"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

The Lychee Road

On the plane to Taiwan, the entertainment selection was limited but this caught my eye: it’s a 2025 movie, labelled as historical comedy, in which a Tang Dynasty minor official is framed by his colleagues into performing an impossible task: delivering fresh lychees from a faraway province for the Emperor to gift them to his favourite consort, Yang Guifei, on her birthday.

The main character, Li Shande, is a low-ranking official because he has a skill no one understands: he can do math. The whole movie revolves around him putting this skill to good use and calculating the shortest route from Lingnan to Chang’an, around 2.500 km, while coming up with ingenious ways to keep lychees fresh for as long as possible.

The movie is nice and brilliant and also so not a comedy. Highly recommended.

Hills Like White Elephants

I don’t think Ernest Hemingway needs any introduction, but his Death in the Afternoon maybe does: it’s a 1932 non-fiction book about Spanish bullfighting, and it’s part cultural study, part travel writing, and part reflection on courage, fear, death, and art. It’s not for the

Read More »
August 18, 2026 6:00 am
Summertime

Mapping the Furrow

Seamus Heaney was a major Irish poet, born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He’s especially known for writing about rural life, memory, language, and Irish history. Death of a Naturalist is both the

Read More »
August 17, 2026 6:00 am
books and literature

Keanu Reeves & China Miéville: The Book of Elsewhere

It would be a vast understatement to say that this book was a surprise. Not being familiar with the comics (so unfamiliar, in fact, that I didn’t even know they existed), the first impact with the main storyline was “ok, what the hell am I

Read More »
August 16, 2026 9:00 am
Load More
Share on LinkedIn
Throw on Reddit
Roll on Tumblr
Mail it
No Comments

Post A Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

RELATED POSTS

Hills Like White Elephants

August 18, 2026

I don’t think Ernest Hemingway needs any introduction, but his Death in the Afternoon maybe does: it’s a 1932 non-fiction book about Spanish bullfighting, and it’s part cultural study, part travel writing, and part reflection on courage, fear, death, and art. It’s not for the

Read More

Mapping the Furrow

August 17, 2026

Seamus Heaney was a major Irish poet, born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He’s especially known for writing about rural life, memory, language, and Irish history. Death of a Naturalist is both the

Read More