The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 24 Jul 2011 12:19 AM PDT FOR week ending July 17, 2011: Non-fiction 1. A Doctor In The House: The Memoirs Of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad by Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad 2. Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going by Han Fook Kwang, et al 3. Once A Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice In The Dock (revised, updated second edition) by Alan Shadrake 4. A World Without Islam by Graham E. Fuller 5. Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff 6. Chicken Soup For The Soul: Think Positive: 101 Inspirational Stories About Counting Your Blessings And Having A Positive Attitude by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen & Amy Newmark 7. The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot 8. Quantum Leaps: 100 Scientists Who Changed The World by Jon Balchin 9. For The Love Of A Son: One Afghan Woman's Quest For Her Stolen Child by Jean Sasson 10. Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps To Living At Your Full Potential by Joel Osteen Fiction 1. The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender 2. Fall Of Giants by Ken Follett 3. The Heiress by Lynsay Sands 4. Luka And The Fire Of Life by Salman Rushdie 5. The Confession by John Grisham 6. A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin 7. Swimming Pool Sunday by Madeleine Wickham 8. The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht 10. Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King Weekly list compiled by MPH Mid Valley Megamall, Kuala Lumpur; www.mphonline.com. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
| Posted: 24 Jul 2011 12:18 AM PDT Look beyond the sanitised Disney version of these mythical creatures and discover a whole different side to them. Flesh-eating mermaids, anyone? I'M told that mermaids are the next big (floppy and wet) thing in young adult fiction. A rather anatomically inconvenient mythological creature to write about, if you ask me. The tail, of course, would be an excellent method of birth control. In fact, it would prohibit sexual intercourse altogether (wouldn't it? My knowledge of aquatic vertebrate anatomy is practically non-existent) and this would surely meet with the approval of nervous parents and those who promote sexual abstinence among the young. And what about the settings of these books? Mermaids have restricted mobility and any action would have to take place by the sea, on the sea or in the sea. I'm not sure if they need salt water to survive. If not, then at least these mermaid characters could also hang out in a swimming pool, or bath-tub. At a pinch they might also be propped up in a shower stall with the water running. In The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, a mermaid manages to replace her tail with legs and feet, but at great cost. Every step she takes with new feet feels like she's walking on sharp knives. I have always found this story really off-putting because of the extremes this little twit is willing to go through for a man. Disney's version of the mermaid is even more annoying. Well, for a start, she's animated and so, not only do we get to read about her folly, we also get to watch her making an extreme fool of herself. Fans of the movie have argued that Ariel, the little mermaid, is an adventurous, head-strong young woman who is prepared to defy her father in order to live her dream, but all I see is a silly girl who gives up her voice (her most precious asset) and her family for a man she knows next to nothing about. Of course, as it's Disney, the prince falls in love with Ariel without having had a single conversation with her. This hardly matters – after all, as Ursula tells Ariel: "On land it's much preferred for ladies not to say a word...." Come on! "They're not all that impressed with conversation, true gentlemen avoid it when they can. But they dote and swoon and fawn on a lady who's withdrawn! It's she who holds her tongue who gets her man." Ugh. Well, if you like the story of the little mermaid, the story has been retold by Carolyn Turgeon as Mermaid: A Twist On The Classic Tale (Broadway, 256 pages). Another young adult (YA) novel about mermaids is The Mermaid's Mirror (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 320 pages) by L.K. Madigan. This one is about a girl who is inexplicably drawn to the ocean up to the point of sleepwalking on the beach and to the edge of the sea. She nearly drowns one day and is saved by a mermaid who reveals a secret about Lena's identity. Hmm, I wonder what it could be. Then there's a new trilogy called Lost Voices. The first book (Harcourt Children's Books, 304 pages) has just been released and tells the tale of Luce, assaulted and left for dead on a clifftop. When she falls into the water below, Luce thinks she will drown but, instead, she changes into a mermaid. Welcomed by other mermaids who were once human girls, Luce discovers that she is now doomed to a life spent luring men to their deaths. The best mermaid-related tale I've ever heard is the one told in The Mermaid Saga, a series of graphic novels by Rumiko Takahashi. The mermaids in this story are not the long-haired, sweet-voiced beauties who sit on rocks, combing their hair and turning shells and seaweed into fashion accessories. The mermaids here are evil flesh-eating creatures who keep young by consuming human flesh. Humans who eat mermaid flesh will become immortal, but might just as easily die or turn into a monster, or Lost Soul. The Mermaid Saga is about a 500-year-old immortal who ate mermaid flesh when he was a young man. While looking for a cure to his immortality he meets an immortal girl whom he helps escape from a village of mermaids. The girl was being fattened up by the mermaids who were planning to eat her once she reached puberty. Not quite what you were expecting of mermaids, right? > Daphne Lee reads to wonder and wander, be amazed and amused, horrified and heartened and inspired and comforted. She wishes more people will try it too. Send e-mails to the above address and check out her blog at daphne.blogs.com/books. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
| Posted: 24 Jul 2011 12:16 AM PDT ONE evening, while I was in the kitchen of our home in Sydney, my daughter was scribbling on a card she had made for her cousin in San Francisco. She was going to write "I Love You", she said. Zehn will need my help to write those words, I told myself while peeling the onions and garlic. Or so I thought. She wrote those three words flawlessly with a full stop neatly placed at the end, and signed her name in the right place, too. How could that be? She's not even four yet! My eight-year-old son came into the kitchen and praised Zehn for having done such a marvellous job in both designing the card and writing on it. "She has miraculously become literate, mum, and she seems so nonchalant about it," he said casually. I was further dumbfounded as I had no idea when and from where my son had learnt the meanings of "miraculous", "literate" and "nonchalant". "They were part of my spelling words and I had seen them before in Roald Dahl's books," he deadpanned, walking off to play with his Lego blocks since there was no homework to complete – Australian primary schools do not give work in the first week back after a two-week winter break. That is the magic of Australian primary education. Children learn without parents knowing much about it. While children are content with the relaxed learning environment in which they acquire knowledge through play and God knows what else, parents, Asian parents in particular, worry because there is no way of knowing what their children are learning every day at school. There are no textbooks to bring home, and homework is often minimal – one page of math and another of English. There are no impromptu tests nor is there a ranking system that tells parents how their children's academic performance compares with others in the class. Some Asian parents I know have resorted to sending their children for tutoring; others simply accept the system and learn to be equally relaxed. I am one of the latter group. Though I do look for pieces of papers in my son's school bag in hopes of finding clues to what he has done at school, I can never get anything more than just the school's weekly newsletter that provides updates about the school. I have attempted to ask him but his replies can be unsettling. "We watched a movie," he sometimes says. But he does not say anything about the play they have to put up after the movie. He learns to speak in various intonations through role-play and grasps the importance of punctuation by reading scripts. "Commas give your sentences tones," he mutters, as he sits doing his homework, which is to write a suspenseful narrative. I can only listen in wonder at these times when he unconsciously releases these intriguing clues to his development as a reader and writer. "Please, thank you. Please, thank you," my daughter, who attends pre-school, repeats this little song as she warms herself in the bathtub. "I said 'thank you' when Isabelle said my shoes were pretty, mum." I struggle to come up with a sensible response: "That's right. We should not feel shy when praised and we thank people for the compliment." "Thank you, please. Thank you, please," she continues singing. Tie neatly done up and shirt tucked in, my son is ready for school on a rainy morning. "This rain is unremitting. It has been raining for five days in a row now, hasn't it, mum?" he says casually. I can only smile. His choice of words is simply too much for me to comprehend on this rainy day – and, no doubt, will be on many other days in the future. "Don't lament about the weather, Jonn. I love rainy days, they are so romantic," my daughter adds, as if to give her mother the final push round the bend. When I say to my husband in Mandarin how crazy our kids have become in their choice of words, my son throws me a wry look. "I am not crazy," Jonn says firmly. I gave up. My mother's lament about my children's loss of a second language had just been proven groundless. My son learns Mandarin in school because his mother lacks the will to teach him. "This is going to be the best day ever," exclaims my daughter, as she looks eagerly forward to another day at preschool. What wonders can be wrought with a relaxed learning environment at school and a bookworm "infestation" at home! 'My face is as soft as putty, mum,' says Abby Wong's daughter, terrifying mum with her use of simile. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
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