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A Guy's Moleskine Notebook

Thoughts and reflections on works of fiction and literature. Pondering of life through pictures and words. Babbling about gay rights. Travelogues and anecdotes.

  • [1] Annie Proulx: Brokeback Mountain
  • [2] Arthur Golden: Memoirs of a Geisha
  • [3] Yu Hua: To Live
  • [4] Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty
  • [5] Colm Toibin: The Master
  • [6] Carlos Ruiz Zafon: The Shadow of the Wind
  • [7] William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience
  • [8] Charles Higham: The Civilization of Angkor
  • [9] Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case
  • [10] Dai Sijie: Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch
  • [11] Alan Hollinghurst: The Swimming-Pool Library
  • [12] Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
  • [13] Colm Toibin: The Blackwater Lightship
  • [14] Alan Hollinghurst: The Folding Star
  • [15] Ross King: Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
  • [16] Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
  • [17] Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections
  • [18] Colm Toibin: The Story of the Night
  • [19] John Banville: Shroud
  • [20] Leo Tolstoy: Resurrection
  • [21] Peter Hessler: River Town, Two Years on the Yangtze
  • [22] Ian McEwan: The Atonement
  • [24] Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
  • [25] Ignacio Padilla: Shadow without a Name
  • [26] Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose
  • [27] Richard Russo: Straight Man
  • [28] Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground
  • [29] Alan Hollinghurst: The Spell
  • [30] Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil
  • [31] James Baldwin: Giovanni's Room
  • [32] Ken Kesey: One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
  • [33] Xingjian Gao: One Man's Bible
  • [34] C. Jay Cox: Latter Days
  • [35] Harper Lee: To Kill A Mockingbird
  • [36] William Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew
  • [37] Daniel A. Helminiak: What The Bible Really Says about Homosexuality
  • [38] James Baldwin: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
  • [39] Kenji Yoshino: Covering - The Hidden Assault of Civil Rights
  • [40] Italo Calvino: If, On a Winter's Night A Traveler
  • [41] Arthur Phillips: The Egyptologist
  • [42] George Orwell: 1984
  • [43] Michael Warner: The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and Ethics of Queer Life
  • [44] Andrew Sullivan: Virtually Normal
  • [45] Henry James: The Wings of the Dove
  • [46] Jose Saramago: Blindness
  • [47] Umberto Eco: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
  • [48] Dan Brown: Da Vinci Code
  • [49] Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
  • [50] Ken Follett: The Pillars of Earth
  • [51] Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
  • [52] Michael Thomas Ford: Alec Baldwin Doesn't Like Me
  • [53] Jonathan Franzen: How To Be Alone
  • [54] Jonathan Lethem: The Fortress of Solitude
  • [55] Matthew Pearl: The Dante Club
  • [56] Zadie Smith: White Teeth
  • [57] Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Double
  • [58] Jose Saramago: The Double
  • [59] Andrew Holleran: Dancer from the Dance
  • [60] Heinrich von Kleist: The Marquise of O & Other Stories
  • [61] Andrew Holleran: In September, the Light Changes
  • [62] Tom Perrotta: Little Children
  • May 13, 2006

     

    Text Message from a Buddy

    Tony has been one of my best friends. I met him at Cal when we were undergraduates: we went to the same church. Like many of the Asian students, he was an aspiring pre-med major who was stuck in the brutal Chemistry 3A - Introduction to Organic Chemistry. This is the class with which Berkeley thrives to weed out those who are unfit for further pursuing the medical track. I was his tutor for Chem 3A and we met twice a week at the Golden Bear Center to discuss homework and lecture materials. We eventually became really close friends and spent vacation together. We took a trip to the Big Apple in 1998 when the northeast was hit by a blizzard. That wind-chilled ferry ride out to the Status of Liberty, the on-top-of-the-world experience at the twin towers (sigh), the yummy Malaysian food, and the all-day pilgrimmage to the MoMA definitely left indelible memories in our friendship.
    A native of Oakland and raised in Costa Rica, he is proficient in Spanish but can barely get by with Chinese! He usually head out to the city and hang out with me and try out different exotic restaurants - Cambodian, Indian, Burmese, Morrocean, Afghanistan. We might become some of the most finicky food critics of off-the-beaten-path cuisines. The second picture was taken in 2004 at Twin Peak on a bluesky sunny day. We were checking out that giant pink triangle spread out on the hill facing the Castro. Anyway, Tony is on a business trip to Hong Kong today so he's at 35,000 feet somewhere above the Pacific. He sent me a text message last night that read:

    Ok. Don't get into too much trouble while I'm gone. I'll be on email though. Tony.

    Thanks buddy. Bon voyage! Hope you get by okay with the broken Chinese!

    2 Comments:

    Blogger Robert said...

    Awh, how cute you two are! Good to have a traveling buddy, too!

    I want to go to HK. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

    5/15/2006 7:12 AM  
    Blogger mattviews said...

    The New York picture was taken in Christmas 1998...I weighed whopping 200 lbs! For those who want to lose weight, there's hope. Look at me....LOL

    5/15/2006 2:04 PM  

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