Fresh Books to the Pile
I blame bookstores for depleting my cash reserves. Despite all good intentions, I have bought a couple of fiction titles (let’s leave non-fiction out of this for now) to add to the to-read pile.
One was on a recent unplanned visit to Amcorp Mall where I found, in one of the boxes of one of the flea-market traders, a big-copy edition of Primary Colours. I have not seen the movie so thought RM10 was quite fair exchange for this tale of political intrigue and subterfuge. There could be an underlying longing that such intrigues and twisted plots (and minds) only exist in stories but – ah.
today – on my Mummy’s Time Out visit to Times bookstore at Bangsar Shopping Centre, I found, with a gasp, a book I had been searching for weeks ago but then forgot. “Let the Right One In” by John Ajvide Lindqvist. My earlier post would tell you how enthralled I was by his “Handling the Undead“. Let the Right One In is going to be released as a movie but in line with a quote I recently stumbled upon “Never judge a book by its movie“, I’m determined to read this vampire tale first before watching Hollywood’s treatment of it.
A reader’s advice to writers
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Ripples and Other Stories: Impressions
I just finished reading Shih Li Kow’s Ripples and Other Stories. A collection of short stories, all of which feature very Malaysian characters and settings (well, except for one fantasy-infused tale), the book makes for thoughtful, intelligent reading. Shih Li’s economical prose paints scenes most Malaysians would be familiar with, but is explored with enough depth and sensitivity to bathe the scenes in new light.
What I especially liked was how characters in one story would appear in another, making us rethink the character and their lives. My favourites are “Hungry in Guangzhou” which has a young Chinese man realise he is more at home in Malaysia than where his ancestors come from, China; “My Mother’s Shadow”, a poignant piece written by an especially sensitive ten year old girl of her Mother; “Private Tuition” which recalls the 1969 incident and the individuals whose lives were forever changed; “Know My Name”, about an abused and love-deprived Chinese teen and his relationship with his parents’ night guard.
An excerpt from “My Mother’s Shadow”:
“I sleep with my shoes on. My father thinks it’s a naughty prank that became a habit. He thinks that I will soon forget all about it the way babies abandon their pacifiers when they decide that talking is more interesting. What he doesn’t know is that it’s dangerous to take our shoes off when we can’t watch over them. Some part of us can be stolen away along with the shoes. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Once tha tpiece of us is lost, we wil never be the same. I know. I saw it happen to my mother and she became a different person. Let me tell you.”
The book is a wonderful, quiet read, making you reflect deeper on Malaysian life, and on Malaysians. There are also quirky stories (including one very intersting ghost story!) to add variety to the collection. I look forward to more of Shih Li’s work.
*This book was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize.
Article: A New Way of Reading
I am one of a small group of people who own an electronic book Reader, coincidentally also a Sony, and wholeheartedly agree with the lack of e-book devices in the country, as well as the difficulty of downloading and purchasing e-books from Malaysia.
For some weird reason, even the Sony site insists on an American address, which is why I piggy-back on a friend’s collection (via his e-mail) for his downloaded books. Mine now sports almost a hundred titles with quite a number of police procedurals and crime fiction (no complaints). Still, it would be nice to be able to conveniently select and buy the books that I want to read at my own time and through my own computer.
Anyway, here is a very good article on e-books, by Elizabeth Tai.
From The Sunday Star (Malaysia), 24 January 2010
IF you’re a bookworm, carting around hundreds of books in one slim, book-sized electronic device would be the closest thing to Nirvana.
For Zarina Abu Bakar, it certainly is.
“You know how you can get caught unexpectedly, having to wait? Waiting for people to show up, for dinner to arrive or for the cars in front of you to move? With the eBook, I am assured of a variety of titles to keep me occupied during these unwanted and unexpected waits,” says Zarina, 37, who reads eBooks with her US$279.99 (about RM957) Sony Reader, a gift she received two years ago from a friend.
Zarina, whose Reader is loaded with the Quran and works by Jane Austen, Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy, feels that eBooks are better than physical books because they’re more convenient, portable and one doesn’t have to drive to a bookstore to get them.
“Additional pluses are the automatic bookmarks – no more losing your place in the book – and the (Reader’s) variable font sizes. It also helps to know that you’re saving the environment,” says this general manager of a Putrajaya-based NGO via e-mail.
Although eBook devices have been selling in many Western countries for a decade, they have yet to become readily available in Malaysia (until recently).
For various reasons – including market size and piracy, which we will get into later – Malaysians can’t even buy any of the more popular eBook devices online and have them shipped to a local address; we have to actually go to countries such as Australia, Britain, Japan and the United States to get one, or get friends or relatives living there to buy one.
To Read: Alice in Wonderland
Never read Alice in Wonderland but get very curious about this book. Now that it’s going to be made into a movie (and in 3D too – I saw the trailer and it looks great), I thought I’d better get to know Alice better. Found this link to a free copy with the first edition’s illustrations!
Sir John Tenniel's illustration for the first edition
Article: (Apple’s)Tablet is the New Book
I can’t wait for this device to come out, especially if Apple allows users outside of the US and Canada to purchase books easily and cheaply, as what they’ve done to the music segment. It’d be great to be able to read Neil Gaiman’s graphic novels at a fraction of the price, but in full colour, and it’d be fantastic to be able to annotate and store memorable passages, words and phrases. Check out the Youtube on what this device will do to textbooks too!
Unless you’ve been trapped under a very large P.C. for the last year, you’ve likely heard the about Apple’s rumored new tablet device (now being heralded as the “iSlate”). The device is thought to be an 8 (or 10, or 11) inch flat iPod-like gadget that will be a mix between a Mac laptop and a Kindle. Most rumors suggest that it will have a touch interface and video capabilities, and, thanks to today’s Wall Street Journal, it has a likely release date: March. (According to the article, Apple will show it to the public later this month.)
Although anticipation has already reached a fever pitch (just take a look at Twitter’s most popular topics on most days) book publishers have an especially vested interest in the gadget. While there have been numerous electronic book readers coming out in the last year (including the most recent, The Skiff), few have managed to capture the public’s imagination beyond the Amazon Kindle – which hasn’t exactly done much for publishers’ bottom line. Many people in the beleaguered industry are hoping that device will do for reading what the iPod and iTunes did for music. A survey among booksellers claimed that an Apple e-reader would one of the main factors that will help push digital publishing forward.
Article source: Apple – Salon.com (“Tablet is the New Book”)
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Article: Don’t fear the e-reader
As a grateful owner of a SONY PRS-505, I am all for e-books and can attest that they complement physical books versus supplanting them. I may not be ready for the Vook yet, though.
The traditional system makes the author — the creator — almost a bit player in the process, with the publishing house winning the lion’s share of the profits to help support its big, expensive infrastructure. Since each book is an investment, the primary concern has to be commercial viability. This shuts any number of talented unknowns out of the system, particularly in the nonfiction categories. Meanwhile, the price of physical books has increased to the point where a lot of readers have also been shut out of the system.
E-books change the equation. Yes, you still need an editorial staff and you still need publicists and you absolutely need a top-flight team of computer geeks. But gone are the cover artists and typesetters, the huge printing presses, the giant rolls of paper, the warehouses full of books, the fleet of trucks to bring the books to far-flung Borders and Barnes & Nobles. The price point for titles will have to be somewhat lower, but the investment is less, and the risks fewer.
Ideally, this allows more writers to enter the publishing stream and to keep a higher percentage of the profits. Ideally, it opens the world of literature and knowledge to more people.
It also allows innovation. Computer technology allows an interactivity that the page simply can’t manage. One company to watch is Vook, which just launched in mid-2009.
Source: Don’t fear the e-reader (Salon,com)
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To Read: Generosity by Richard Powers
A book on the science of happiness, or whether there is such a thing as too much happiness. Happiness in a bottle, anyone?
Everybody wants to be happy. But does anyone want to be happy all the time? Without shades of melancholy grey, wouldn’t perpetual bliss make life unbearably bland, a sort of whited-out death on earth?
These questions stand at the heart of Richard Powers’s provocative 10th novel. Set in contemporary Chicago, it ponders the fast-approaching time when neuroscience will allow us to control our emotions. The story centres on Thassa Amzwar, a 23-year-old Algerian immigrant who has fled that nation’s brutal civil war after the slaughter of most of her family. Although she has much more reason to be depressed than the self-involved American students at her film school, Thassa is the picture of happiness, emerging from the “walking corpse” of Algeria “glowing like a blessed-out mystic”.
Two to Begin
Here we are, at the start of another new year. How will it compare – better, worse, happier, heavier, brighter, darker – to last year? Whichever way the road turns, books make good travel companions.j
A visit to the bookstore is always a good way to start the new year. A jaunt to Kinokuniya – on a somewhat vague mission to add some quirkiness to the bookshelf – yielded two titles by as yet unread (by me) authors: Swede John Ajvide Lindqvist and Karen Joy Fowler.
I’s heard of Let The Right One In, but never got around to reading it. This one that I did get, Handling the Undead, has a dark-humoured though not very original premise: the dead coming back to life. What do you do when the loved one you lost and mourned for, return?
I am on page 100. John’s writing is neat, spare, but incisive. 100 pages in, and he has managed to balance the comic absurdity of corpses jerking back to life with the horror of the living at the encounter. Grief, loss, and pain permeate the narrative, though there are scenes of almost-hilarity (imagine a morgue with hundreds of new dead awakening).
I don’t know yet where John will steer the story, though I sincerely hope it doesn’t end up as a zombie gore fest.
Stephen King dealt with this subject matter in some depth in Pet Sematary, and simlar to King’s shambling corpses, John’s are also clearly bare of the human soul. King’s walking dead were very quickly and clearly monsters, though the reader can argue that the more monstrous were the relatives who brought them back to life in the first place. Both, I believe, deal with the pain that the loss of a loved one causes, dealing with death, and the question: what happens after we die?
I have more than two hundred pages more to go in this rather grim tale of the undead in Stockholm.
