Literature HK & English Literature

Get yourself an e-Reader for Hong Kong Summer

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 07:34:24 -0700

The screen reading experience may appear daunting for those who have grown up in the post-digital era. In one of his interviews, the prominent American literary critic Harold Bloom said that he once tried out reading ebooks and he found the experience weird.

Bloom is not alone. One of my friends (at the same age as mine) is so opposed against the ebook stuff as well. With these in mind, I have written this essay. Hopefully, it works as a preaching piece to make you at least not dislike it, or in general, to make you read more with the help of the screen.

The e-Reader doesn’t replace the paperback experience. It is not an ‘either/or’ but a ‘both’ situation. Like many others, I read paperbacks and hardbacks at home. But I don’t enjoy sweating over a 200-paged book at the bus stop in a Hong Kong summer. The ebook debate has a geographic aspect to it as well. Hongkongers may love better ebooks during our commute than the Westerners. It can be an aesthetic experience in the UK but a self-aware experience of smudging the dog ear with your sweating hand in Hong Kong.

To help let go of your paranoia about the e-Reader setting, I want to share my experience about the access to books and the format conversion.

Libby is a good free platform to link your e-reader back to your local library. I am a Kobo reader so I am not representing all e-book users. Libby is compatible with many tablets, including Kindle and Kobo. You can borrow books from your library and read them on your e-Reader. I am sure you will find some ways to gain free access to the texts you want to read if you have a mind to it.

If you are worried about the format conversion, Calibre is a free and helpful...Read More

'I started Early - Took my Dog'

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:52:59 -0700

‘I started Early - Took my Dog’ recounts the speaker (possibly Dickinson herself) walking a dog at the seaside. She sees ‘Mermaids’, possibly seals or sea elephants, emerging from the sea. There are also warships, beside which the speaker realises her smallness, the size of ‘a Mouse’.

The wave then starts whipping on her. The gradual invasion is sexually charged.

The bodily violation makes the sea all the more erotic. The wave relishes the speaker bit by bit, first the feet, then the lower and upper body. The wave is then personified.

The pronoun ‘He’ has received much Freudian and biographical attention on Dickinson’s romance. ‘He’ is neither God (as in the poetess's ‘God is indeed a jealous God’) nor convincingly presented as the poetess’s lover. The personification of the wave can be erotic without being necessarily biographical and self-revealing.

If the first impression of the sea is a sexual assaulter, then at the last stanza it is given an abrupt metaphorical turn to be courteous. It ‘bow[s]’ to the speaker whom it deems ‘Mighty’.

I came upon an interpretation that points us to Orion and his dog (a constellation) as the figures in the poem. I found it illuminating as a former student of Maths. You may want to have a look at that. For the interpretation on the heavenly stars, a user identified as Djehuty has great original insights (See https://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?17963-quot-I-started-Early-Took-my-Dog-quot).

Shakespeare’s use of the sea is always a fascination. Clarence, an older brother of the eponymous figure (this little brother will later become Richard III), has a dream during his captivity in the Tower of London. His drowning dream has received much critical attention on his guilt; In this essay, I suggest we can see how Shakespeare, on a wider plane, uses the sea to present consciousness and unconsciousness.

Guilt, undoubtedly, is part of consciousness which, for my discussion, means the awareness of our feelings, thoughts, and more importantly, how unconsciousness has effects upon us. Does Clarence have a glimpse at his unconsciousness? I think he does.

In the Tower, noticing Clarence’s heavy look, the keeper asks about the cause. Yesterday Clarence was ‘So full of fearful dreams, of ugly sights, / That, as I am a Christian faithful man, / I would not spend another such a night’ (1.4.3-5). Clarence perceives himself as a good Christian. God bless his soul. He is comforting himself with his religious faith that should ironically hinder his entrance to Heaven when only perdition is suitable for what emerges from his unconsciousness. Clarence has a double consciousness. He thinks he is practicing Christian principles, being a child God loves; meanwhile, he is contradictorily aware of his ill deeds.

Clarence then recounts his drowning dream to the keeper.

In the dream, Richard (Brother Gloucester) has taken Clarence out of the cabin aboard. They are now walking near the side of the ship. The view of England provokes Clarence’s memories...Read More

Why Not Eat and Drink at the Library?

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 20:47:11 -0700

It has been ingrained in us as part of our common sense that we cannot eat or drink in libraries. However, you can, in fact, eat sandwiches or cold food and drink coffee in the National Library of Wales (the main hall); or, if you don’t mind a walk, in Hugh Owen Library. It is more than a matter of hygiene. Nor do I believe that the Welsh cleaning team has got the ultimate ingredient to clean all the dirt they encounter. So, what makes these two sets of rules, the Hong Kong one and that in Aberystwyth, incompatible, or even contradictory, with one another?

The difference, I think, lies in trust and manners. I am writing this because of love, not of hatred. That is also how Edward Said treats literary criticism—instead of finding errors in a text, we critique out of love. I have no grudge with Hong Kong Libraries; but the difference has been fascinating me. I must try to get an interpretation, if not an answer.

Perhaps, the Authority in Hong Kong doesn’t trust its people. That is it. Some squeeze sandwiches’ wrappings into the gaps between seats on the bus; others spill coffee over in a mall without cleaning it (or at least trying to do so) before they leave. So, when a general respect for the public infrastructure is already hard to earn, how can the Authority trust its people to care about the local libraries? How can we be sure that when a person dampens a book, he would ask the librarian for help?

I am not being biased here surely there may be some people like that in Wales. But the rules reveal it all. Sadly, Hong Kong is still far from trusting its own fellow citizens who have contributed to its shaping.

Close Reading: Edith Wharton's Mr Jones

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 19:45:23 -0700

The labyrinthine library has Jorge Luis Borges to guide us through; Manderley has Mrs Danvers to uphold Rebecca’s memories; here, we have Mr Jones. All are stuck in a place because of love and duty.

Lady Jane has recently inherited an old mansion, Bells, detached from its neighbourhood. Some don’t even know its existence.

One day she attempts to have a look around the house. The maid denies because Mr Jones doesn’t allow.

When Lady Jane lives there, uneasiness haunts her. A novelist and friend, Stammer comes in her request and lives with her. The mystery of Mr Jones gradually reveals.

Jane wants to use the smoke chimney in the blue parlour. Mrs Glemm refuses because Mr Jones says not to use it.

There are moments when Jane sees the shape of Mr Jones and his footprints.

As Jane wants to get into a locked room, Mrs Glemm is so reluctant. She pretends to lose the key. Jane doesn’t subdue; Jane asks for a blacksmith apprentice for help, because the blacksmith doesn’t want to. The asked-for blacksmith apprentice coincidentally forgets his instruments so he leaves and heads back town. At last, Mrs Glemm gives the key to Jane. In there, Jane finds out the family papers that bear traces of Mr Jones.

In another room, as Lady Jane tries to ransack the papers and letters from the drawers, Mrs Glemm is horrified.

She dies soon after. The red marks on the neck reveal that...Read More

Close Reading: The Friend of the Friends by Henry James

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:27:30 -0700

The Friend of Friends (or The Way It Came) is one of Henry James’s works that rarely I vibe with. I read a few stories from James; most of them just fell into the void of incomprehension. Not utter incomprehension. But I definitely missed the bit of appreciation that makes James a great writer.
This ghost story is no less about ghosts than jealousy and love. It surrounds the narrator who has two friends, the man and the woman, as we shall call them. At eighteen, the woman, the narrator’s friend, sees her father’s ghost in a museum; whereas the man sees his mother’s in his room during his stay at Oxford. The narrator is a keen matchmaker; she soon arranges meetings for the two. What are the odds? So they must meet.
Here is the rub. Every meeting fails to even take place. The ‘caprices of chance’, as James puts it, make it so. Either the man or the woman has some business that makes them absent.
We then know that the man, the narrator’s other friend, has proposed to her, friendship boiling into romance (we can see Victorian romantic escalation differs a lot from the modern one).
One day the narrator intentionally postpones the man’s (now her fiancee) arrival for the arranged meeting with the woman. His absence is expected, though the woman is in the dark, owing it to chance. Well, he hasn’t shown up once; why would he?
The unsettling ghost seems to be metaphorical as the narrator uses it. This extract shows the narrator’s thoughts about the recent death of the woman’s husband; more importantly, as the narrative shifts into the narrator’s mind, it reveals her jealousy of the woman. She feels insecure in her marriage. The possible intimacy between her husband and...Read More

In Memory of Barthes

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 20:12:30 -0700

As Roland Barthes crossed a zebra crossing, a laundry van knocked him flat. Disfigured, Roland Barthes was unidentified for hours in the ward. That was one of the shocking details about the death of Barthes. Italo Calvino, in 'In Memory of Barthes', connects his reading experience of Barthes’s final work, Camera Lucida, with his reflection on death and photography.
On 28th March 1980, a group of people waited for Barthes’s coffin to leave the hospital for the provincial cemetery to join his mother in her grave. Michael Foucault was among them; Italo Calvino later joined in the silent crowd, feeling ‘a grief that would not tolerate any other display but that of silence’ (Calvino, 73). Calvino got a glimpse of Barthes in the coffin. ‘Barthes’s face did not seem at all disfigured: it was him, exactly as he was when I regularly encounter him in the streets of the quartier, cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth’ (71). The funeral artist might have done a great job to recover his features; meanwhile, Calvino’s recognition appears to me symbolic, especially when I read his opinion that Barthes’s last book on photography is also about love.
Love makes the photo look less static, non-human. It makes sense why many dislike the cinema. Looking at the portrait, you feel deadly if not unloved. It is not at all ludicrous when the photographer often sweet-talk his model to boost his or her confidence.
Love symbolically explains why Calvino could recognise Barthes. Yes, Barthes might look far from disfigured in the coffin. But Calvino describes not the ‘heaviness’ of his face. The fixity of Barthes’s corpse should have reminded Calvino of ‘the fixity of the image of death’ (74) in photography. He writes none of these in his...Read More

Recommendation: Books about Shakespeare

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:51:35 -0700

In your Shakespeare journey, a line with unusual pauses and Elizabethan words can seem daunting. But I bet that the struggles may have already pulled yourself closer to Shakespeare. You want to know more about him, this mysterious charming man. Or, like some critics argue, a black Jewish woman (this is worse than the Francis Bacon theory. Give me a break… ). How did Shakespeare’s family help shape his creativity and imagination as a whole? In what ways did he draw on classics as he put thoughts into words? If this is you, my list of books about Shakespeare will make him more understandable and enjoyable for you.
Here are some books that really helped me in my Shakespeare journey; I hope they would help you as well.
~
1. Shakespeare’s Language by Sir John Frank Kermode
Kermode is a close reading master. In this book, he discusses a lot of literary devices and ambiguities. As Peter Ackroyd puts it, ’No more of Shakespeare the imperialist. No more of Shakespeare the feminist. Here is Shakespeare the writer.’ Kermode is a writer who spends almost half of the chapter to clarify the meaning of ‘prone’ (‘prone and speechless dialect’) in Measure for Measure. If you like a close reading approach, Kermode is your pick.
2. Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language by Sister Miriam Joseph
Book culture may be at stake. To remain competitive, AI training companies have resorted to old books; not just old, but rare. The book tycoon Amazon seems to have been buying rare books in bulk. 404 Media worked with a bookseller to reveal the (possible) truth.
A T-Rex ripping off a book. Its symbolic meaning is rather clear, isn’t it? Either the T-Rex reads voraciously to outwit humanity or to destroy (‘devour’) the books without empathy.
~
I recently had a conversation with an English Literature professor in late July and I brought up this topical discussion to her.
‘Oh. I don’t know that. I only know that the AI companies have been feeding their models old books. It means that old thoughts will be coming back to us.’
Holocaust and slavery advocacy flashed on my mind. Perhaps I was just focusing on the grim side of history. There are also Shakespeare and Leonardo de Vinci, not to mention the great classics in the Chinese canon. AI is the greatest reader of all time, even though it may not read closely like humans.
‘I cannot imagine AI reads Hitler,’ replied I after a pause of reflection.
‘Well. They said they have hired philosophers to make sure things are moral. But I don’t know.’
I guess. A reader of Shakespeare and Hitler would have been a hard imagination for me if AI hadn’t existed.
~
Human thinking is hardly objective and analytical. It involves self-consciousness, emotions, and beliefs, among...Read More

Shakespeare's Religion

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 05:54:22 -0700

While John Shakespeare (William’s father) lived with a ‘double consciousness’, as Stephen Greenblatt puts it, that is, the conflicted, if not strange, abidance by both Protestant and Catholic ethos, William seemed to live without committing himself to either of them (according to Greenblatt); though he often drew on his experience with these two branches of Christianity to furnish his plays: the Catholic purgatory in Hamlet, for instance.
Shakespeare might have first witnessed his father being torn between the two beliefs in his household, before experiencing a strong Catholic sentiment at school. During the school years, Shakespeare must have experienced the great split between Protestant and Catholic ethos. His schoolmasters, Hunt, Jerkins, and Cottam, were all deep down Catholic. The appointments of them were made by no others but the Earl of Warwick and the bishop of Winchester, both were still loyal to the old faith — Catholicism. As long as one appeared conformed to Protestantism, which was Queen Elizabeth’s religion, one would be fine. Well, at least the early years of her reign: when the Pope hadn’t yet excommunicated the queen and the catholics didn’t vehemently take her down from the throne.
Among the three schoolmasters, Cottam had the most influence on William. Hunt eventually left school for Douai with a student named Debdale and became a Jesuit. Cottam’s family lived in Lancashire and close to the Hoghtons, a wealthy family there. Cottam might have recommended Shakespeare to be their private tutor. Cottam knew his parents (John and Mary) were deep down Catholic and he expected William might become one as well: a brilliant one with his poetic talent.
~
Catholicism was at its zenith when...Read More