might be time i started this up again

Pick a song, any song

So I picked up Nick Hornby's 31 Songs as a gift for a friend. But decided that since I wasn't gonna give it away just yet, I'd read it first.

Hornby's somewhat famous for his hits About A Boy and High Fidelity, which were turned into pretty successful films, and many people I know are serious fans of High Fidelity, them music freaks.

Anyway, 31 songs is another book for the music freak I figure. Hornby's written an anthology of sorts about yep you guessed it, 31 songs.

There is a nice mixture, from the modern to the classic. Like he writes of how Nelly Furtado's I'm Like A Bird is ... well actually he doesn't really describe the song but rather how there are certain songs you just have to play over and over again. Which is very true. I do that too often and always wondered why. So Hornby provides an answer of sorts or at least Dave Eggers does: "we have to 'solve' them."

which i suppose is true. to understand a song better, to 'get it' and maybe even to figure out some elusive lyrics.

But it's a pretty darn good read and I love the way he drifts off onto other things. it's not a song/album review but a personal account of why these songs matter to him and that's what's fascinating. It's a little like Will Self (see below) and his restaurant reviews really. To me, that is writing but of course you'll never find that in most newspapers/magazines in Singapore.

feeding frenzy

Will Self is a bit of controversial journalist as journalists come. He was the restaurant critic for The Observer for 2 years in the 1990s and wrote for several other British papers like The Independent. Self's also an author.

Apparently he got fired from The Observer after admitting to have taken heroin while onboard then-Prime Minister John Major's plane while covering the campaign.'

More info on Will Self and his exploits can be found Here

What I am concerned with though is his book Feeding Frenzy. While not really a proper book, it is instead a collection of his articles writing for the various magazines and dailies. It's chock-full of restaurant reviews, book reviews, art exhibition commentaries and so on. It's just bursting at the seams really.

I was a little confused at how to go about reading it cos there wasn't a listing of the various reviews and it doesn't really seem to follow any order so I decided to just flip around and read whatever caught my eye. And I like his restaurant reviews. They are delightfully irreverent, sometimes barely commenting on the food until right at the end. Although I'm sure some people will (and probably have) comment that he is terribly self-indulgent and a bit wacky. But that's what Self admits -- that he is eccentric. And that's what's important really. Admitting that you are. ha

anyway i did a quick search on amazon.com but the book is not to be found there. I suppose it's seriously a Brit thing...

desired

Martin Amis' Yellow Dog
Amy Tan's The Opposite Of Fate
Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake
Charles Baxter's SAul And Patsy
Paul Auster's The Book Of Illusions
Dave Egger's You Shall Know Our Velocity
JM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello
DBC PIerre's Vernon God Little
Salman Rushdie's Step Across This Line

Books read in 2003

The year is coming to a close (unfortunately!!) and here's the list of books i've read this year. For some reason, my list only starts in February and for the life of me I can't remember why that's so! Some, like the Bridget Jones series, were read for a second time.

Looking through the list I realise it's a more varied listing than in previous years. There are more non-fiction books, more Asian writers (mostly thanks to the pile of books a colleague lent me, some good some bad!). It was also the year I picked up a book, attracted solely by the cover and found a genius of a writer within! But then of course the world already knew of him as Jose Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

Some of the memorable books are (this list doesn't include read-agains):
Mario Vargas Llosa - The Feast Of The Goat
John Steinbeck's East Of Eden
Iris Murdoch's The Sea The Sea
Jose Saramago's Blindness
Gerard Jones' Killing Monsters
Katherine Graham's A Personal History
Phillip Hensher's The Mulberry Empire
Yan Geling's Lost Daughter Of Happiness
Jasper Fforde's Lost In A Good Book

My goal for next year: to read more, to read more variedly and to also include notes! (I can barely remember the plot of many of the books read this year) And also to write more in this bookbound blog.

It's strange to write down my reading goals, ocme to think of it. But I like to take my reading seriously. There are so many many books out there that I've yet to lay my hands on and my list of To Be Reads keeps growing and growing!


THE LIST (in case you're wondering, it's a total of 52 ie a book a week)
Author and Title
John Cheever - Stories of John Cheever
Mary Ann Taylor Hall - Come And Go Molly Snow
John Irving - The Fourth Hand
Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang
Joanne Harris - Blackberry Wine
Dennis Mcfarland - The Music Room
Mario Vagas Llosa - The Feast of the Goat
H. G. Wellls - The Invisible Man
James Nagel et al - Hemmingway in Love and War
Franz Kafka - The Trial
William Styron - Sophie's Choice
Somerset Maugham - Far Eastern Tales
E. Annie Proloux - The Shipping News
Emma Forrest - Thin Skin
Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway
Helen Fielding - Bridget Jones' Diary
Dave Eggers - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Helen Fielding - Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
Nigel Slater - Real Good Food
Stephen Carter - The Emperor of Ocean's Park
Katherine Graham- Personal History
Jasper Fforde - Lost In A Good Book
Jose Saramango- Blindness
Iris Murdoch - The Sea, The Sea
Alberto Manguel- A History Of Reading
Bill Bryson - Down Under
Fay Weldon - The Bulgari Connection
John Irving - My Movie Business
John Steinbeck - East Of Eden
Suzanne Keyes - The Camera My Mother Gave Me
Ann Packer - The Dive From Clausen's Pier
Robert S McNamara - In Retrospect
Jose Saramango - The Cave
Mineko Iwasaki - Geisha of Gion
Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart
Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
May-Lee Chai, Winberg Chai - Girl From Purple Mountain
Andrei Codrescu - The Dog With A Chip In His Neck
Margaret Atwood - Oryx And Crake
Tim Winton - Dirt Music
Gerard Jones - Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes and Make-Believe Violence
Betty S mith - A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
Liza Dalby - Tale of Murasaki
Martin Scorsese - Scorsese on Scorsese
Haruki Murakami - After The Quake
Jon McGregor - If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things
Philip Roth - Letting Go
Yan Geling - Lost Daughter of Happiness
Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones
Ahdaf Soueif - Map Of Love
Loida Maritza Perez - Geographies Of Home
Phillip Hensher - The Mulberry Empire

The Boston Globe's top picks

The Village Voice's best of 2003

The Sydney Morning Herald's list of best books of 2003.

The Boston Globe's best books

The New York Times' list

Lost daughter of happiness

I've heard of this book, well the title at least, for quite a while now but never was interested enough to pick it up.

I dont know what made me pick it up at the library last week but i'm glad i did. it was a good read.

kinda expected it to be the usual ''in my days' type of chinese novel. which i am frankly very sick of. but it wasn't . it was interestingly abt a chinese prostitute in san francisco in the 1860s.

i'm terrible at writing book reviews. mostly cos it seems like work. u know what i mean?

i like to read, i really do and reading something and writing a review after that kinda puts me off the book.

so all i want to say about this book is that it was a good read. i liked it. there.

Libraries

I am a big fan of libraries - after all, where else can u read books for free?

And I do want to applaud the National Library Board for extending their reach. I mean, libraries in shopping malls? That's a brilliant idea!

However, I do have something to complain about.

Just how is it that the library will only stock certain books in certain libraries?
And in some cases, a library will only have one copy of a book?

I'm not talking of some obscure book here. Take for example Monica Ali's Brick Lane. It's been much hyped-up and was a nominee for the Man Booker Prize, one of the biggest book prizes in the world. And yet, there is only one book that resides in the Bukit Batok library (which happens to be the library I frequent the most)

I do recall searching for a book via the online catalogue and realising that I would have to go to either Sengkang, Geylang or some other similarly far library.

Heck I'd rather just buy the book!

Which actually leads me on to another thing: the Word Shop has disappeared from Marina Square!!!

No More Cheap Books!

Sigh, i fondly recall the day I purchased The Eyre Affair from them at less than ten dollars. So what if it was a little bent? At that price, who cares?

I enjoyed searching the shelves, finding a name I recognised. It's where I picked up books by Salman Rushdie, Kate Greenville and Alice Hoffman for that same low low price.

Now where do i get books at those prices?

booklist

The Guardian has a list of the top 100 novels of all time. Not everyone agrees with them I'm sure.
how many have you read? Find out here

My count's 22. but then i can't remember whether i've read a few of them. i guess then i can't count them if i can't remember them!!

if nobody speaks

of remarkable things

isn't that a gorgeous title? I think i'd heard of it somewher else before and it caught my eye at the library.

I'm just starting on it but I do like the way he opens the book. With sound. To further illustrate what i mean here's a sentence from the second paragraph of the book.

'The low soothing hum of air-conditioners, fanning out the heat and the smells of shops and cafes and offices across the city, winding up and winding down, long breaths layered upon each other, a lullaby hum for tired streets.'

He's quite poetic but loses me a little at times as he does write about a whole lot of things that are going on. I do like the bits where he's more of an observer looking down on the various goings-on in the street below and writing about them.

Then he switches to a first-person narrative and stupid me, thought it was a guy. Turns out to be a girl. Maybe i was just sleepy when i was reading that. (!)

bout time

I figured it's about time I posted something to this blog, this poor neglected blog.

So let me tell you what I've been reading. All about it.

In the morning I get up and read the newspapers -- the Straits Times (skimming thru really cos i already know what's in the papers the night before), Streats and Today. On Wednesdays I also do a quick flip of the computer times.

I have been trying to catch up with the Newsweek subscription. I've just started with this week's issue so not too bad. Should be able to get that through before the next one comes.

The one that's lagging behind is The Atlantic -- the new issue has been sitting on my footstool (ok, it's a box) for about a week and i still haven't finished the previous one!

Dont get me wrong, it's a great magazine. last month's copy had a great story on shipping. I know, shipping! It's not the most exciting thing in the world but it was well-written and personalised so it was a good read.

I also read: The New York Times online, The Guardian unlimited, the BBC news online at work. Those are the three I rely on most. Occasionally I will see what ChannelNewsAsia has on their website, to make sure we are as updated as they are!

do the shawshank

Reading Different Seasons for the umpteenth time. It's Stephen King's most brilliant book. A collection of 4 novella (they're really too long to be called short stories so i think novella is the right word? but please correct me if i'm wrong)

My favourite of the four is the Shawshank Redemption. It's a well-crafted story, narrated by Red, who's Shawshank's get-man. He gets whatever the inmates want, except for weapons. And that's how he befriends Andy Dufresne, in jail for allegedly killing his wife and her lover. Andy asks for a rock hammer, a tiny thing beloved by rock collectors. he later asks for a poster of Rita Hayworth, and we find out in the end just how important that poster was to him.

terrible summary i know, but it's the hand, the hand!!

Also picked up Tim Winton's Dirt Music from the library. Will see how that goes after I'm done with the magazines (NG Traveler and Book)

I've decided that before I die i would like to visit Portland, Oregon. And why? that's the home of Powells. It's supposed to be an excellent (and huge bookstore).
I like their website and their newsletter even more. Very quirky newsletter which always includes a short on Fup. Store cat.

and that line: 'Just one serving of today's edition provides 100% of the recommended daily allowance of news from Portland, Oregon.'

cheery

atwoodian

am abt half way thru margaret atwood's latest boo - courtesy o me sis who bought it 4 me bday pressie. Oryx And Crake is its name - havent heard muchgood abt it tho so bit apprehensive but quite like it. i guess it cld b called sci-fi somewat. it's set in the future n has a lot 2 do with cloning n stuff.

short post. hand still hurts

something different from the bbc

weird questions

same ole story

a colleague recently loaned me a whole stack of books. written by various asian writers.

the one i'm reading now is The Girl From Purple Mountain by May-lee Chai and Winberg Chai

it's your typical chinese-american exploration of family ancestry and in turn, learning more about oneself tale.

similar perhaps to the most famous of all chinese-american authors, amy tan.

but barely half as entertaining, and that's saying a lot as i'm not a fan of tan. (couldn't resist)

anyway, the thing is this family actually has a pretty interesting history. one of the ancestors (the grandma i think) was one of the few women to attend a university (at that time and in china too!) and she also got a masters in something in the US.

but the way the story is told is mighty confusing.

there is an explanation in the introduction. that the story is told from both may-lee and her father winberg's points of view. but these points of view do tend to jump a little here and there like in one chapter which is told mostly by winberg and at the end, there seems to be an anecdote tacked on, by may-lee.

the story is mostly of winberg's mother (may-lee's grandma) and their journey across the seas to the US.

the story on the whole is interesting, but badly written.

i just feel like it's the selling of your soul, the marketing of your family history, milking it for all its worth. but no use lah. i've never heard of the book!

Reading online

Here's a great link to free books. might get tiring, after all, who's got the patience to read a whole book on the computer?

But here it is anyway, Bibliomania

In Retrospect

Another attempt at reading an autobiography. The other more recent one was the Katharine Graham book. which gave an interesting insight into the world of newspaper publishing. and that she was acquainted with Truman Capote. I did pick up a book yesterday in the library that mentioned that some author had Capote as a neighbour when she was young. He appears everywhere!

anyhoo...In Retrospect is Robert McNamara's book. the former US Secretary of Defense (Kennedy''s time, that is)
why his book? he writes on the Vietnam War. Something which i probably should know more about but i don't. so i'm hoping to learn more about it.
it's not too bad so far, he writes in quite a conversational way, or at least Brian VanDeMark, who is credited alongside McNamara, does.

a little heavy and slow-going so i hopefully i won't have to renew it...

The Camera My Mother Gave Me

I picked up this book at the SPH sale for charity. i think it cost $5. It was an intriguing blurb at the back which reads:
'If you have a vagina you know that most of hte time it is without sensation...how do your kidneys feel? How does your pancreas feel? Luckily we have no idea how these things feel. The vagina is mostly like a pancreas and feels nothing. If it feels something, it is either erotically engaged or ill.

'All this is obvious if you have one. But half of us don't.

'i have one, and something went wrong with it.'

Well plus it was five bucks....

it did seem promising. i liked the cover. it was simple, no pictures and a calming shade of green. Also, The Camera My Mother Gave Me was an intriguing title. it still is.

and i guess Susanna Kaysen's name did stick in my mind. she did write Girl, Interrupted after all. i read that. i think.
unfortunately at this moment i only recall the movie n that Angelina Jolie stole the show from Winona Ryder. Deservingly. Winona Ryder acts exactly the same in every movie.

Here's my first attempt at a book review. Be nice.

The Dive From Clausen’s Pier

My library copy of The Dive From Clausen’s Pier came with a bright sticker stamped loudly with ‘Good Morning America’and ‘Read This!’. Ouch.

Carrie Bell, recently out of college, needs to grow up faster than she can imagine. Her relationship with high school sweetheart Mike Mayer (the Mr Congeniality type) is stagnating but before she does anything about but drop not-so-subtle hints, he dives into shallow water and fractures his spine, leaving him a quadriplegic.

Carrie doesn’t know how to cope with this tragedy and she ups and leaves for New York City. For a new life, far away from the sleepy town of Madison, Wisconsin.

There she meets the mysterious, sardonic Kilroy. He consumes her, yet she doesn’t know anything about him. Not even how he got his nickname.

It is also in New York that she begins to take design lessons. It all seems to bode well for her. She is happy with Kilroy, though the relationship is mostly under his terms and the design classes seem to be pushing Carrie in the right direction.

Yet after this glimpse of a fulfilling future, Packer sends Carrie scurrying back to Madison.

Are we meant to approve of her decision to return?

Packer tends to get caught up in weird descriptions, for example: ‘I crossed my room and sat on the futon. My legs jutted out in a way that reminded me of the dead witch’s legs in The Wizard Of Oz, sticking out from under the crushing weight of Dorothy’s house’.

And Carrie isn’t exactly a sympathetic character. She’s rather shallow and self-absorbed. She doesn’t know what she wants, although it’s staring her right in her face (Use the sewing machine, Carrie! Be a designer!! The though kept screaming from me, not matter how not obvious it was to her)

Oh man wld u believe. someonés compiled a list of BOOK REVIEW sites.