Welcome to Kado's Reading Couch
Dear readers,
Do you ever feel lost after finish reading a book? How about the missing feeling when you’re walking out of the theater and the audience goes their own way without sharing a word? These feelings are very normal. Good books and movies deserves more than a one time consumption. They deserved to be discussed, revisited, and remembered. Things that we gloss over the first time we read or watch a book or movie might be reminded when we talk to each other, or when we revisit them 10 years later with more life experience.
“Book review” and “Movie review” are strange and fancy title for the writing contained in my Substack. But if it helps you imagine what you may expect from my Substack, think of my Substack as a bi-weekly review where I talk about how books and movies relate to us. In my Substack, I don’t limit myself to only review the latest books and movies. Sometimes I review books and movies that are decades old, even hundred years old. And sometimes good books and movies deserve a lengthier response than what is appropriately contained in one article. I will break these longer writings down into more digestible chapters and post them according to the bi-weekly schedule.
The word “review” implies an evaluation of the value of a book or an movie, and that is where my writing deviates from what would be called an “book review” or “movie review”. “Reviews” are supposed to recommend you to read or not to read a certain book or movie based on its value, but I believe that you don’t need somebody to tell you what is worth reading or watching. On that base, I only write about books and movies that I find relatable to what is happening around us. The purpose of my writing is not so much to stipulate a comment on a movie or a book, but to bring about a discussion where the appreciation of reading or watching a book or movie is continued, although we have already flipped through the last page or got to the end of the credit roll.
You may ask, if our interaction with a movie and a book should not end at the point when we finish reading or watching them, when should this interaction end, and how should it continue? Our interaction with good books and movies doesn’t have an definite end point, and as long as people keep finding good ways to talk about them, they continue to be relevant to us. Over the course of human history, many literatures ceased to exist for many reasons. Sometimes these anonymous literatures cease to exist because they were confiscated, censored, burnt, or simply ceased to inspire interest and lost in oblivion. But as long as there is someone out there who find them relevant, and talks about them, they bring diversity to our common understanding in an unexpected way, and that is the true purpose of reading books and watching movies.
Diversity is not the constant saturation and re-saturation of new stories perpetuated by the juggernaut of the entertainment industry. The juggernaut of the entertainment industry hinges on our affinity with new things and our tendency to forget about these entertainments the moment we finish consuming them. This forgetfulness is the only way the entertainment industry can free up new spaces, and justify its re-saturation of these spaces with the flooding of newer productions. If we simply consume the flooding of new materials without reflection, we will drawn and not be able to remember anything important.
But an retreat from the entertainment industry into the castle of old canons also seems like a direct path to orthodoxy. The inauguration of canons always takes place among a host of reviews and critiques that stipulated the crowning of canons. If we blindly accept the idea of canon when we go through canonical literatures, we voluntarily cut ourselves out from the opportunity to bring ourselves to an on going discussion.
Let us abandon this idea about the new versus the old, canon versus entertainment, and find another way to make this work. The problem with both entertainment and the obsession with canon is actually quite similar: in both cases, the reader looses their agency. The alternative reading habit thus hinges on us to regain our agency. To reclaim our agency is both simple and hard. The easy part is simply to accept that our reflection about a book or a movie engages in a type of discussion that will never be settled once and for all. These discussions sometimes take place between friends, strangers, with an Substack writer, or with ourselves. But regardless of its form, these discussions allow us to change our mind about a book or a movie from time to time; they allow us to continue to grow with a books or a movie beyond our first impression about the book or the movie. However, the hard part of a good reading habit, which I challenge to put this burden upon myself, is to realize the time and place these discussions occur. A discussion has its natural rhythm and tempo. Although one discussion naturally branch into other discussions, we all need a pause from time to time. To be able to pause and resume, lies in our judgments about how one discussion relates to another, so we can pick up where we left off yesterday. This, relies on a sense of history which I wish to contribute to our conversation.
Sincerely,
Kado—April 12, 2023