essentially two sides of the same coin, that depending on the circumstances they can change roles, and that this is precisely how people overcome troubles and survive. *It's nothing to be concerned about*, he says. *Because the person here right now is indeed you.* That is the book in miniature. The narrator of the walled town, still holding the girl, and the narrator of the real world, slowly moving ahead, have been trading places all along, depending on what he needed to survive. And it does not matter which one is "real". Both are him. We all carry those two selves, the one that still thinks about a certain person, and the one that has accepted the parting and keeps walking, and we survive by letting them take turns. Even the way Koyasu leaves is a lesson: he fades, little by little, exactly as the people around him learn to live without him. That is what a good goodbye looks like. ## The boy in the Yellow Submarine parka And then there is the boy, the strangest piece of the puzzle, and the one I am still turning over. He reads every book in the library and forgets nothing, speaks to almost no one, and has no place in the ordinary world that fits the shape of him. And somehow he knows the walled town, and knows its map without anyone ever having shown him one. The reading I have settled on is that he is the narrator's exact inverse. The narrator went to the town chasing a memory, and his task was to learn to leave. The boy belongs there, and his task was to find a way in. For him the roles are reversed: it is this world that is the shadow-life, and the town that holds his real self. He cannot reach it alone, because the town exists inside minds, so he reaches it through the narrator, and in taking over the reading of dreams he does the narrator a final kindness: he takes custody of the part of him that wanted to stay, the part still holding the girl, so that the rest of him can go home whole. Koyasu had already told him as much, long before the town gave him the proof: > Instead of wondering which is real and which is the shadow, it might be best to think how each is the vital other self to the other. The proof is the boy taking his seat at the dream-reading desk, and it releases him. There is one eerie loose thread: in one of the conversations they have down there, the boy mentions that his body might be lying in a cabin somewhere in the forest, and that it does not matter any more. It unsettled me, and I think it is meant to. It is the one moment Murakami lets the cost of full passage show: to go somewhere entirely, something must be left behind. He never resolves it, and he is right not to, because any answer would break the spell. ## On the pace of it I will not pretend the book moves quickly. The first part felt slow to me, though in fairness I was reading it in stolen moments, without the calm it asks for. *Kafka on the Shore* is the better-paced novel, and of the Murakami I have read, it still holds the crown. But the slowness here is at least partly the point: this is a book about convalescence, and convalescence does not hurry. There is also something moving in where it came from. Murakami first wrote this story as a novella in 1980, was never satisfied with it, refused to let it be reprinted, and carried it like a fishbone in his throat for forty years before rewriting it as this novel. Which means the book does exactly what it preaches: he went back to an old, unfinished thing that had been waiting inside him for decades, not to live in it again, but to finally set it down. ## Final thoughts The ending is peaceful, and it tells you almost nothing about what happens next, which is exactly right. We do not need the details, because we already know the only thing that matters: the narrator has changed, is more present in his own life, and has learned to live without her, with room, probably, for a new love. After several hundred pages of walls and shadows, that calm certainty is enough. I would recommend it to anyone fond of Murakami, though not as an introduction; start with *Kafka on the Shore* and come to this one later, when the slowness will read as intended. But it is really a book for whoever is going through what the narrator goes through: learning to let go of the memory of someone from the past. This book will not hurry you, and it will not lie to you about how long it takes. It will simply keep you company inside the walls, and then, when you are ready, quietly show you the gate. --- # Book Review - The Old Man and the Sea https://laijie.dev/blog/book-the-old-man-and-the-sea/ 2026-08-02 · The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway · rated 5/5 ## The story Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a thing, long enough that the others treat him as unlucky and the boy who used to sail with him has been sent to work a luckier boat. On the eighty-fifth day he rows out further than anyone else, alone on the open water, and hooks a marlin so big it could pull his little skiff wherever it pleased. What follows is a slow, exhausting contest of will between one old man and one enormous fish, far out where nobody can see it. ## Packed for Prague The trip decided this one for me. I was off to Prague with friends for a few days, I did not want to drag a doorstop across a holiday, and *The Old Man and the Sea* is small enough to live in a jacket pocket and be read in the gaps of a trip. It just turned out to be far more than a convenient size. ## Santiago, master of his craft What struck me first was Santiago himself, and how completely he knows what he is doing. This is no beginner. His calm, the way he reads every small change in the water and answers it without panic, the quiet expertise in every movement, all of it tells you he has spent a lifetime at this. And it tells you something about Hemingway too: you cannot write a fisherman this convincing unless you understand the sea yourself. More than his skill, though, it is his will that stays with you. Faced with a challenge far larger than himself, Santiago does not flinch from it. He simply sets himself to it, patient and unshakeable, and in doing so he becomes a kind of proof of how much a single person can endure when they refuse to give up. ## A worthy opponent The heart of the book, for me, is the struggle itself, and the strange respect that grows inside it. Santiago does not hate the marlin. The longer the two of them are locked together, the more he admires it, even loves it, and calls it his brother. That is how a truly great opponent works on you: instead of resenting their strength, you recognise how formidable they are, and the contest becomes something almost noble. That is why the book never feels small, even though almost nothing "happens". It reads like watching two creatures matched almost exactly, testing each other to the limit, and by the end you understand that there is no shame in a struggle like this, win or lose. The worth is in the fight, and the dignity holds even in defeat. ## When the sharks come Then, on the long way home, the sharks come. The moment they arrive is a wonderful, terrible one. You know what the eighty-four empty days before this cost him, and what the three days since have taken out of him, and just as the prize is finally his, it is torn away from him piece by piece. It is not fair. But that, in the end, is the point: nature does not deal in fairness. It is unpredictable and indifferent, and it takes what it takes. > A man can be destroyed but not defeated. Hemingway hands you the grief and the meaning in the same breath. Santiago loses the fish, but never himself. ## The boy on the shore For all that this is a story about one man alone at sea, it turns on someone who is not there for the fight at all: Manolin, the boy. He does not sail out for the great battle, and yet his presence runs through the whole of it. The bond between them has already shaped how Santiago meets his challenge; out on the water he keeps wishing the boy were with him, and that wish alone seems to steady him, as though he carried the boy's faith along with his lines. It could so easily have tipped into a forced "power of friendship" note, but Hemingway keeps it restrained and true. It is just a boy who believes in an old man, and it matters more than it has any right to. ## Simple, and all the stronger for it A word on how it reads, because it surprised me. The prose is astonishingly simple, plain and direct and fast, with none of the ornament you might expect from a great classic. And it needs none. Anyone could pick this up and understand exactly what it is saying. The bareness is not a shortcoming; it is the whole point, the same lean honesty that Santiago himself lives by. ## Final thoughts *The Old Man and the Sea* is a small book about patience, about practising something until it becomes mastery, and about the quiet truth that the greatest challenges tend to find the people who have spent their whole lives getting ready for them. But the thing I keep turning over is the morning after, when the skeleton is still lashed to the skiff. The other fishermen measure it at eighteen feet, the biggest thing anyone there has seen come out of the Gulf. The tourists up at the Terrace look at the same bones and take them for a shark's, and admire the tail. Nobody has any idea what it cost him: the days, the pain, the loneliness, the battle not one of them witnessed. That, to me, is the deepest thing in the book. Not every fight we win is seen, or celebrated, or even understood by the people around us. Some of the hardest things you will ever do, you will do alone, and no one will know. What Santiago leaves you with is a way to make peace with that: to enjoy the struggle for its own sake, and, when you win, to let that be enough on its own, without needing anyone's approval. In the end, the only person who has to know what you are capable of is you. --- # A Miata of My Own https://laijie.dev/blog/a-miata-of-my-own/ 2026-07-16 The garage 209,000KM Mazda MX-5 · ND · 2015 · Soul Red · 1.5 Skyactiv-G · 6-speed manual ## Not the fastest car in the room I first came across the Mazda MX-5 a couple of years ago, in its original NA shape, all round headlights and soft edges, and I remember thinking it was a genuinely cute, interesting little thing. Nothing more than that at the time. Then I spent a while in Munich, on Erasmus, surrounded by cars I had only ever seen in pictures: Porsches, Lamborghinis, the sort of BMWs you hear before you see them. And somewhere in all that metal, something in me quietly shifted, though not in the direction you might expect. Instead of wanting more, faster, louder, I found myself wanting less. When I came home I started swapping some of my things for simpler, more analogue ones: a physical notebook and a Lamy Safari fountain pen instead of another app, a Timex Expedition Solar on my wrist instead of a screen. And the car I kept coming back to, after all those supercars, was the smallest and most honest one of the lot. ## Why this one I had wanted a car of my own for a long time, and at first I told myself to be sensible about it. I looked at the more practical options, something with proper space and a usable boot, the kind of car you are supposed to buy. But the more honest I was, the less that held up. I would be the one driving it, nearly always on my own, and I almost never carry anything bigger than a bag. Once I admitted that, practicality dropped to the second tier, and what I actually wanted moved up to the first. And what I wanted was a Miata. Once the idea took hold it was hard to shake. It is not fast, not flashy, not the sort of thing that turns heads at a junction. It is light, simple, and built around a single idea: the driver and the road, with as little as possible in between. That was exactly what I was after. So I started scrolling the second-hand listings, not really expecting much, and then this one appeared: an ND in good condition, a fair price, freshly wearing its original Soul Red. I looked at it for a while, thought *why not*, and that was that. ## What it's like to drive The best way I can put it is that the car talks to you. You feel the road through the wheel, through the seat, through the pedals, every small thing the tyres are doing reported straight back to your hands and feet. There is nothing numb about it. My favourite way to drive is with the roof down and some music on, the wind coming in, the whole thing feeling less like operating a machine and more like moving with one. > It was never about going slowly. It was about being there for the drive. For me it was never really about speed. I keep coming back to the idea of *slow, unhurried kilometres*, but I do not mean crawling along. I mean not being in a rush to be anywhere else, letting the drive itself be the point: just me, the car, and a quiet, open road. ## The drive home If I had to keep one moment out of all of it, it would be the drive home on the day I bought it. The way back was a good mix, long stretches of motorway with the views opening up on either side, and then quieter roads with a bit of a bend to them, all of it under a slow sunset. It was the first time the car was properly mine, the first time it was just the two of us, and it already felt like the start of a long and unhurried friendship. --- # Book Review - The Death of Ivan Ilyich https://laijie.dev/blog/book-the-death-of-ivan-ilyich/ 2026-06-30 · The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy · rated 4.5/5 ## The story Ivan Ilyich is a successful high-court judge who has always done things exactly the way they are meant to be done: the proper career, the proper marriage, the proper house, the proper friends. Then a trivial injury becomes an illness that will not pass, and the life he built so carefully begins to look very different from the inside. ## A short book before a big day I picked up *The Death of Ivan Ilyich* for a simple reason: I wanted something short. My thesis defence is only a couple of weeks away, and before the days fill up with rehearsals and nerves, I wanted to close one more book, something I could actually finish in a sitting or two. Tolstoy's novella was the obvious choice, barely a hundred pages, and it had been waiting on my shelf for a while. What I did not expect was how a book that short would follow me around for the rest of the week. There is something almost unfair about reading a story like this one right before a milestone that is supposed to prove you are doing life *right*. ## A life lived comme il faut It does not take long to understand what kind of man Ivan Ilyich is. Tolstoy reaches twice for the same French phrase, *comme il faut*, as it should be, proper, correct, and when he is not using the French he is using its plainer cousins, "decorous" and "propriety", over and over. Everything in Ivan's life is *comme il faut*. His career, his marriage, his furniture, his friendships, all of it chosen not because he wanted it, but because it was the done thing, the respectable thing, the path a man of his standing was expected to walk. And he never strays from it. He never does anything that surprises anyone, never makes a choice that is truly his own. The closest he comes is when, worn down at home, he goes off to the capital to chase a better position, and even that is less rebellion than ambition, another rung on the same ladder everyone around him is climbing. > Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible. That single line holds the whole book. Reading it, I could not help turning the question back on myself. How much of what I do, day to day, is what I actually want, and how much is simply what I have been taught to want? Tolstoy does not ask it gently. He shows you a man who answered it wrong and never noticed until it was far too late. ## The truth, too late For most of his life, Ivan Ilyich never really suffers. Things go wrong in small, manageable ways, and he rearranges himself around them and carries on. It is only when the pain arrives, real, undeniable, final, that he is forced to stop and look at what he has built. And what he finds is unbearable. In the one stretch of his life where he truly struggles, he realises that all of it, the career, the propriety, the comfortable correctness, may have been a lie, that he might have lived his whole life the wrong way. And what is cruel is that the knowledge arrives with no time left to act on it. He screams for three days. Then, in the last two hours, his son takes his hand, and Ivan feels sorry for him, and for his wife, and the fear he had carried for months simply is not there any more. "In place of death there was light." The thing that ruined his life, that he could only ever do what was expected of him, is also what makes those two hours possible: it takes until the very end for a man like that to do one thing purely because he feels it. That, to me, is the real horror of the book. Not death itself, but reaching the end and understanding, with almost no time to spare, what would have counted. ## Vanity over virtue What sharpens all of this is the people around him. From the very first pages, where his colleagues learn of his death, their first thought is not grief but opportunity, who will be promoted now, which post opens up, what it means for their own careers. They mourn with their mouths while calculating in their heads. And they want exactly what Ivan had. The salary, the standing, the house, that house, arranged so carefully to look just like the homes of people who matter, furnished to impress rather than to be lived in. There is a bitter irony in the fact that it is while perfecting this little monument to appearances that Ivan takes the fall that quietly begins to kill him. It is a world built on vanity instead of virtue, on looks instead of character, and the saddest part is how few in it can tell the difference. Almost the only person who treats Ivan with plain, honest kindness is Gerasim, the young servant who sits with him through his worst hours, and he is the lowest-ranking figure in the entire story. ## Tolstoy without the weight Tolstoy is easier to read than I thought he would be. I had braced for something dense, the kind of Russian classic you have to fight your way through, but Tolstoy's prose here is clean and direct. The sentences never spiral the way Dostoevsky's do; even when Tolstoy goes deep into Ivan's head, the writing stays plain and moves. It reminded me of *War and Peace*. For all its length, that book never felt slow to me, the rhythm simply carries you along, and the same is true here, only pressed into a fraction of the pages. Easy to follow, easy to sink into. ## Final thoughts *The Death of Ivan Ilyich* is a small book that asks an enormous question: are you living the life you actually want, or the one you were taught to want? Tolstoy does not let you watch from a safe distance. He sits you down with a man who got every external thing right and the one internal thing that mattered wrong, and dares you not to see a little of yourself in him. It kept bringing to mind, of all things, "The Nights" by Avicii: *live a life you will remember*. That is the whole warning of the book turned into a chorus. Ivan arrives at the end with nothing he would want to remember, precisely because he was so busy living the way he was supposed to. Anyone who has suspected that they are not quite happy with where their life is heading, that they might be drifting down a path laid out by everyone except themselves, will not find this a comfortable read. But it is a short, sharp prompt to check, before the answer is fixed for good, that the life you are building is actually yours, and not just one that looks correct from the outside. --- # Book Review - No Longer Human https://laijie.dev/blog/book-no-longer-human/ 2026-05-22 · No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai · rated 4/5 ## The story Told through three notebooks left behind by a man named Ōba Yōzō, the novel traces a life lived at a strange distance from everyone else, drifting through art, women, drink and despair. Osamu Dazai finished it not long before his own death, and it reads like a confession. ## A book that had been waiting for me For a while I had wanted to step away from the desolate, post-apocalyptic worlds I usually get lost in, and read something more human, more grounded. *No Longer Human*, by Osamu Dazai, is a title that kept appearing every time I looked into the classics of Japanese literature, always surrounded by the same kind of comments: that it was sad, honest, and impossible to forget. With that reputation, and the curiosity to understand a culture I deeply admire, I finally decided to give it a go. It pulled me in more quickly than I expected, and it made me uncomfortable in the best possible way. ## A simple voice that pulls you in The first thing that surprised me was how easy it was to read. Dazai does not hide behind complicated words or long, decorated descriptions. His prose is plain, almost as if someone were talking to you quietly in an empty room, and the whole force of the book comes from that plainness. Because the language is so direct, there is nothing standing between you and his thoughts, and before you even realise it, you are no longer reading a novel; you are reading the private diary of someone who decided to tell you everything. I think that is the biggest achievement of the book: it manages to feel enormous while saying it all in the most modest way possible. ## The night at Kamakura Of everything in these notebooks, it is Tsuneko I have thought about most. Yōzō drinks in a bar with no money to pay for it, and the woman serving him lets him drink anyway. She takes him back to her apartment, and they spend the night telling each other how tired they are: her husband is in prison for swindling someone, she has almost nothing, and for once Yōzō does not seem to be performing. He calls it a night of liberation. They meet again only once. On that second night she says she cannot go on living, he agrees without arguing, and the two of them walk into the sea at Kamakura. She dies. He is pulled out alive, charged as an accomplice to her suicide, expelled from his university and cut off by his family. Two nights. That is all they had together, and it was enough for both of them to agree that neither wanted to continue. What I find hardest is not the attempt itself but the part he cannot undo: she got what they had decided on together, and he did not. ## How much of it he lived What makes *No Longer Human* hit even harder is knowing how much of it Dazai lived. Yōzō's life runs alongside his own: the alienation, the addictions, the repeated attempts to end his life. Dazai drowned himself weeks after finishing it. The part I cannot shake is the way Yōzō talks about his childhood. From a very young age, he already feels that he does not understand other people, that he is somehow separated from the rest of humanity, and that the only way to survive among others is to wear a mask, to play the clown so that nobody looks too closely. And he describes all of this, the deep fear and loneliness of a child, with an honesty and an ease that are almost unsettling, as if confessing the darkest feelings of his early years cost him nothing at all. There is no drama in the way he says it, and that is precisely what makes it so heavy. The longer I sat with that part, the less his clowning looked to me like a weakness. It is what keeps him alive, the only way he finds of staying among people he does not understand. It is also what guarantees that nobody will ever reach him, because whoever comes close is meeting the performance and not the person. He cannot drop it without being seen, and he cannot keep it without being alone. By the time he can see that clearly, he has no other way left of standing in front of another person. ## Final thoughts It would be easy to call this a depressing book and leave it there, but for me it was something else. *No Longer Human* made me think about the masks that all of us wear, in smaller doses, every single day, and about how little we truly know of what the people around us carry behind their own. I did not close it feeling sad. I closed it feeling more aware, more attentive to the quiet struggles that people rarely show. It is not a book that hands you answers, but one that changes the questions you ask yourself. Read it if you are willing to sit with something honest and uncomfortable, and to recognise a part of yourself in places you would rather not look. If you are not, it will only be a sad book. --- # Book Review - The Three-Body Problem trilogy https://laijie.dev/blog/book-three-body-problem/ 2026-04-25 · The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu · rated 5/5 ## The story As China's Cultural Revolution tears the country apart, a secret military project reaches out into space, and something answers. Decades later, a wave of impossible events and an eerie virtual-reality game pull a scientist toward a terrifying discovery: a civilisation from a chaotic three-sun system is already on its way to Earth. Cixin Liu's trilogy follows the centuries of human history that single contact sets in motion. What follows covers all three books, so there are spoilers for the sequels ahead. ## An unexpected read Along my reading journey, I have read very few sci-fi books, the ones I loved the most being the *Metro* series by Dmitry Glukhovsky and *Roadside Picnic* by the Strugatsky brothers. I came to *Metro* after finding out the games existed, though I still have not played them. I knew about *Roadside Picnic* because it was one of the books my high-school philosophy teacher recommended. Anyway, both present a desolate world where humanity has to fight to survive, with very few resources and constant hazards, which leads to a fragmented and hostile society that usually leaves you on your own against whatever comes. On the other hand, I discovered the trilogy's universe thanks to a recommendation from a friend from China. I saw that it was on sale on Apple Books, and at that moment I did not have any other physical books to be read, so I decided to give it a go. ## The scene I did not understand at first The trilogy does not open in space. It opens in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, with a physics professor named Ye Zhetai standing in front of a crowd at a struggle session, told to renounce relativity, quantum mechanics and the Big Bang. He refuses. He keeps refusing, and the crowd beats him to death while his own wife joins the denunciation and his daughter, Ye Wenjie, watches it happen. I had bought this book as science fiction. I remember reading that opening and feeling that I had picked up the wrong novel, or that someone had put the wrong chapter first. It felt arbitrary, a piece of history dropped in front of me with no connection at all to the chaotic suns and the impossible physics I had been promised. I kept waiting for the story to start. It took me a long time to realise that the story had already started, and that this was the whole of it. Everything that happens over the next three books comes out of what that afternoon does to Ye Wenjie. When she is later sent to Red Coast Base, and a signal from another world finally arrives there, she does not answer it as a scientist, and she does not answer it as a citizen of her country. She had already decided years earlier what humanity is, standing in that crowd, and everything that follows, the invasion, the Wallfacers, the centuries of fear, comes from one woman concluding that her species cannot be trusted to correct itself. That opening is not background to the story. It is what causes it. ## Philosophical thoughts and dilemmas At the beginning, I could not imagine how a string of physicists killing themselves could lead to what was going to happen in the following chapters. The concept from which the Trisolaran World comes is the mathematical problem of the Three Bodies, a system with no general solution, chaotic enough that nobody can predict where the bodies will be very far ahead. If this happened in a Solar System, instead of regular seasons, the planet swings without warning between Stable Eras and Chaotic Eras, and a civilisation can be scorched or frozen out of existence before it finishes rebuilding. Any civilisation that survives conditions like that has, by definition, learned to handle them, which is why the Trisolarans are so far ahead of us. The plot changes entirely. Instead of discovering a whole new world, we find our own under one of the biggest threats in its history: an extraterrestrial civilisation is travelling to this planet with the purpose of invading it and settling down in a more stable world. In this moment of chaos, the world decides to sort of unite, and they desperately create the Wallfacer program, where four individuals were handed enormous resources and the right to act without ever explaining themselves. These four people have to design a strategy that cannot be revealed in any way, since these Trisolarans are actually listening to everything that is happening on Earth via the Sophons, which are supercomputers the size of a proton. Three of them are broken by the Wallbreakers the enemy assigns to read them, until the fourth develops a theory that describes a dark and raw reality of the universe. After this, the human civilisation goes through a series of events over several centuries where everything was possible, from the total extermination of the civilisation, to the idea of a human exploration of the universe beyond the Solar System. Two characters, Luo Ji and Cheng Xin, went through a great many dilemmas because of the weight of what they were carrying, and I still do not know what I would have done in their place. The first had more at his disposal than almost anyone alive, yet he spent several years living in peace in an isolated house in the middle of nowhere, as if he did not care at all about the human extinction. And this raises the question: What would you do? Would you focus on the technology, or on a plan that could fool the Trisolarans, or, given the fact that the chances of survival were at the lowest, would you go wild and spend all the money to live as you wished? The second one, after being given the role of Swordholder, faced the situation in which she could either reveal the position of the enemies even if it involved revealing the location of the Earth too to provoke the extinction of both worlds, or refuse to do so and risk it all, allowing the Trisolarans to subdue human civilisation, with the hope that in the future they could manage to survive all these events. Thus, the question is: If you were going to die under the attack of someone (or something), would you prefer that you both were exterminated, or would you accept your fate and simply die? ## Da Shi The character I enjoyed the most was not one of the people carrying the species on his back. Shi Qiang, Da Shi, is a Beijing policeman with no doctorate and no patience, rude to almost everybody, a cigarette usually going, and entirely unimpressed by clever people explaining why something is impossible. Everyone around him is thinking in centuries. He is thinking about who did it and where they are now, and more often than not that is the question that actually moves things forward. ## An image of the society Throughout the trilogy, human civilisation faces events that lead to the best and the worst of it. From a civilised world where peace was omnipresent and everyone enjoyed the best of conditions, to a civilisation that was forced to relocate to a single continent and fight against each other for their own survival, the humans went through many events where they could not see a bright future, but still, they decided to be confident about it, and never lost hope, even in the last of their days. ## Final thoughts What stayed with me after closing the last page was not the scale of the events, but the contrast between the immensity of the universe and the smallness of human decisions against it. Where *Metro* and *Roadside Picnic* drop you into a world that has already collapsed, *The Three-Body Problem* makes you watch the collapse approach for centuries, and forces you to ask what you would carry with you, and what you would let go. I went into these books expecting another desolate setting to lose myself in, and walked out of it with a trilogy that questioned how I think about responsibility, time, and the weight of being alive at the wrong moment in history. --- # Book Review - Crossroads of Ravens https://laijie.dev/blog/book-crossroads-of-ravens/ 2025-10-29 · Crossroads of Ravens by Andrzej Sapkowski · rated 5/5 ## The story This is Geralt before he is even of Rivia: barely out of the witcher keep of Kaer Morhen, young, sharp, and far from sure of himself, setting out on the Path for the very first time. Andrzej Sapkowski's novel follows those early contracts and harder lessons, as a newly made monster-hunter starts to learn how little the world he bleeds for thinks of his kind. It is the earliest chapter of Geralt's life yet written in the Witcher saga. ## Back to the Path After spending so much time in the world of the Witcher, through the books and the late nights playing the games, I did not think Sapkowski could still surprise me with Geralt. *Crossroads of Ravens* proved me wrong. Instead of the weary, sharp-tongued witcher I already knew, this book hands you a much younger Geralt, barely out of Kaer Morhen, still figuring out what kind of man, or monster, the world expects him to be. ## The first steps of a witcher What I enjoyed the most was watching Geralt at the very start of his Path. He is fast and deadly, trained for a single purpose, and yet he is also naive, unsure, and far more human than the legend he would later become. Sapkowski takes his time here, showing the small contracts, the mistakes, the doubts, and the slow realisation of how the world actually treats someone like him. Seeing the origin of so many things I had taken for granted in the later stories gave the whole saga a new weight. You understand that the cold, distant Geralt was not born that way. He is shaped, slowly and painfully, by everything that happens to him on this road. ## Evil, and the refusal to choose This is also the book where the seed of Geralt's philosophy gets planted. Faced again and again with situations where there is no clean answer, where every path leads to someone getting hurt, he begins to wrestle with the idea of the lesser evil. People want him to pick a side, to decide which evil is more acceptable, and he simply refuses. He does not have the words yet. Years later he will find them, in front of a wizard who wants him to kill a girl: > Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. [...] But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all. Here he only has the refusal, and no way to explain it. It is easy to read that as stubbornness, but the more I thought about it, the more it felt like the only honest position. Calling something the lesser evil is still calling it evil, and pretending otherwise is how people make peace with terrible things. Watching a young Geralt arrive at this on his own was the emotional core of the book for me. ## The mentor Geralt did not ask for There is a second man at the centre of this book, and his name is Preston Holt. Geralt meets him at the worst moment of his young life: he has killed a deserter to protect a peasant and the man's daughter, and the reward for that is a sentence to hang. Holt is the older witcher who rides in and stops it, and then, without anyone asking him to, appoints himself Geralt's mentor. I did not trust him, and I do not think you are meant to. Holt keeps his own counsel, he steers conversations, and he uses Geralt more than once without saying so. He survived the attack on Kaer Morhen and has spent the years since hunting the men behind it, and he named his estate Rocamora, which is revenge in the Elder Speech. A man who does that is not taking in a stray out of kindness. Geralt watches him carefully for the whole novel, and he is right to. And yet Holt is the first real teacher Geralt has outside the keep. Vesemir gave him the swords, the signs, the mutations, everything a witcher needs to survive a monster. What Vesemir could not give him, because Vesemir stayed behind those walls, is the world: how people lie, how a court works, who will pay you and who will hang you instead, how to kill a man with your bare hands when you have no steel. Holt teaches him all of that, and he teaches him what it costs to live in it, and at the end he pays that cost himself rather than let Geralt pay it. ## Who the real monsters are The other thread that hit hard was the discrimination the witchers live with. They are mutants, created to protect people from the creatures that hunt those people in the dark, and their reward is to be feared, insulted, and treated as freaks. They are called monsters to their faces by the very people they bleed for. And yet, again and again, the book shows you who the real monsters are. The humans, with their fear, their greed, and their cruelty, often do far worse than anything Geralt is paid to hunt. The creatures act on instinct; people choose. That contrast, monsters by birth against monsters by choice, is where Sapkowski has always been at his best. ## Final thoughts *Crossroads of Ravens* is not a grand, world-shaking adventure, and I think that is the point. It is a quiet, sharp look at how a legend begins, and at the small moral choices that slowly turn a young man into the witcher we know. If you already love this world, it adds a layer you did not know you were missing. And if you do not, come to it for the monsters, the human kind especially. --- # Book Review - The Stranger https://laijie.dev/blog/book-the-stranger/ 2025-04-27 · The Stranger by Albert Camus · rated 4/5 ## The story "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know." From its very first line, the novel tells you exactly who Meursault is: a man so detached from his own life that even his mother's death reaches him as a fact without weight. He is an unremarkable clerk in French Algiers who drifts through his days feeling almost nothing, until he shoots a man dead on a sun-blank beach, for no reason he can name, and is dragged into a trial where he is judged less for what he did than for the way he failed to grieve. Camus wrote it as the story of a man condemned for refusing to play along. ## A life in greyscale Meursault is not cruel, not cold in the way villains are cold. He is simply tired, tired in a way that has drained the colour out of everything. To him, life makes no particular sense, one choice is much like another, and the days pass in a flat, grey light where nothing seems quite worth feeling strongly about. Love, ambition, grief: they all look like performances other people have agreed to put on, and he cannot see the point of joining in. That is why his mother's death lands the way it does. When the news reaches him, it is not a blow. It almost seems he had been ready for it long before it came, not because he did not care, but because the way he had been living, the way he already saw the world, had prepared him for it. Her death is not a wound. It is one more piece of evidence for the greyscale view he already held. ## Judged for the wrong crime What Camus does so well is turn this into a trial, and then quietly change what is on trial. On paper, Meursault is judged for what happens on that beach. In truth, he is condemned for something else entirely: for not weeping at his mother's funeral, for not behaving the way a grieving son is supposed to behave, for refusing to fake the feelings everyone expects of him. It is a sharp and uncomfortable point. Society, the book suggests, can forgive almost anything sooner than it can forgive someone who will not play the part. Meursault's real offence is his honesty, his refusal to pretend, and it is that, far more than the act itself, that seals his fate. ## The colour he had refused And yet the book does not leave you in that greyness. In his last days, as he waits in his cell, something in Meursault begins to shift. What tips it is the chaplain. He comes to Meursault's cell uninvited, keeps pressing him about God, and Meursault, who has agreed to nothing his whole life, finally loses his temper and shouts at him. It is the first thing he has ever wanted badly enough to raise his voice for. And when the shouting is over and he is emptied out, the change has already happened. > I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. For the first time he seems to sense that every moment might have been worth living, that the world he had written off as grey was never truly colourless, and that he had spent his whole life refusing to look, colourblind by his own choosing. Perhaps the colour had been there all along, and he had only chosen not to see it. It is a strange, quiet kind of hope, and it arrives far too late to save him. It lands all the harder for that. He learns how to live only once living is being taken away from him. ## Final thoughts *The Stranger* is a short book that stayed with me far longer than its length suggests. It is easy to read Meursault as simply empty, but I think that misses him. He is what a person becomes when they refuse, knowingly or not, to say more than they actually feel, and Camus follows that decision all the way to its end, and then, right at the edge, cracks it open. What I took from it was not despair, but a strange push in the other direction. If a man can discover, in his final days, that the world had been full of colour the whole time, then perhaps the real tragedy is not death, but waiting until the end to notice life. Reach for this book when the grey starts creeping in, not to sink further into it, but because somewhere in these pages is a quiet argument for looking again, while there is still time. --- # Book Review - Notes from the Underground https://laijie.dev/blog/book-notes-from-the-underground/ 2025-04-13 · Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky · rated 4.5/5 ## The story "I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man." That is how the book announces itself, in the voice of its own narrator, and those opening words already give away the whole game. What follows is the confession of a nameless retired clerk, holed up in a shabby room on the edge of St Petersburg, a man who has thought and stewed and resented his way into total isolation. Half feverish philosophy, half a bitter story from his past, it is Dostoevsky handing you a human being with nowhere left to hide. ## The hero in his own head The Underground Man, as he is usually called, is one of the strangest narrators I have ever met. He is bitter, petty, cruel, and endlessly proud, and yet he tells his story as though he were the misunderstood hero of it. That is what makes him so unsettling. He has clearly caused pain, wasted whatever gifts he had, and pushed away everyone who came near him, but in his own account the self-condemnation is itself a boast - nobody, he wants you to know, sees his own rottenness as clearly as he does. Watching someone narrate their life this way, admitting to everything and repenting of nothing, is deeply uncomfortable, and deeply human. Dostoevsky puts this man's morality and character under a spotlight and does not let you look away, and slowly you realise the antihero is not a monster from some other world. He thinks the way people actually think when they are busy protecting their pride. ## Too conscious to live The first part of the book is almost pure argument, the Underground Man ranting about free will, science, and the idea that human beings could be reduced to rational machines. He despises the notion that, if we only calculated correctly, we would always choose what is good for us. And the quiet joke of the novel is that he is living proof of his own point. > To be too conscious is an illness, a real, thorough-going illness. He believes he sees more clearly than anyone alive, and that clarity is the thing eating him. Every important decision he makes is driven by wounded pride, spite, and impulse, and he can narrate exactly why, as it happens, without being able to stop. He thinks himself into corners, talks himself out of every decent instinct, and mistakes all that endless self-analysis for wisdom. For me, that was the real warning of the book: a life run on nothing but self-analysis, with no room left for feeling or trust, does not become clearer. It rots. Overthinking is not the same as understanding, and treating logic as your only compass can quietly steer you nowhere at all. ## The chance he threw away The second half turns from philosophy to memory, and it is here the book truly wounded me. The Underground Man is offered something he has done nothing to deserve: a moment of real, unearned kindness from another person, a chance to be better, to undo a little of the harm he has caused and simply let someone in. It is the one door still open to him. And he slams it shut. Out of pride, out of shame, out of the need to feel superior even to the person holding out their hand, he chooses cruelty over connection and ruins the only redemption he was ever offered. It is agonising to read, precisely because you can see how badly he wants to reach back, and how completely his own mind will not let him. ## Final thoughts *Notes from the Underground* is not a comfortable read, and it was never meant to be. It is a portrait of what happens when a person lets bitterness and endless self-examination take the wheel, when cleverness becomes an excuse and pride becomes a prison. It shows you, in painful detail, exactly how not to steer a life. What stayed with me was not hatred for this man, but a wary sort of recognition. We all carry a little of the underground in us, the part that overthinks, that guards its pride, that talks itself out of the brave and generous thing. Dostoevsky drags that part into the light and makes you look straight at it. If you have ever caught yourself reasoning your way out of doing the right thing, this book will find you, and it will not let you off easily. --- # Book Review - Marina https://laijie.dev/blog/book-marina/ 2025-03-30 · Marina by Carlos Ruiz Zafón · rated 4.5/5 ## The story In a hazy, half-gothic Barcelona, Óscar, a boy boarding at an old school, takes to slipping away to wander the emptiest streets of the city. One afternoon he meets Marina and her father in a crumbling mansion, and soon he and Marina are following a mysterious veiled woman down into the buried secrets of the city. Carlos Ruiz Zafón wrote it for younger readers, though it rarely feels that way. ## A book from another time There are books you read once and forget, and there are books that wait for you to come back. *Marina* is the second kind. I first read it as a teenager, right at the beginning of high school, and going back to it now, years later, felt less like rereading a story and more like returning to a place I used to live in. What surprised me the most is that it held up completely. It read just as well as the first time, maybe better, because now I could see all the things my younger self had simply felt without understanding. ## The Barcelona before the Cemetery The first thing that pulls you in is the atmosphere. Zafón builds a Barcelona that is gothic, foggy, and full of secrets, a city of empty mansions, forgotten cemeteries, and shadows that seem to carry their own memory. Reading it now, you can clearly see the seeds of what would later grow into the universe of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and the Sempere bookshop. The same melancholic streets, the same feeling that every old building is hiding a story it would rather keep: it is all already here. It almost feels like a rehearsal for the world he would perfect a few years later, and yet it stands entirely well on its own. ## The black butterfly For me the book hangs on a single visit to the old cemetery. Marina takes Óscar there and they hide and watch a woman in black stop at a grave that, unlike every other one around it, carries no name. There is nothing on the marble but a symbol: a black butterfly with its wings spread. She leaves a single red rose and goes. The same butterfly turns up again later in places that have nothing to do with a cemetery, and the man who chose it never explained to anyone what it meant. The question the book opens is not really who is buried there. It is what the picture is for. Much later the butterfly gets a story of its own, and it is not the one I expected. It is a real insect, one that lives in tunnels away from the light, has a life of fourteen days, and buries itself before it dies so that something can come out of it three days after. Once you know that, the book has quietly stopped being a gothic mystery with a clue in it and turned into something much closer to magic realism. ## More than a teenage story On paper, *Marina* is teenage literature. But it reaches far beyond what that label usually promises. It was, without a doubt, better than most of what I was reading at that age. Part of that is the romance. It is a teenage love story, but not the kind that ends with everyone safe and happy. Where so many books of that time handed you a comfortable happily ever after, this one refuses. The love here feels tender and real precisely because it is fragile, because you sense early on that it will cost something. That honesty hit me hard as a teenager, and it hit me again on this reading. > Marina once told me that we only remember what never really happened. The other thing that makes it so special is the way it mixes things that should not belong together. There is the grounded realism of two young people and a father who is losing everything, and then, underneath it, there is magic, mystery, and genuine terror. Zafón blends them so naturally that you never stop to question it. The horror does not break the tenderness; it sharpens it. If the book has a limit, it is Óscar himself. He is fifteen, and he does not fully understand what he is watching; he reports things he cannot yet weigh. I used to read that as the novel being narrower than it wanted to be. Now I think it is the reason the ending works at all. You see what is happening about a page before he does, and then you have to stay with him while he gets there. That page is what makes it hurt. ## Final thoughts Coming back to *Marina* reminded me why some stories stay buried in us for years. It is melancholic, beautiful, and a little frightening, and it treats its young readers as if they were ready for sadness, which they usually are. If you only know Zafón through *The Shadow of the Wind*, this is where much of that magic was born. And if, like me, you read it long ago, do yourself a favour and go back. It will be waiting for you, exactly where you left it. --- # Book Review - Kafka on the Shore https://laijie.dev/blog/book-kafka-on-the-shore/ 2025-03-12 · Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami · rated 5/5 ## The story Two stories run alongside each other, chapter by chapter, and for a long while you have no idea what they have to do with one another. In the first, a fifteen-year-old boy who calls himself Kafka Tamura runs away from his father's house in Tokyo, chased by a dark prophecy and drawn toward a little library in a distant town. In the second, an old man named Nakata, who cannot read a single word but can hold a conversation with any cat, sets off on a journey he does not understand, following a logic entirely his own. Haruki Murakami lets the two paths bend slowly toward each other, and toward something far stranger than either of them could guess. ## My first Murakami *Kafka on the Shore* was my first real step into Japanese literature, and into Murakami, and from the opening pages I could feel I was somewhere new. The style was unlike anything I had read before, calm and matter-of-fact even when the events it described were anything but. Murakami will narrate a boy fleeing a curse and an old man chatting with a cat in exactly the same steady, unhurried voice, and somehow that evenness is what makes the strangeness go down so easily. What pulled me in straight away was the way it begins. Kafka slips out of his home and into the world almost as though in a trance, urged on by a presence he calls the boy named Crow, a kind of imaginary friend, or second self, who speaks to him whenever he needs steadying. Right from the start you are told, very quietly, that the ordinary rules are not entirely in force here, and that you should probably stop expecting them to be. And then the book splits in two, alternating between Kafka and Nakata, two lives that could not seem further apart, trusting you to hold both until it is ready to show you the thread running between them. ## Nakata, and the art of accepting your fate If Kafka is the heart of the book, Nakata is its soul. An old man left simple after a strange incident in his childhood, he moves through the world with a gentleness that stopped me every time he appeared. He does not rage against what happened to him, nor mourn the life he might otherwise have had. He simply accepts what fate has handed him and lives it fully, talking to cats, eating his eel, resting when he is tired, and finding a genuine happiness in all of it. My favourite thing in the whole book is Nakata and the cats. At first it is simply funny, an old man gravely interviewing the neighbourhood cats about one that has gone missing. But somewhere along the way it stops being a joke and starts to ache a little, because you realise the cats are not a quirk, they are his company. Nakata has almost no one, and it is plainly easier for him to sit and feel at home beside a cat than beside any person. Those conversations are where he is most himself, most gently understood, and Murakami lets them carry a tenderness I never saw coming from what had looked, initially, like a gag. And there is a small reward in it, because the man who connects more easily with cats than with people does, in the end, find a human companion of his own, and the whole thread he belongs to closes on a note of real peace. ## Oshima, and the ones who keep you moving Kafka does not survive his own story alone, and the person I came to value most along the way was Oshima, the librarian who takes him in. Oshima does far more than hide a runaway boy. He gives Kafka a safe place to be, a room, a refuge, a sheltered corner of the world where he is allowed to simply exist for a while, and then, just as importantly, keeps him moving forward when it would be far easier to stop. He is sharp, kind, and almost without judgement, the sort of steady presence that lets a frightened kid keep going. In a book so full of the uncanny, Oshima offers something rarer still: ordinary, decent, human care, without a price. ## Johnnie Walker, Colonel Sanders, and the turn into the strange And then the book simply refuses to behave. I still remember the jolt of first seeing the name Johnnie Walker turn up as an actual character, and, later, a man who looks and talks exactly like Colonel Sanders strolling in to hand out cryptic advice. Taking those familiar labels and pinning them onto figures out of some other reality made everything tilt, in the best possible way. It was so unexpected that it pushed the whole story into a stranger, headier place, and I loved it for that. Johnnie Walker is not only strange, though; he is the hinge. It is his cruelty that finally forces Nakata to snap, to do the one violent, decisive thing that turns his small, settled life into the journey the rest of the book follows. From there the impossible keeps arriving as though it were nothing at all: fish fall from the sky, a stone becomes a doorway, and Kafka finds his way into a hidden world deep in the forest, where time does not run the way it should, and where the ending waiting for him, and for Miss Saeki, the woman who runs the library, was nothing I could ever have predicted. Almost none of it is explained, and to me that felt exactly right, just enough mystery and not a drop more. It is the kind of book that leaves you wanting to grab someone by the arm and tell them the whole thing, simply because it is such a breath of fresh air, so new and so unexpected. ## The prophecy, and how far it goes Underneath the wonder, though, runs a darker current, and it is worth being honest about it. Kafka's curse is an old and heavy one, Oedipal to its core: the prophecy that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother and his sister. Murakami does not treat that as a distant, tidy symbol. He follows it, and he does not look away when it arrives. This was the part that unsettled me, especially early on. Murakami does not hold back in how explicitly he writes the sexual side of the prophecy, and I had genuinely never read anything with that level of detail before. More than once I caught myself unsure whether it all truly needed to be quite so explicit, whether the frankness was serving the story or simply testing me. I still do not have a clean answer. It is part of what makes the book brave, and also part of what makes it, in places, genuinely uncomfortable to sit with. ## The magic in the little things What I loved most, though, lives in the small things. Murakami pays an almost unreasonable amount of attention to the details most writers skip straight past: what a character cooks and eats, the record that happens to be playing, the exact feel of a room at a certain hour, the car someone drives. Nothing is too minor for him to notice, and it is precisely this patient, loving attention to the ordinary that makes everything else possible. > He never asks you to believe in the impossible. He simply describes it so carefully that you already do. That, in the end, is what I most want to highlight. Murakami takes a story rooted in a thoroughly real world and threads true magic all the way through it, and to me it lands closer to fantasy than to what people usually file under magic realism. And yet, resting on all those small, true details, the magic never once feels false. It feels like something that could be happening somewhere just out of sight. ## Final thoughts *Kafka on the Shore* was the perfect first door into Murakami, strange and gentle and completely its own thing. It asks you to let go of needing everything to add up, and rewards you with a world that feels more alive than most realistic ones, cats and prophecies and falling fish and all. I closed it a little changed, and a great deal more curious. It also turned out to be a beginning. This was the book that opened Murakami for me, and I went straight on to *Norwegian Wood* and *South of the Border, West of the Sun*, and loved them both, though in a completely different, quieter key. Of the two, *Norwegian Wood* was the one that stayed with me; *South of the Border* circles many of the same themes, but *Norwegian Wood* is where they bloom. If you have never read Murakami, and you are willing to follow a story that trusts you to sit with a mystery rather than solve it, this is exactly where I would start. ## A side note from the garage *Written a good while after I first read this, once I finally had a car of my own.* One small detail has grown on me far more than it had any right to. Oshima drives a little Mazda roadster, and on my first read I slid straight past it as background colour. Since I bought a Miata of my own, a more modern version of that very same little car, those driving scenes read completely differently. I can suddenly recall exactly how Murakami describes the feel of being behind the wheel, the smallness of the thing, the closeness of the road, and it turns out he got it just right. It is a funny kind of magic of its own, a book reaching forward to meet a version of you who did not exist yet when you read it. --- # Book Review - Metro 2035 https://laijie.dev/blog/book-metro-2035/ 2024-06-15 · Metro 2035 by Dmitry Glukhovsky · rated 4.5/5 ## The story A generation after the bombs fell, the survivors of Moscow live crammed into the stations of the Metro, each one its own small, wary nation. Artyom cannot accept that this is all that remains of the world, and keeps climbing to the poisoned surface with a radio, hunting for any signal that other people are still alive out there. *Metro 2035* is the final book of Dmitry Glukhovsky's trilogy. ## The end of the line *Metro 2035* was the last stop in a journey that started years ago, back when I picked up the first science fiction I ever read. The Metro books, along with everything in that same Russian, post-apocalyptic, STALKER kind of mood, were the stories that pulled me into the genre in the first place. So coming to the final novel of Glukhovsky's saga felt like saying goodbye to something that had quietly shaped the way I read. And to my surprise, it might just be the best of them all. ## Coming back to Artyom A big part of that is Artyom. *Metro 2034* had stepped away from him to follow Homer and Sasha, and as much as I appreciated that detour, I had missed him. Returning to his point of view, to his stubbornness and his impossible hope, felt like coming home. Homer was a wonderful presence here too, the old chronicler still trying to turn all of this misery into a story worth remembering. Together they carry the weight of the book without ever making it feel heavy. ## The world above What shook me the most was the slow, terrible revelation that there were people living outside the Metro network all along. The world above was never as empty as everyone had been told. The chapter that stayed with me is the one where Artyom tries to tell the people of the Metro the truth: that there is a world out there, that they could leave Moscow, that they could try to live something close to a normal life again. And the answer he gets is not anger, or fear, or even disbelief. It is indifference. They simply do not care. > They had spent so long in the dark that the light became the thing they feared most. That broke me a little. These people had lived underground for so long, had been hurt so deeply, that hope itself had become unbearable to them. It was easier to stay in the dark they knew than to risk the daylight they had already given up on. And it is hard not to see how real that is. You can find the same exhaustion in people living through the wars happening right now, people so worn down that the idea of a different life slowly stops feeling possible. ## Where it wears you down What I called a chapter is really a pattern. Artyom reaches a station, tells them the truth, and is sent away. Then he does it again at the next one, and again at the one after that. Glukhovsky is not subtle about any of it either. There are long stretches where the novel stops being a story and becomes a sermon, and you can feel him at your shoulder making sure you have taken the point. Somewhere in the middle I was tired of Artyom, tired of the argument, and tired of watching the same scene reset. And I think that is the only way it could have worked. Had the Metro turned him down once, cleanly, I would have registered a sad scene and moved on. Because it turns him down for hundreds of pages, I gave up on anyone listening long before Artyom did. That is what has already happened to the people down there, and a tighter book could not have put me inside it. It is a slog, and the slog is the argument. ## Anya I have said almost nothing about Anya, and the ending does not work without her. She is Artyom's wife, and she is also Miller's daughter, which means the man Artyom spends the book arguing with is the man she grew up under. She works the mushroom beds at VDNKh while he goes up to the surface with his radio and comes home poisoned. What she wants is an ordinary life and a child, and he will not give her either. For much of the middle of the book the marriage is gone, and her own father tells Artyom to leave her for her own good. She comes back to him anyway, and by then Miller's men are holding her life over Artyom to keep him in place. So when the two of them finally get out of Moscow, it is not one man being proved right. It is two people who had nearly lost each other deciding to go together, which is a smaller thing and a better one. ## Final thoughts Artyom gets something like a happy ending, and he earns it. But the quiet tragedy of *Metro 2035* is everyone he leaves behind. The people of the Metro are probably condemned to stay down there forever, not because the door was locked, but because they were too afraid to even try it. That image, of a whole world choosing the cage over the unknown, is what makes this the book in the saga I think about the most. If you have any love for bleak, deeply human science fiction, do not stop at *Metro 2033*. The road only gets better, and it ends here. --- # Book Review - The Shadow of the Wind https://laijie.dev/blog/book-the-shadow-of-the-wind/ 2022-09-12 · The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón · rated 5/5 ## The story The Cemetery of Forgotten Books lives by a single rule: the first time you are led into that vast, hidden labyrinth of lost and abandoned books, you must choose one volume, whichever one calls to you, and adopt it, keeping it alive so that it never vanishes from the world. Barcelona in the postwar years, and it falls to Daniel Sempere, the young son of a widowed bookseller, to make that choice. The book that finds him is *The Shadow of the Wind*, by a forgotten author named Julián Carax, and it will take over Daniel's life. When Daniel discovers that someone has been hunting down and burning every last copy of Carax's work, he sets out to uncover who the author really was, and stumbles into a story of love, betrayal, and old wounds that slowly begins to fold itself around his own. ## The best of Zafón Of everything Carlos Ruiz Zafón wrote, *The Shadow of the Wind* is, for me, the finest. *Marina* was the book that first introduced me to him, but this is the one I would press into someone's hands before any other. Why the best? It is hard to put into words, but it comes down to how personal it feels. This is a story that sticks to you, that changes you a little, and that leaves you so content when you close it that you want to walk straight into the next book. A great deal of that comes down to the Semperes: Daniel and his gentle, grieving father, and the little bookshop they keep. From the very first pages, that family and that shop settle into you, warm and lived-in and quietly sad, and they simply refuse to leave. You finish the book and they stay on, the way real memories do. ## A grey and gothic Barcelona Just as unforgettable is the city itself. The Barcelona Zafón builds here is a character in its own right, a place thick with melancholy and drawn almost entirely in greys. Its streets are misty and half-lit, its mansions crumbling, its secrets buried in fog, and there is something genuinely dark, even frightening, waiting in its shadows. This is not the sunlit, postcard Barcelona. It is older, sadder, and far more mysterious, a city that seems to remember every sorrow it has ever held. And it makes the perfect stage for the story, because a tale like this one could not breathe anywhere brighter. ## Fumero, and a colder kind of fear Not all of that darkness lives in the fog and the architecture, though. Some of it wears a face, and its name is Inspector Fumero. He is one of the most chilling villains I have come across, not because he is some larger-than-life monster, but because he is entirely, plausibly human. Fumero is the raw, unvarnished portrait of a ruthless policeman, a man who simply does not care what methods he uses so long as he gets the result he wants. Cruelty, to him, is just an efficient tool. There is a cold, almost bureaucratic menace to him that feels far more frightening than any ghost, precisely because you know men like him have always existed, especially in a time and a place like this one. ## A book that chooses its reader At the heart of it all is that first, strange idea: that in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a book chooses its reader as much as the reader chooses the book. That first descent into the Cemetery is one of those scenes that on its own would have been enough to make me love the book. *The Shadow of the Wind* does not merely fall into Daniel's hands; it feels as though it had been waiting there for him all along. > Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. And then something wonderful and unsettling begins to happen. The deeper Daniel reads into Carax's life, the more the world of that novel seems to seep into his own. Figures who belong to the book start appearing around him, the past begins to rhyme with the present, and you slowly realise that Daniel is not only investigating a story, he is starting to live it. Watching the line between the book and his life dissolve is one of the most magical things I have ever read. ## Love, the thing that moves everything For all its mystery and menace, though, the real engine of the book, and of everything Zafón wrote, is love. It is the force underneath almost every action here, and across the whole series: the thing that drives people to protect, to lie, to destroy, and to keep going long after they should have stopped. Carax's story is, at its core, a love that could not survive its world, and it is that same longing, echoed and passed down, that Daniel finds himself caught inside as his own heart is drawn into the tale. In Zafón's Barcelona, love is never a soft or decorative thing. It is the power that moves everything, and the one most likely to get you hurt. ## Fermín, and a story told like cinema The other thing that makes it so hard to put down is the cast, and above all Fermín Romero de Torres. He arrives partway through, a ragged, fast-talking, endlessly charming man with a mysterious past, and he promptly steals every scene he is in. His loyalty and his humour are brilliant, the kind that makes you laugh out loud one moment and catches in your throat the next, and it is no surprise at all that he goes on to charm his way through the rest of the Sempere books. His own past stays a tantalising mystery for a long while, one that keeps deepening across the books, all the way to *The Labyrinth of the Spirits*, the fourth and last of the novels, and that slow, patient payoff is part of what kept pulling me forward. A story this dark needs a heart this bright, and Fermín is exactly that. And Zafón tells the whole thing as though he were filming it. The storytelling is intensely cinematic, every scene lit and framed and paced like something you are watching as much as reading. You can almost hear the rain, see the lamplight on wet cobblestones, feel the camera drift down those foggy streets. It is the kind of book that plays out behind your eyes. Thinking about it now, though, I have come to see that this is also the book's one real limit. The same lighting that makes those greys so unforgettable, and that makes a man like Fumero genuinely frightening, never switches off. Every scene is lit and framed for maximum effect, so nothing here is ever allowed to be ordinary: a conversation in the shop, a walk home in the rain, an afternoon in which very little happens, all of it arrives at the same raised temperature. The book has no quiet register to drop into. And I do not think that could be repaired without losing exactly what I love in it, because the atmosphere is not laid over the story, it is the thing driving it. The greys and the camera are one instrument, and it does not have a soft setting. ## Final thoughts *The Shadow of the Wind* blends mystery, darkness, and just a touch of the magical into something that feels, above all, complete. And it closes the way the best of these stories do, by folding back on itself: by the final pages you feel how these lives and these tales seem to repeat, one generation handing the same book, and the same wonder, on to the next. It is a gothic tale, a love story, a detective story, and a love letter to books all at once, and somehow none of those threads ever gets in the way of the others. It also changed something in me. It gave me a new love for old, traditional bookshops, the kind where you can still catch the smell of old paper, and it made me understand why a place like that is worth protecting. This was my way into the whole universe Zafón built around the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, and from the moment I finished it I wanted nothing more than to keep going, straight through to the very end of the series. If you have never stepped into his Barcelona, start here, in the fog, with a boy and a forgotten book. --- # A Graduation Trip to Prague https://laijie.dev/photography/prague/ 2026-07-27 Prague has been standing on the banks of the Vltava for more than a thousand years. In the fourteenth century, under Charles IV, it was the seat of the Holy Roman Empire and one of the largest cities in Europe, and it has been collecting layers ever since: a medieval core of narrow stone streets, gothic towers, baroque facades, art nouveau details on the corners. The wars that flattened so many European capitals in the last century mostly passed it by, so the centre is not a reconstruction of itself: the astronomical clock has been ticking on the old town hall since 1410, and Charles Bridge has been carrying people across the river for more than six hundred years. They call it the city of a hundred spires, and from any high point you understand why: wherever you look there is a tower, a dome or a green roof breaking the skyline, with the castle watching everything from its hill on the other side of the river. But it is not a museum. The streets below are full of life, with terraces everywhere, beer halls where the glasses never stay empty for long, and a constant flow of people crossing from one bank to the other. It is a city made for walking, which is exactly what we did. We planned this one as a graduation trip. After four years of sharing classes, exams and deadlines, a group of eight of us, almost all from the original group that started together, took the chance to celebrate it with a trip together. We flew in on a Monday night in the last week of July and stayed until Saturday afternoon, which gave us five full days for the city. We spent them going from one landmark to another: the old town square, the churches, the Gunpowder Tower at the entrance of the old city, and Charles Bridge, which we crossed in the middle of the crowds, between the statues and the street musicians. One day we also climbed to the Žižkov monument, where a giant equestrian statue of Jan Žižka, one of the largest in the world, guards the memorial, with a wide view over the city. And, obviously, we tried the local food and the beer, which in Prague is not optional. Not everything was in the plans. The apartment turned out to have exactly one bathroom for the eight of us, so showers became an exercise in organization, one we somehow managed to solve. We slept split in two rooms of four, and in mine, someone, who will remain anonymous, snored more than enough for everyone. The nights were spent talking about old anecdotes and asking each other random questions. And half of the group ended up with an Uber driver whose strange comments about football and even stranger Spotify playlist became the running joke for the rest of the week. The photo from Letná Park was a bit spontaneous. We were passing nearby, and I remembered having read about this viewpoint, so I took the camera and headed to the spot. From up there, the bridges over the Vltava line up one behind another: Charles Bridge in front, full of people from end to end, and behind it the rest of them, with the little boats scattered on the water in between. Of all the photos I took that week, this is the one that stays as the picture of the trip: it shows the beauty of the city better than any other, with the same bridges we had been crossing back and forth all those days. --- # Three Days in Trieste https://laijie.dev/photography/trieste/ 2026-05-18 Trieste sits at the very top of the Adriatic, on a narrow strip of land between the limestone plateau of the Karst and the sea, so close to the border that Slovenia begins practically in its suburbs. Its story is different from the rest of Italy's: for two centuries it was the great port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the window to the sea of an empire that barely had a coast. The Habsburgs declared it a free port, ships from half the world unloaded there, and the shipping companies and insurance houses that grew around that trade built the city that still stands today: rows of white neoclassical palaces facing the water, wide avenues, and the Piazza Unità d'Italia, one of the few great squares in Europe that opens directly onto the sea. Then the empire dissolved, the borders moved, and Trieste woke up as an Italian city with a port built for a country that no longer existed. It never fully recovered that central role, and maybe that is why it feels the way it feels today: elegant but calm, slightly out of time, as if the city were still waiting for ships that stopped coming a century ago. The mixture of cultures is still there, Italian, Slavic and Central European at once, and so is the coffee tradition the Austrians left behind, kept alive in historic coffee houses where writers like James Joyce and Italo Svevo used to spend their hours. It is not a city of big attractions; it is a city with an atmosphere, and that is exactly what I found. The trip itself was an out-of-the-blue choice. One Sunday I realized I had a bit of free time ahead, and with that thought, the idea of travelling appeared on its own. I knew I wanted to go to Italy, but the exact place was undecided, until I saw that the flights to Trieste were affordable and that the city had some history running through those white walls. That was enough. I booked the trip that same Sunday, and the very next day, from the 18th to the 20th of May, I was there. Funnily enough, the trip started before even landing: I spent the entire flight talking with an elderly man who was travelling with his wife to visit their son in Udine. And once in Trieste, it felt like I was isolated from the rest of the world. I barely looked at the phone; I just enjoyed the nice weather and the fresh air coming from the sea, and learned about the history of the place by visiting the same spots people from the last century used to visit too. I spent those days without much of a plan. I wandered through the old town and along the Canal Grande, which brings the sea a few blocks into the city, with its small boats moored in line and the church of Sant'Antonio closing the view at the end. I climbed up to the hill of San Giusto, where the cathedral and the old fortress stand, and from where you can see the whole gulf and the rooftops of the city descending towards the water. I also sat in two of the legendary coffee houses of the city. At Caffè San Marco I had my first ever slice of Sacher cake, with an espresso on the side; at Caffè degli Specchi, the one of the mirrors, I went for a cappuccino, and afterwards I tried the ice cream too. They are still what they were a hundred years ago, with their marble tables, dark wood and unhurried waiters, and it is easy to understand why those writers made a second home out of them. And when the day was ending, I walked out onto the famous Molo Audace, the stone pier that stretches into the gulf a few steps from Piazza Unità, and spent the sunsets there, enjoying the breeze and the soothing melody of the sea. The photo is from Miramare Castle, a bus ride away along the coastal road. The castle stands on a promontory over the sea, completely white, and this is how it first appeared to me: framed between the trees of its park, with the flag on the tower and a seagull crossing the grey sky. Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg, younger brother of the emperor, built it in the 1850s as a home for himself and his wife Charlotte, but he left for Mexico to become emperor there before the works were even finished, and he never came back: he was executed a few years later, and Charlotte lost her mind waiting for him. The residents who came afterwards did not stay long either, and many of them also met their end far from home, which fed the legend that whoever sleeps in Miramare is destined to die in a distant land. That was the highlight of the visit for me: walking through those rooms and gardens, prepared with so much care for a life that never happened, and feeling that the people who were supposed to live there never really did for too long, exactly as the story goes. --- # Hiking in Bavaria https://laijie.dev/photography/hiking-bavaria/ 2026-03-02 With the exams already finished and a few days left before returning to Spain, it was the perfect time to travel around Bavaria and enjoy what this beautiful region of Germany has to offer. After a few seconds pondering about where to spend those days, I decided to visit two specific places: Herzogstand and Eibsee. The decission was quite easy to make, I had already visited other places like Tegernsee and Starnberg, so getting closer to the Alps was almost straightforward. I woke up at 7AM to prepare the meal for the trip and take an early Regional Bahn to Kochel, the lake sitting right next to Herzogstand. During the trip, I enjoyed the views along the journey, specially when we stopped by Starnbergsee, the lake was marvelous and filled with color. In approximately an hour, the train arrived to Kochel, and from there, I took a bus that would bring me to Walchensee, where I started the hike. The hike was not very difficult, and although there were some parts of the path that were covered in snow or ice, it was not too difficult to go through them. Furthermore, the views of the lake and the mountains were impressive. Once I arrived to the ski station, I set off to the peak, and since this path was on the north face of the mountain, it was still covered by snow, that reached my knees at some points. It was after 20 minutes walking, that I finally arrived to the cross that indicated that I had reached my destination. From up there, one could see the lake Kochel on one side, and the Alps on the other, the calm that one could feel there made the entire hike worth it. After an hour or so, I decided to head back to Kochel, I took the gondola from the ski station, and then the bus. Before taking the train back to Munich, I decided to stop by for a little rest in the lake, from where I could see Herzogstand, towering over the lake with its presence while little ducks were chilling in the calm water. Once in Munich, I went to one of my favourite places of the city, Mamma Bao(if you haven't been there, you must do it), around five minutes from Hauptbahnhof, to top off this day with a delicious dinner. --- # Munich's Landmarks https://laijie.dev/photography/munich-landmarks/ 2025-10-08 Munich is a city famous by lots of things, either the Oktoberfest, the delicious Weisswursts, for being the home of the great Bayern Munich FC, and many other things, but what striked me the most was the history and the iconic landmarks you can find all around the city. From the stunning Neues Rathaus that welcomes you when you come out of the Marienplatz metro station, to the enormous Frauenkirche, without forgetting the ostentatious Residenz Munchen. All these buildings are majestic. Taking the chance, I wanted to experiment with my recently acquired camera, so tried to capture the essence of some of these buildings while strolling around the city and admiring the beautiful architecture.