Fox

One evening, a fox started learning English by eavesdropping on a human family's bedtime stories. 

Fox 8, an eponymous protagonist in the story by George Saunders, doesn't write perfect. He makes a lot of spelling mistakes, and is barely able to speak "Yuman" after hiding in the bushes outside a human's house. 

Fox 8 thinks the "Yuman" voice sounds great, and is particularly drawn to the human bedtime stories. The most difficult thing for him, however, is to listen to the story of The Hen and the Fox. Oh, the fox is depicted as a sly villain tricking chickens. None of this is true according to Fox 8.

Witnessing human's cruelty is just another piece of evidence that fox is not sly, not as mean as the human worker who killed his companion fox who ventured into a human mall's food court.   

What's the moral of this story? I think the dark joke should be from the last piece of advice from Fox 8: "I know you Yumans like your stories to end happy. If you want your stories to end happy, try being nicer."

War

Mention the genre of historical fiction, story setting of wars will come to mind. Tolstoy's War and Peace is just one contemporary example.

As mentioned in the moving fiction, The Mountains Sing, wars have the power to turn graceful and cultured people into monsters.

The father of the protagonist, Diệu Lan, was unlucky to meet one of those monsters. He was decapitated and murdered by Japanese soldiers when he was travelling to Hanoi to sell his family's potato crop. 

If you think wars can only strip away people's conscience, Diệu Lan would have sneered at your condescension. Wars unmask human courage and grace too. The Great Famine in 1945 forced Diệu Lan to flee to Hanoi as a beggar with five of her children. She could find nothing to keep the children alive, and ended up offering them the banana stalk. 

"But that's pig's food," said her son.

"If pigs can eat it, so can we," Diệu Lan smiled and bit into the stalk. Juicy and crunchy.

Her daughter took a bite and nodded. "Delicious."

Her son then gave in, biting down the banana stalk. His face softened as he ate. 

Their family endured the famine and made it.

Chasing

Whatever the limits and travails we face, many of us want to run faster. This is the very marrow being runners. Sebastian Sawe of Kenya has just become the first human to run a marathon in under two hours six months ago.

Any ambitious runner will tell you – I'm one – that years after the end of school sports day, it isn't the youngest runners who are still obsessed with their pacing, it's the most bullheaded. I'm one of those, too. 

I recently heard about the story of Annemari Sandell, a Finnish long-distance runner who spent six weeks training in the Rift Valley of Kenya before winning the world cross-country championships. Next, I read about Adharanand Finn, a British journalist who moved with his family to Kenya, running side by side with Olympic champions, giving up burgers and pizzas, switching to Kenyan staple dish known as ugali. He even woke up at five to do hill workouts with the Kenyans. Considering the altitude and thick jungle air, it's a commendable effort.

And at the end of it all, Adharanand Finn conquered the marathon in 2 hours 51 minutes to fulfil his sub-3-hour dream.

Addie

Victoria Schwab tells the story of a young French woman who is able to live forever, and without being able to be remembered by anyone she see. To capture the woman's Faustian bargain, the title of the book is called The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

Be forewarned, you will be jumping back and forth over a span of three hundred years because the novel has a non-linear timeline. Addie steals a scarf from a closet shelf this time, and then a paperback of The Odyssey next time. The thief can be caught, but never remembered. There's no need to worry about Addie's track record, when any thieving can be erased by a new page, an instant apart, and every life is a fresh start. A clean slate.

It's like getting a unlimited supply of Get Out of Jail Free cards, and everyone knows how satisfying that feels, however temporary. And then, between one life and the next, Addie can often roll a double six to Pass Go.

The ache of Addie's "life", however, can be tougher than what we could have imagined. And maybe it isn't a perfect way to live a life without being remembered. The curse for Addie to be forgotten by everyone she meets is much worse than the gain of being immortal: she isn't living any life at all when she is forgotten.

Gene

If you'd asked people a few years ago what their personality traits were decided, most wouldn't have said polygenic scores. 

But given what the scientific field of genetics has evolved, the polygenic score has been hailed as the ultimate crystal ball for our height, intelligence quotient, or even the chance of winning the Chicago Marathon. Once the full genetic code from huge number of people have been available, the range of genetic variations in people with a certain condition can be compared to those without the condition. Such information can then be used to calculate a polygenic risk score. 

A selling point of commercial score  – think about MyOme or 23andMe – is that the customer can find out if a kid is born with a sprinter's gene to win every game of tag or race. Or else, if you are such a strong believer in genetic determinism, that would be the chance to select the embryo for a more promising offspring, or to adjust the premium for the life insurance company. 

Don't get me wrong, I am not against exploring our DNA, the source code of all life. It makes sense to get a polygenic score for coronary artery disease and work out who are at an unfavorable odds of getting heart attack. They deserve better control of risk factors. That being said, don't forget what Anneke Lucassen, a professor of genomic medicine in the NHS, has mentioned about our destiny: a person's postcode at birth can potentially predict risk of future disease just as well as the genetic code. Ten years ago, a study of over 55,000 people has confirmed that even for those deemed at high genetic risk (top quintile of polygenic scores), a favorable lifestyle can offset a nearly 50% risk of coronary artery disease.  

Perhaps we do ourselves a disservice by putting too much – or too rigid – emphasis on our destiny being deterimined by genes. 

Dolly Parton

Obitutary of country-music legends, such as George Jones, had filled half page in Time magazine in 2013. After the death of Dolly Parton was announced by her family less than two months ago, the magazine dedicated the cover and a four-page feature to pay tribute to the country-music superstar. 

I didn't know too much details of her rags-to-rhinestones career, and wasn't aware that she won eleven Grammy Awards. I then borrowed the novel written by Dolly Parton and James Patterson: Run, Rose, Run. Featured in the thriller, a young singer-songwriter AnnieLee Keyes met a reclusive music legend Ruthanna Ryder who has retired. To a certain degree, AnnieLee looks like the next Taylor Swift, and Ruthanna is the familiar Dolly Parton who created the Book Garden to put books in the hands of needy kids in the story.

A story of make-believe. That's like what Dolly Parton said, "I don't practice my faith; I live it."

Grief

Wally Lamb's novel The River is Waiting is a daring exploration into the question if the weight of having been a good parent can atone for atrocity of killing one's child.

After the loss of his job, a stay-at-home father, Corby Ledbetter, killed one of his children in a car accident. He was sentenced to prison because blood test results indicated he was drunk and strung out on benzos. When the judge handed down the charge of manslaughter, she said some sentences were easy to decide, others kept her up at night. And Corby's was one of the latter ones. 

For me, this book by Wally Lamb is both an easy choice (one of the best I have read this year) and one that keeps me up at night (from a heart-shattering story).