The Origin of 'Buying Books Like a Landslide'
I used voice input to tally up how many books I’ve bought since college until now — finished the list in under 20 minutes. Although the bookshelf looks densely packed, there are actually fewer than 200 books, not even a grain of sand in the vast ocean of knowledge.
I haven’t participated much in JD.com’s book sale events these past couple of years. I feel there are fewer and fewer books worth reading. Ultimately, the trouble lies in choosing — picking books I like one by one takes a lot of time, so I slowly add them to my cart and only pay when there’s a promotion. A colleague asked me why I buy so many books. I said, “They’re cheap! Works out to about ten yuan a book. Even if I don’t finish reading them, they can be family heirlooms!”
My inexplicable love for books stems from a childhood with no books to read — just like how grandparents always treasure food. Whatever you lacked back then, you always want to make up for it frantically now. Before the age of ten, I lived in a remote mountain valley with no information flow, no newspapers, and only CCTV Channel 1 on TV. In that survival state, thirsting for knowledge, I dug out my parents’ middle school textbooks from a junk pile — leftovers from the 1970s — and read them all. From their biology book I learned about paramecia, tree ferns, dinosaurs, and the origin of species. From the slightly gruesome human anatomy diagrams, I understood that the human body isn’t solid — inside, like a pig, there are heart, liver, spleen, and organs. I guessed humans would die too. The math book made no sense to me, so I tore it up to fold “bo” (square paper blocks you slap on the ground — if your “bo” flips the opponent’s “bo,” you win theirs). The book was full of strange symbols and had a weird tone. Later, thinking back on that math book, the weird tone turned out to be political slogans. When I truly had nothing left to read, I asked Grandma to borrow the Children’s Encyclopedia Newspaper from the township primary school teacher. I followed the tutorials in the paper to do science crafts. In an article about the mutual conversion of kinetic and electrical energy, I attached fan blades to an electric motor, put it in a field ditch, and made a hydroelectric generator that lit up a diode. Later I demonstrated the principle of electrical energy conversion to my uncle-in-law with this setup — the grandeur was no less than Galileo explaining heliocentrism. I also tried building airplanes — even though I knew that a water-drop-shaped curved wing generates lift, the foam was too light and my craftsmanship too crude, so they never flew far. Eventually I couldn’t borrow the Children’s Encyclopedia Newspaper anymore, and I couldn’t make anything fun. If I’d had a set of Encyclopædia Britannica or the complete Twenty-Four Histories back then, my youth might have been much more colorful.
Children these days no longer have that hunger for knowledge I once had. They’re interested in games on the screen — not in LED display technology. Back then, armed with a Phillips head screwdriver, if Grandma hadn’t stopped me, the TV would have been taken apart long ago.
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Below is the list of books I’ve purchased
Economics
Western Economics
The Snowball
The Yale University Economics Course
The Wealth of Nations
Currency Wars
Principles of Economics
Social Sciences
Freedom at the Highest Point
The Selfish Gene
Games and Society
China in a Village
Rediscovering Society
Class Analysis of Contemporary Chinese Society
A Short History of Chinese Philosophy
Grand Enterprise: The Founding History of the Qing Dynasty
Sending a Bullet
1587, a Year of No Significance
Notes on Politics and Law
Democracy Is a Modern Way of Life
The Course of Modern China
Political Gains and Losses in Modern China
Democracy in America
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
A History of Western Philosophy
The Second Sex
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
Homo Deus
From Late Qing to the Republic
A Global History
Guns, Germs, and Steel
The Crowd
Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Disappearance of Childhood
Influence
Thirty Turbulent Years (Vol. 1)
The Water Level of Ideas
Hidden Rules
Fiction and Literature
The Fountainhead
Atlas Shrugged
The Muslim’s Funeral
White Deer Plain
1988: I Want to Talk to the World
Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
The Merchant of Venice
Macbeth
The Three-Body Problem
All Creatures Great and Small
Ramayana Bridge
City Gate Opens
A Good Day of One Person
The Stranger / The Plague
The Alchemist
Buddha on Line One
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
The Razor’s Edge
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Biography of Su Dongpo
Kokoro — Natsume Soseki
The King of Chess, the King of Trees, the King of Children
Six Lectures on Loneliness
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
The Four Books and Five Classics
Classic of Mountains and Seas
The Night Boat
Finest Selections of Ancient Prose
Zeng Guofan — Tang Haoming
Complete Commentary on Ice Mirror
A New Account of the Tales of the World
Zizhi Tongjian
Night Ride
Love in the Revolutionary Era
My Spiritual Home
The Silver Age
The Golden Age
Dreams of Splendor of the Eastern Capital
Little Window Reminiscences
The Catcher in the Rye
Love in the Early Summer Lotus Period
Lord of the Flies
Dream Reminiscences of Tao’an / Seeking West Lake
The Myth of Sisyphus
No Longer Human
Three Hundred Tang Poems
Odd Rocks
River Town
Notes from the Yuewei Hermitage
Central Park West
A Little Journey in the Airport
The Ideal Afternoon
First Love, Last Rites
Watching You Go
Tokyo One Year
Six Records of a Floating Life
Song of Everlasting Sorrow
Walking Alone at Ease
The Interpretation of Dreams
Works of Bei Dao
Despair — Nabokov
Sketches from a Chinese Studio
A One-Man Pilgrimage
The Design of Everyday Things
The Beauty of Mathematics
Where Is My Homeland
The Novels of Xue Tao
Master Zhu’s Family Instructions
40 Studies That Changed Psychology
Immortality
Four Happy Worries About the Nation
Rich Dad Poor Dad
What the Master Would Not Discuss
A Pale View of Hills
Siddhartha
A Book of Rainy Days
The Fall of Giants
Without a Fixed Address
Cakes and Ale
Of Human Bondage
Reading Is a Portable Sanctuary
The Moon and Sixpence
Dubliners
The Black Book
The 13 Buddhist Sutras
My Heart Has Only Seven Sorrows
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
We Three
The Long Goodbye
Murder on the Orient Express
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Sound and the Fury
Meditations
Strategies of the Warring States
Self-Control Techniques
The Unconsoled
Xu Sanguan Sells His Blood
Blindness
Killing Commendatore
The Gadfly
Plants and Trees of the Human World
A Year of Living Alone
One Person’s Village
The Devotion of Suspect X
Journey Under the Midnight Sun
Toki
Principles
Lost Horizon
I Am a Cat
The Buried Giant
Dream of the Red Chamber
I and the Temple of Earth
Great Short Stories
A Cultural Odyssey
Dune
To the Lighthouse
Zhuangzi with Annotations
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Love in the Time of Cholera
Lolita
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Finding China
Decisive Moments in History
You Can Never Wake Someone Who’s Pretending to Sleep
Language
Standard Japanese
English Speaking Red Book
This English Grammar Book Is All You Need
Programming
Introduction to Algorithms
The DOM Scripting Art
JavaScript: Advanced Programming
C Programming
Beginning Python
Python Cookbook
Learn PHP in 21 Days
Brother Bird’s Linux Private Kitchen