Sunday, January 30, 2005

 

Book recommendations

One advice that I always follow is never completely trust recommendations from anybody. Book reviews ...especially by fellow writers can be a good guidance but even so don't take them wholeheartedly...

I'm going to contradict myself here...What I suggest you and anybody who live in Klang Valley do is to go to the BRITISH COUNCIL at Jalan Ampang... go and read weekend editions (Saturday & Sunday papers) especially the GUARDIAN and The TIMES...go read the book sections... These papers have some of the best writings on literary stuff... reading them make you feel ashamed reading our local NST or the STAR...let alone the malay papers...I sometimes go there too...so who knows we all can meet each other there...

I once gave a present to a friend who is just getting married… Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier…a great and beautiful romantic story full of nostalgia written by a great writer with a tragically short life ……but I never get any comment whether he read it or not….since then I’ve never presented anyone with any books….
I generally hate book presents because nine out of ten times you tend to get books that you hate… but I once received a present from someone a really great book by a really great writer…Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa….

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

 

Books you read when travelling

While on train , bus or airplane on long journeys...you'll see people reading , yes, even here in Malaysia which is notorious for people not reading anything apart from silly gossipy magazines ..you'll notice a few rapt in their paperbacks....and I'm obsessed by the need to know what these people are reading... it's kind of like trying to peek into people's souls in a way... I have this urge to come up to the reader and flip the cover to know what the title is...

But more often than not I feel dissapointed when I finally get to glimpse the title as in most cases the books are just long version of silly gossipy magazines...most of the books are those formulaic and saccharine romances or thrillers....not that I have anything against these authors... they are some of the most clever people and they know they can make loads and loads of money by giving more of the same to silly uncritical readers...people like John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steel the late Barbara Cartland...these people know what they are doing are not art..but just feeding people macdonalds in words....

Hardly anybody seems to read real books...but sometimes you do meet people reading some unexpected books...I once saw this beautiful lady reading William Boyd's "Stars and Bars"...Boyd isn't exactly Doestoevky of course but he's one of the better popular novelists...Over the years I've read several of his books and I have the following in my collection : Good Man in Africa (1981) An Ice-Cream War (1982) Brazzaville Beach(1990)The Destiny of Natalie 'X' and Other Stories (1995) and Armadillo (1998). The girl I mentioned above was in Dover though, so perhaps not very suprising to find people reading good books here..in England I mean....though judging from the top 20 books in major papers like the Times or The Guardian quickly show that even English people mostly read rubbish...

Back here, quite recently I was with this engineer friend on a flight and I noticed he was reading a thick book with a bown paper cover. Now here's someone reading an interesting book! I thought, porn may be..a brave man to read porn on a plane I thought....he's more interesting than I originally thought...I thought...I asked him what he's reading but he kind of refused to say much...I waited till he nodded off and flipped the inside cover..and lo and behold! he's reading Harry Potter!!!..but sensible enough to cover the cover page with brown paper......

Anyway, for me whenever I'm travelling I usually bring several books...at least one fiction and one non fiction..If I go overseas lonely planet is a must of course...In my most recent Trip to Cambodia in December I brought with me Bill Bryson's Sunburned Country..a quite hilarious travel book on Australia and a Vonnegut paperback.

I'm looking forward to my next travel which is in two weeks' time to London and what I'm really looking forward to is on the way back...I'll fly to Moscow and spend a couple of days there and than take a 6 day trans-siberian train journey to Beijing...I'll have plenty of times to kill and need to start thinking which books to bring...I'm thinking of bringing several volumes of GRANTA, may be Marmaduke Pikthall's translation "The Glorius Quran" and the highly interesting book about Jews and anti-semitism that I'm currently reading ..."CHUTZPAH" by Alan M. Dershowitz.

An interesting comment by one reviewer in Amazon.com has this to say about Jews:The essential question is... Are his people persecuted because they are obnoxious or are they obnoxious because they are persecuted?

Friday, January 14, 2005

 

We are Lost!

I have about one thousand or may be two thousand books in my library...99.99% are in English language...on art, travel, wildlife, fictions, biographies, Islam, other religions etc etc...not that I love mat salleh or prefer mat salleh's language...in fact I feel like washing my mouth everytime when speaking in english or cut my hand when tapping all these words in english... but what to do... it's like cancer...this language... it has coursed through my vein and invade my intellectual being... why ? because like many of you I've been educated in english....but...on the bright side...we have to admit that all kinds of written words... from the mundane reference books to the highest literaary writings...theirs are far far superior to our own.... but no...actually our OLD manuscripts are no less of supreme quality..but along the way ...we lost our way...now our writings are next to worthless...I have not read any Malay writings (creative writings I mean) since I can't remember when....it's sad but then again...poor us... we've lost everything...food (we eat tom yam, nasi kandar, mac donald, we drink capucchino,) films ,musics the same... we've been invaded by alien cultures...we are lost!!!....

 

Saturday, January 01, 2005

 

The book I read on the last day of 2004

It's now 5 minutes to midnight and new year 2005...and it's appropriate that I end 2004 and start 2005 thinking about books... books to read for pleasure...so what's the very last book that I read in 2004?
Well last night before I went to sleep I was reading an old GRANTA issue focussing on India, about Kashmir during the mid 90s when the beautiful Kashmir became a mess due to the fighting with India....It was a depressing read... nodded off before finishing it...and just before that, night before last I was reading an even more depressing story in the same issue about Bombay...this time about the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Mosque and how the Shiv Sena thugs rampaging and burning muslims in Bombay....
Oh hey...as I'm writing this it's now past mid night so...happy new year to you all.....and it's appropriate that I'm writing about GRANTA to usher in the new year. This is to me one of the best English literary quarterly that I've come across...you have great writing by all the wellknown and great writers on all kinds of topics...fiction, biography, novel in progress, travel, opinion pieces/essays...anything and everything worth reading...

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