November 8 reading reflection -Jaxon

 I really enjoyed reading all of the stories except for the one about the monkey, which I tried hard to follow but was still not able to get what was happening in the story, what's even worse is that the story has super long paragraphs and super long sentences that almost made me can't breathe. 

Among all the stories, I like "Goodbye Christopher Robin" and "First Rate Material" the most. I like seeing all the famous fairy tales being told from another perspective and  the idea of "nothing" and "everyone is just a character in a story." The world has subtle changes in every moment, and they are valued differently by different people. Subtle changes happen every day, and they will eventually become some big changes that you can't ignore. That's kind of a butterfly effect, and it's interesting to see how people become more serious when they start to trace those big changes and realize that they are accumulated from small or subtle stuff.

"First Rate Material" has really interesting settings of "human products." I feel a little uncomfortable imagining nails and teeth being used as furniture. I actually thought the narrator and her friends were not human, so they were discussing "human products," and it turned out they are humans too, and they feel comfortable accepting that their bodies will be used as materials to build products. I don't really know why human materials are better since the products mentioned in the story are definitely not durable at all in reality.

I also like "Paprika Jiro." I don't have a theory of what "they" represent in the story. I thought of those action movies in which when someone gets chased in a market, they usually try to deal severe public damage to all the stalls, and even now, I feel that's very unfortunate if you are the one who is trading in the stalls. I think "they" might be something hard in life like difficulties people encounter because of their fate, and they come without reason, and no matter how hard you try to find the original, you just can't, and you will give up and learn to accept them.

I also like "Dugong" very much since I saw a lot of familiar names of people and places in Chinese. The whole story's pace was good until the anteater kicked in. I feel except the dugong talked, the story made sense until I became confused when the creature started to talk about Columbus.