read and be Happy

  When AI can summarize One Hundred Years of Solitude in three seconds, when large language models can generate perfectly formatted book notes for any work, a question grows sharper by the day: do we still need to read for ourselves? If machines can "read" on our behalf, why should we still turn pages word by word? Hainan Hui has a song called "How to Love Artificial Intelligence," whose lyrics pose a thought-provoking question: "People used to say 'a' and 'i' spelled love; now people say 'A' and 'I' spell the future. How should we love AI — as a beast of burden, or as a parent?" ( read the original article ). This question lands with particular force in the context of reading. Do you treat AI as your reading "beast of burden" — letting it extract key points and generate summaries while you simply reap the benefits? Or do you treat it as a reading "parent" — uncritically accepting its interpretations an...

  Is reading a one-way act of absorption, or a two-way exchange? On the surface, reading appears to be a process in which the reader extracts knowledge, wisdom, and emotion from a book — the book gives, and we receive. But upon deeper reflection, reading itself embodies a subtle "philosophy of giving": what do we invest in the act of reading? And what do we keep for ourselves from the books we read? The answers to these questions may be far older than you imagine. A Cantonese song puts it with wry humor: "Sending someone borscht, only your nose gets to smell the aroma." ( Click to read original ) This seemingly playful lyric touches on a profound question in classical philosophy: when giving becomes one-way depletion, when the giver cannot even nourish themselves, the halo of "selfless dedication" turns deeply ironic. Apply this logic to reading, and it becomes equally thought-provoking — if reading is purely about "acquiring," greedily flipping ...

  If you've ever been to a traditional teahouse in Guangzhou's old town on a weekend morning, you've witnessed a curious scene: elderly patrons, one newspaper per person, rustling pages amid the steam rising from har gow and chicken feet, while young people beside them swipe furiously at phone screens. At first glance they're reading entirely different things, but look closer — they're all doing the same thing: searching the city's crevices for their own portion of "spiritual sustenance." A while back I came across an article about how the Cantonese song "The Streets Are Full of People Searching for a Living" echoes the bustling street culture of the Song Dynasty from a thousand years ago. The piece quotes Meng Yuanlao's Dreams of Splendor of the Eastern Capital , which describes the streets of Bianjing: "The night market lasted until the third watch, and reopened again by the fifth watch. Places of amusement bustled without end thro...

  Open a book and you step into someone else's story. But those who truly know how to read understand that reading's endpoint is never remaining a spectator — it is learning to become the author of your own life. The deepest insight: all reading ultimately returns to the self, accumulating vocabulary, structure, and courage for "writing one's own story well." I recently read a commentary on the Cantonese song "Who Are You to Decide the Ending of My Love Story?" The image of "the storyteller studying the listener's expression, calculating how to revise the plotline" captures the deepest link between reading and life — we are not merely listeners; we ought to be our own storytellers ( click to read original ). Tang dynasty scholar Cui Jiao lamented, "Once you enter the marquis's mansion, it is deep as the sea; from that moment, Xiao Lang is a stranger" — handing his love's ending to fate. But today's readers have awakene...

  There are moments in every life when you stand perfectly still, yet feel a gap between yourself and the world so vast that no time zone adjustment could bridge it. The person you're waiting for hasn't returned as promised. The outcome you're hoping for remains perpetually out of reach. The answer sheet you so carefully prepared turns out, in the end, to have fallen short of even the passing line. At such moments, some people choose to open an old book — not to kill time, but to steal a quiet breath between someone else's lines. The song Zuoxiangde pierces with this lyric: "Those answer sheets that started with perfect scores, in the end they all failed to pass." The line offers no one an escape — it precisely nails down every person who has ever tried hard in love, career, or life only to have things turn out contrary to their hopes. Even more brutal is the connection it draws to Li Shangyin's ancient and desolate verse: "You ask when I will return...

  Have you ever done this: bought a stack of books, made a solemn reading plan, only to find that a month later you've barely gotten past the preface? I know this all too well, because I am exactly this kind of person. At the start of every year, I write out a long reading list—philosophy, history, literature, popular science—ambitiously convinced that this year I will finally become "learned and refined." And then… nothing. Those books sit quietly on my shelves and inside my Kindle, like silent witnesses testifying to my repeated failures to follow through. That was until I heard a piece of advice so simple it barely qualified as advice: don't try to finish a book in one go. Just read ten pages a day. This is a topic that has been discussed and debated across the blogosphere: even if the effort is small, persistence itself is the victory ( Read the original article ). After reading that article, I felt a sudden sense of relief—I had been measuring myself with the wro...

  When Li Bai is mentioned, most people think of the "Poet Immortal," the "Wine Immortal" — the defiant figure who declared, "The Son of Heaven summons me, but I refuse to board his boat." Yet beneath those verses of drunken revelry lies another dimension of Li Bai's spiritual world: a profound inner calm. And this is precisely the quality most neglected by readers today. Hainan Hui's song Taking Wine to the Ends of the Earth reinterprets Li Bai's spiritual legacy. It sings not of unrestrained abandon but of a relaxed willingness to "leave all those trivialities behind," a composure that allows one to "calmly and peacefully drink a cup of wine" ( read the original article ). This shift in perspective offers contemporary readers an important insight: when we read Li Bai, we should not only read his wildness — we should read his peace. Why is Li Bai's "calm" harder to emulate than his wildness? Because wildness ...

  When we speak of "labor," the first images that come to mind are often sweat, toil, and the daily grind. Yet deep within Chinese culture, labor has never been merely an economic concept. It is a spiritual posture, a way of expressing dignity. From the agricultural narratives in the Book of Songs — "In the seventh month the Fire Star declines; in the ninth month we hand out winter garments" — to the quiet daily perseverance of countless ordinary people today, labor and resilience have always formed a prominent thread in the Chinese humanistic spirit. A recent essay exploring Cantonese songs and classical poetry traces precisely this unbroken "labor narrative" from ancient times to the present — from the streets where "everyone is out hustling for a living" to Bai Juyi's verses about peasants who persist through scorching summer heat ( click to read the original article ). If this theme resonates with you, the following five books may help ...

  Every World Book Day, social media feeds buzz with activity: people posting their reading lists, showing off bookshelves, sharing their screen-time-tracking stats. This "gathering-style" reading is reminiscent of the ancient practice of plucking red beans — "Gather more, my friend, for this bean best bears longing" — as if reading more books, more broadly, would naturally make wisdom grow. Yet what truly changes a person has never been how many books you've read. It's how much preparation you brought to the act of reading itself. Over 1,300 years ago, Wang Wei sent a red bean — a "love pea" — to a friend far away, earnestly hoping the recipient would gather more of them and think of him often. That sentiment was beautiful, but it ultimately tethered longing to a single seed — somewhat passive, somewhat expectant ( Read the original article ). Today's readers, however, don't need to wait passively for books to bestow wisdom upon them. Th...

  City life has never been quiet. The morning rush-hour subway packs bodies against bodies. Social media notifications buzz without pause. Office keyboards clatter in relentless waves. We are wrapped inside a thick cocoon of noise, our ears flooded with countless streams of information, yet our hearts grow emptier by the day. In response, many of us reach for the "mute" button — noise-canceling headphones on, the world declared nonexistent. But true quiet has never required "blocking everything out" to achieve it. Hong Kong Cantopop carries a distinctive tradition: using the clamor of the streets to throw the authenticity of the human heart into sharper relief. As this Cantopop song explores , the world is packed with "troublemakers" — people who pick fights, manufacture noise, and fill every day with pointless quarrels. But the answer the lyrics offer is an interesting one. It is not to shout back. It is not to join the circus. It is to ask, with quiet ir...

  When was the last time you read a book twice? For most people, the answer is probably "never" or "high school textbooks." Somewhere in our subconscious, "finished" equals "done" — a book comes off the shelf, you turn the last page, and you can contentedly put it back, as if you've completed some kind of possession. But there's a massive misunderstanding here: confusing "having flipped through" with "having understood," and mistaking "contact" for "comprehension." In programming, recursion means "a function calling itself" — the same function is triggered repeatedly within its own body. The core logic stays the same each time, but the input parameters have changed, and the output depth is different ( read the original article ). Reading a truly good book — isn't that a form of recursion? The book remains the same book; not a single word has changed — but you have changed. You've a...

  This era has accelerated everything. A fifteen-second video fails to grab you, and you swipe it away. A headline that doesn't scream for attention goes unclicked. A book that hasn't delivered a climax by page thirty gets branded as "boring." We read faster and faster through the torrent of information, yet feel emptier and emptier. The ancients said, "Read a book a hundred times, and its meaning will reveal itself." We can barely muster the patience for one reading. This brings to mind the ritual of tea tasting: truly fine tea is never guzzled — it must be sipped slowly, waiting for the sweetness to rise from the throat. Is reading any different? The wisdom of slow reading mirrors the philosophy of tea tasting exactly. The first sip may taste plain, even slightly astringent, but after patient savouring, sweetness slowly wells up from deep within. This process of "returning sweetness" is precisely slow reading's most precious experience. An es...

  You must have had this reading experience: flipping through an entire book from cover to cover, most of the content flowing past like water — but there are always those few moments — a certain sentence, a certain paragraph, a certain character's decision — that press the pause button, deeply embedding themselves in your memory. Years later, you may have long forgotten the book's title and author, yet you still remember that line. These moments are the "keyframes" of reading. Keyframe Thinking: Between the Head and Tail of Reading In video editing, a keyframe is simple — you set the start and end states, and the software computes the transition in between ( Read the original article ). This is the essence: set the head and tail, automate the middle. Keyframes in reading work the same way. Most of a book is "auto-generated transitions" guiding you from one state to another. What changes you is never the transitions — it's those few keyframes: an insight ...

  People often say life is unpredictable — "the large intestine wraps the small intestine." This lyric first sounds like a joke, yet upon reflection, it captures the daily anxiety of every modern person. Hainan Hui's The Unpredictability of Life offers no grand answers, only the simplest response — "go to work, clock out, leave some time to play with the family." In the face of uncertainty, the answer is not to seek outwardly, but to settle inwardly. This wisdom of "wrapping" complex problems into everyday life is precisely the greatest lesson reading offers us. A book's value lies not in how profound it is, but in whether it can package a grand proposition into a truth you can take home. ( Read the original article ) "Wrapping" is a fascinating image. Intestine wraps intestine, rice rolls wrap youtiao, lotus leaves wrap glutinous rice — the wrapping of food is all about layers, about inner and outer blending together. The "wrappin...

  The hardest lesson in life is not how to acquire, but how to let go. From childhood we are taught to work hard, persist, and fight for what we want — but almost no one teaches us when to release our grip. The things we fought so desperately to obtain, the people and possessions we once believed indispensable, can become heavy burdens on our shoulders. True freedom isn't having enough; it's letting go thoroughly enough. A thought-provoking article once explored this wisdom through the lens of a song. It cited Hainan Hui's "Do as You Think," which compares gain and loss to a numerator and denominator: "If the numerator of what you have is too small, don't imagine the denominator too large." Simple words, yet they capture the essence of human greed. We always believe that acquiring this thing will make us happy, possessing that thing will satisfy us. But in truth, what we really need is far less than we think. ( Read the original ) The article quotes ...

  Reading has never been a solitary act. When you open a book, you are collaborating with the author — they build a world with words, and you fill it with your imagination. This cross-temporal partnership echoes the profound meaning that the Chinese character "社" (shè) has carried for millennia: a group of people coming together for a shared purpose. And reading is one of humanity's oldest and most beautiful forms of cooperation. Read the original Chinese article When most people hear "she," they think of terms like "supply and marketing cooperative" or "welfare cooperative" — words that have re-entered the public spotlight in recent years. But have you ever wondered where this character actually comes from? According to historical linguistics, the original meaning of "she" was the god of the soil. The ancient dictionary "Shuowen Jiezi" explains: "She is the master of the land." In ancient agrarian society, land ...