Here is a ranked list of the books which I finished reading in 2017:

1. An Elemental Thing – Eliot Weinberger
2. Love in a Fallen City – Eileen Chang
3. True Grit – Charles Portis
4. South and West – Joan Didion
5. Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei – Eliot Weinberger
6. Welcome to the Monkey House – Kurt Vonnegut
7. The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
8. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
9. The Selected Poems of T’ao Chien
10. The Conquest of America – Tzvetan Todorov
11. The Death and Life of Great American Cities – Jane Jacobs
12. The Ghosts of Birds – Eliot Weinberger
13. October – China Miéville
14. Grand Hotel Abyss – Stuart Jeffries
15. Draft No. 4 – John McPhee
16. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome – Mary Beard
17. The Writing Life – Annie Dillard
18. The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History – Frank Dikötter
19. Poems – Wang Wei
20. The Earth is Weeping – Peter Cozzens
21. The First Salute – Barbara Tuchman
22. Against Everything – Mark Greif
23. Once Upon a Time in China – Jeff Yang
24. Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson
25. A Memoir – Chang Cheh
26. Wong Kar-wai – Peter Brunette
27. The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper

I’m starting a new thing as well this year. For awhile I’ve been writing down lines from movies in the Notes app on my phone. Sometimes they end up in reviews, or as standalone letterboxd blurbs, and sometimes they don’t. I’m going to keep one for every year, and publish it at the end, without context. Here is this year’s, which began only in June.

A cat is never on the side of power.

15 years later, some wolves still survive.

Oh Doris, you think everything is treason.

Let’s keep praying

Stop being negative. It’s all in your head. Think of something more cheerful. Can’t you be normal?

Folks like us don’t have a clue.

Don’t go to weird places.
What’s that supposed to mean?

You need tissues for your issues.

Killing Japanese takes energy. Have some congee.

All you people are good for is poetry and stealing.

See you after the victory.

Things in this world can’t stand scrutiny.

Isn’t working to survive a drag?

Nothing is fun. You just work and die. That’s your life.

       Aphrodisiac flour made from the tears of a hundred year old pig forced into heat.

Film pickled in sea snake soup.

If a grinning toothless goat is what you want, you can find one anywhere.

White-brow monk is a turtle son of a bitch.

Nice guys, but . . . poorer.

One of the main things we began to discover was that our theoretical calculations did not have a strong correlation with reality.

Renoir!

Awful disappointing weather today.

If I was bored I’d go out and buy something, like cheese, or quails’ eggs.

No Christine, that’s a frog. Bears wear hats.

The idlers want to shudder at the thought of dangerous work.

Parasites are another excuse

This was a Dracula indeed

Find the true meaning of Christmas! Money! Money! Money!

It’s the spirit of the actors that counts. The interest they have in their director.

As last by as the sun and the earth exist, we can always survive.
You are amazing.
We all are.

There are gatherings and separations in life. Don’t feel sad for temporary partings, because the final victory is coming.

And here are the photos of text I took throughout the year.