စိတ်ထဲရှိသမျှ

I juggled multiple Burmese political books last year, and this was the only non-political book I read, and I loved it. The book tells the story of a teenage boy, 14 years old, growing up in 1930s Japan, and his uncle, who cares for his nephew and offers him advice—loads of it, most particularly in Japanese ways. In addition to the story, it educates the readers not only on art, science, language, history, politics, and philosophy but also teaches a powerful message on the value of thinking for oneself and standing up for others during troubled times.

I’ve read Yearning (တမ်းတတတ်သည်) by Kyi Aye. In all honeslty, I chose to read it solely because of the title. However, I was disappointed to discover that among all the Burmese books I’ve read, this one was the most challenging to comprehend because it was filled with unfamiliar words, expressions, regional terms, and complex sentence structures. And it’s with much shame I hereby also admit that I understood only about 45% of it. From what I could grasp, the story revolves around a love affair between a 19-year-old man and an older woman. However, I’m certain that there are still

The first time I read "First They Killed My Father" by Loung Ung was many moons ago in a café near the backpacker hostel where I was staying in Siem Reap. Back then, I chose to read the book for no other reason than to educate myself about the Khmer Rouge regime ahead of my upcoming trip to the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh, which was just two weeks away. However, despite the heart-wrenching survival story of Loung under the brutal Khmer Rouge, I found myself reading it with the detached mindset of a distant observer, indulging in carrot cake and sipping a hot Americano in the comfort of an air-conditioned room.

It took me over 13 years to get my hands on this book, 'Harp of Burma,' written by Michio Takeyama with the aim of giving young Japanese readers hope after the devastation of World War II. It was first published in 1946. The English translation by Howard Hibbett was released 20 years later, in 1966. By chance, I watched the film adaptation back in 2011 and fell in love with it. That was how I learnt about the book. The story is set during the World War II

စိတ်ကူးချိုချိုမှာ ခင်ဖုန်းသက်ဝေကို ဂလယ်ရီ အလည်လိုက်ဖို့ ဝင်ရှာခဲ့သေးတယ်။ အရောင်းစာရေး ညီမလေးက စကားချိုချိုနဲ့ ပြန်ပြောတယ် ကုန်နေပါတယ်ရှင်တဲ့။ စိတ်ပျက်ပျက်နဲ့ စံရိပ်ငြီမ်မှာ မာလာရှမ်းကော သွားစားကြတော့ မိုက်ကီက မေးတယ် မင့်တီ အဆင်ပြေလားတဲ့။ မိုးထဲ၊ လေထဲ ကားသံ၊ ခိုသံ ကြားမှာ ကျနော် ညည်းတွား နေတာကော ကြားရဲ့လား ခင်ဖုန်သက်ဝေ။ ၃၇လမ်းက အဟောင်းဆိုင်တွေလဲ ရောက်ခဲ့သေးတယ်။ ခင်များကို ကျနော် မတွေ့ဘူးဗျာ။ ကျနော်ကလည်း ကျနော်ပဲ ခင်များ မရှိတော့မှာ ခင်များကို အသည်းအသန် လိုက်ရှာနေမီတယ်။ ဘယ်တော့

I do not do reviews cos I am bad at them but this one is gonna make an exception. The Aravind Adiga's White Tiger has changed my opinion of India, in a good way tho.  It gives me thoughts about lives in India and the caste system they practice there.  If I am not mistaken, Myanmar have adopted some of their practices here as well but I cannot name them.  Anyway, we may beg to differ here but I have no reasons to blame those changed their religion just to get away with the caste system.