Do you have the patience to read a physical reason or recommendation?
When your favorite "house" invites you to think of something in public and to recommend it, your feelings are generally mixed. On the one hand, honor and privilege, and on the other - responsibility and considerable nervousness. What would my students say: "Scared, professor, huh?". Well, kids - I am. I have heard from the kids of today's generation that you are what you listen to, while in our generation it has always been that you are what you read. So both then and now musical and literary taste without error determined other aspects of being in our quantum-classical system. I have decided to sneak into the safe zone of physics and propose two books from the VIP seats in accordance with the quantum and classical understanding of that elite skill of solitude and reading. If I dare to share the literary space in which I have lived since I read (and that is now circa 44 years), then I would decide to suggest books that reconcile both our quantum (Einstein-relativistic) world and the other classical (Newtonian) -absolute). For this warm October morning, I allow myself two in one.
To young people and everyone who feels that way, I would like to recommend Zhang Yueran's book "10 Loves". She wrote the book as a teenager and student. All the more incredible is her early literary talent. She is considered one of the most promising young writers in China. She recently received her PhD from the Department of Ancient Chinese Literature. The number of readers is about half a million in China (only). The book contains 10 stories that ‘spill’, in which you often lose your footing in time and space, in which youth meets old age, east with west, rural with urban. It is completely ‘quantum’.
What I like about collections of short stories is that you are not bound by the order of the stories, nor the pages. You read from where you want. It upsets me in terms of reading, but I love it too. Young Zhang "unpacks" her life and clears it with her fears, growing and flourishing in front of the reader and the whole of our "little" China. For "10 loves", Zhang says: "These were, without exception, foggy stories about imaginary creatures, full of mysteries and from beginning to end filled with fatalism. This is probably because my heart was filled with fear at the time, a subtle fear for the life you feel when you are in a skyscraper, like the terrifying growth of tropical plants." An even finer recommendation is to start with the story "Gino and skipping the buck".
On the other hand, I recommend "always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride" Milan Kundera (born between the two wars, 1929) and his book "Laughable Loves". I said, he's my favorite cynic-classicist. Also, in accordance with Zhang Yueran, he writes about love, but in a special way. Through the book, Kundera "dissects" the system, the relationship with God, religion, communism, obedience, a woman and her failed emancipation, mental and physical nudity. This book does not have to be read from the beginning, it is read from all sides… I love that very much, the optional conquest of physical and mental space without a set path. Eternal silent candidate for the Nobel Prize, which he has not yet received until the age of 91… I suggest you start with the story "Fake hitchhiking". Regardless of the fact that there is a 60-year difference between Milan Kundera and Zhang Yueran, their collections of stories about love make the world of love in harmony, connecting the quantum and the classical, the micro and the macro in the literary synchronization of space and time.
Wishing you a journey to the quiet world of different…