The World I Saw When My Eyes Were Little

I bought two books in a day, and without a precise reason, both of them are about one's childhood.

1.  The boy in the striped pyjamas (Chú bé mang pyjama sọc - in Vietnamese): This has to be one of the best books I have read. Not that I've read that many books, but I can claim with certainty that this is a book of quality. Unlike Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter 7, and the other books that made me keep reading for straight hours after I opened the first page, this book is written with a very slow pace. The first half of the book didn't seem to impress me that much; one day, I read chapter one, and another day, I read chapter two. Then, one random day, when I picked up the book again and read the last few pages, I could feel the tightness of my heart beats, one coming right after another, while I intensely followed the footsteps of the young Bruno, worrying about the cruel things that might happen to this innocent mind. I decided not to spoil any content-related material here because I wanted those who haven't read the book to have the chance to experience it themselves. But, this is the only book that when I turned the last page and folded the book, I put it on my heart and started to contemplate things all over again, as if I still hadn't believed what just happened. Anyways, great book to read. And the movie was also great. I got killed again when I saw the movie, even when I had already read the book. What a genius work, killing me twice by two different versions! Thank John Boyne for making this book available to mankind.

The published cover of "The boy in striped pyjamas" in Vietnam

2.  Cho tôi xin một vé đi tuổi thơ (Give me a ticket back to childhood - in English): Let's start with a poem by the Russian poet Robert Rojdesvensky:

[...] 

Today I rushed out of home

to the station,

queue up for the ticket:

"The first time in a millenium,

perhaps,

give me a ticket back to Childhood.
The middle class."

Detachedly, the seller
quietly whispered

"Sold out".

[...]

The cover of "Give me a ticket back to childhood"
by Anh Nhat Nguyen

This book is written by Anh Nhat Nguyen, the Vietnamese writer who wrote many works suitable for children, simple yet always deep. It's not a book to haunt me for days like The boy in striped pyjamas, but it has the ability to make me burst out my laughter whenever I encountered some funny lines (This is amazing, considering the fact that I don't know since when I no longer laughed at intended humorous stories). It also made it way into my mind, and revealed the little secrets I hid from my parents for too long, before I forgot them myself. There's one paragraph about how the author used to hate sleeping at noon (a Vietnamese habit) and pretend to close his eyes to deceive the parents, and he always end up sleeping for real. When I read this paragraph, I just could not stop smiling, because I couldn't express how much it applies to my case when I was young, and I bet it must be the same thing for many kids all over Vietnam too. Reading the book, I realize  the little secrets that I thought to be only mine are actually universally true for all the Vietnamese kids (like how I always pretended to be sleeping at noon and always ended up sleeping for real). This thin book (only 200 small-size pages) is not really special, but it seems to be a little diary that keeps the author's childhood, while reading it reminds me of my own childhood. How amazing.

Okay, I think it's already an amazing thing that today I can write this much. Recently life seems so busy that spending one or two hours for blogging seems so difficult. I guess life at university will be much harder than this, so I will try to make use of this time to keep up my blogging as much as possible. Another part of this childhood post may be released soon.

Good night to anyone who has read this post till this line.