Runner

There's nothing quite like reading a runner's journey learning to run – and to live – like a Greek. That's how and why I borrowed the book The Art of Running by Andrea Marcolongo, who learned Ancient Greek at her liceo classico at the age of fourteen, and started her instinct to run along the Seine at the age of thirty-two. 

The author experienced the vital impulse at a similar age as Haruki Murakami (who started to run at the age of thirty-three, the age that Jesus Christ died, the age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill). That has a lot to do with the fear of aging. She trained hard to run the marathon in Marathon. For history buffs and runners, the small town of Marathon needs little introduction; this is where the Athenian herald Pheidippides had started his run to Athens. Andrea Marcolongo insisted on running to see the Giants and Lapiths atop the Parthenon with her own two eyes, standing on her own two legs.

I love the way Andrea Marcolongo described running: that is her way to prove that she still has time, that adulthood (read: old age) is relative, that there is no end to youth if we dedicate ourselves to staying in shape.

Fiction

Weird – and no doubt controversial – as it may sound, a book from fictional genre can resemble an autobiography. 

Sigrid Nunez, an American writer, wrote her seventh novel The Friend in the first person voice. In the middle of reading this story of a woman mourning the suicide of a close friend and taking in his bereft dog, I had to look back at the call number on the spine of the library book. I checked the letter F and convinced myself it's indeed a fiction, and not a memoir.

Writers like Proust, Isherwood, Duras, Knausgård, are particularly skilful in handling fiction as autobiography, autobiography as fiction. As Sigrid Nunez quips, "When someone asks why a highly unconventional book is called a novel, the author responds it's a novel because he says it is."

Security

Kiley Reid's book Such a Fun Age is a page turner about race and class.

The story is about a Black babysitter, Emira, who was accused by an upscale grocery store security guard. The security guard suspected Emira to be a kidnapper of a white toddler. The scene of tense standoff – security guard pointing finger at Emira's face, and rebuttal "The fuck are you doing? Don't touch me!" from Emira holding a two-year-old girl – was filmed by a white man holding his cell phone.

Emira didn't want to keep the video and asked for deletion of the footage. Things got complicated when it turns out that video had been leaked and went viral. Emira Googled black girl grocery store video and was appalled by thousand entries of comment on Twitter. 

The novel isn't about cybersecurity but Emira's friend's comments serve as a lens through which I learn to to be careful. Emira's friend Zara asked the key questions on safeguarding digital data.

"Who the fuck did you send this to?"

"Did someone steal your phone?"

"Look at me. Did your phone get hacked?"

"Is it on the cloud? Or on a drive or a shared folder?" 

"Are you sure he deleted it that night? Did he delete if from his Sent folder? Did you make sure?"

Age

When I was preparing a lecture for geriatric medicine, I heard the news of President-elect of the United States at the age of seventy-eight. 

Should there be an age limit for the election? 

Yes, I know, that might seem like comitting the sin of ageism. Still, I have to say that there is nowadays an imbalance of power that favors the old. 

It is not just in politics that our performance peaked when we were relatively young. This is also true in science and mathematics, according to the Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan who discovered the structue of ribosome. In his book Why We Die, he talked about people working into their seventies or eighties – or even longer – with unwillingness to admit getting old. 

Surrounded by scientists trying to hang on for as long as they can, Venki Ramakrishnan discussed the time when our creative powers peak. The first answer that came to his mind was the age when scientist did their best work. For Nobel Prize winners, they nearly always make their key breakthroughs when they are young and not very powerful. 

Next, he turned to the most innovative companies (think Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the artificial intelligence company DeepMind): they were started by people in their twenties or thirties.

The same was true of literature. Kazuo Ishiguro said it was hard to find cases where an author's most renowned work had come after the age of forty-five. If you aren't convinced, think about War and Peace, Ulysses, Pride and Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights. These novels were all written by writers in their twenties and thirties. 

No wonder more than 1.2 million people marched in France last year to protest against the government's proposal to raise the retirement age a mere two years from sixty-two to sixty-four. Dosen't it make sense?

Collection

Reading books from black-belt storytellers has improved my way of crafting sentences – thanks to my habit of collecting – after jotting down memorable paragraphs from their books.

I can't think of a good reason, but I like collections. One of my vocabulary building hobbies, as an early reader at junior grades, is writing new words (and their meaning from dictionary) on a notebook. That's not all. As I'm getting older, I use my smartphone or laptop to copy good sentences every time I dive into reading.

The joy of collecting good sentences is best captured by my recent reading Martyr! from an Iranian American poet and novelist. Kaveh Akbar has extraordinary skill in writing metaphors. One good example is his way of depicting a crowded studio. He didn't state the size of the studio. He wrote it like this: I lived in a studio so small I could smell my neighbour's farts. 

I couldn't help laughing and copying. 

Leaf by Leaf

Autumn colours draw phenomenal crowds to Japan outdoor areas for the foliage, most prized of all being the maples. It's hard to resist. My wife and I have been grateful for the chance to view the vibrant colours during Kamikōchi trip this autumn. 

Calendar checking is getting more difficult when the climate change has pushed back the peak of autumn leaf season over the past decades. A study in the United States has confirmed delayed arrival of red maple leaf colours by more than a month since the 19th century.

Have you thought about the reason of leaves turning yellow and red? As the award-winning author Tristan Gooley told us, nature is not a whimsical artist splashing variety onto our landscape in the hope of winning prizes for creativity. According to his book How to Read a Tree, there must be a reason for every one of the differences we see. 

Next time you see leaves turning yellow, you know it is a negative effect: you see yellow, but you're actually looking at an absence of green. These are times when trees draw chlorophyll from their leaves back into themselves: the trees dare not waste such as a valuable resource as daylight hours decrease. Much like a photographer putting back camera after dark, the trees have evolved an adaptation strategy to prepare for winter. On the flip side, some trees like oak and maple produce sugars during the day that are then trapped inside by longer, cooler nights. The sugars lead to the production of pigments, such as anthocyanins, which serve as their "sunscreen", so to speak, when their chlorophyll is recycled. The anthocyanins are what make maple trees look red and attractive to us during autumn.

Kamikōchi

Kamikōchi has been revered as Japan's answer to the Yosemite or Patagonia. Even I have neither been to Sierra Nevada nor South America, I have to agree that Kamikōchi is the Holy Grail for hiking enthusiasts. 

Situated at an elevation of 1,500 metres and along the banks of the crystal-clear Azusa-gawa, Kamikōchi is also known as the "Japanese Alps", a term popularised by the English missionary and conservationist Reverend Walter Weston. The town's popularity spiked in 1927 with the release of Kappa, a novella set in Kamikōchi and written by the Japanese author Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

My wife and I had an enjoyable four-hour walk in Kamikōchi today, eyeing the peaks of Mt Yake-dake and Mt Okuhotaka-dake. 

As your travel guide tells you, it wouldn't be Japan without the crowds. Timing is everything. To beat the crowd, we took our breakfast around 7 and caught the bus early. Many passengers got off the bus near Taishō-ike pond for leisure walk, and we decided to hike upriver to Myōjin-ike before heading back. While privacy may not be a big part of the hiking experience, perfect weather is. We counted ourselves exceptionally lucky to have Kamikōchi hiking on a day with the best sunny period within this week.