The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Bigger bounty from BookFest 2011 Posted: 08 Aug 2011 07:10 PM PDT THE first time BookFest@Malaysia opened its doors to the public in 2006, the organisers waited with bated breath to see whether the response would live up to their expectations. They need not have worried; 320,000 people visited, it was a roaring success, and they decided to do it again the next year. Now in its sixth consecutive year, the annual event organised by Popular Book Company (M) Sdn Bhd, is back with this year's theme "One Book, One World". "I've travelled to countries where book fairs are held – China, Singapore, Thailand, Britain or the United States – and the sheer diversity of books is something which I find really special. Reading is something universal and a book can open up a whole new world to the reader. That is why this year, we decided that we would go with this theme," says executive director Lim Lee Ngoh, who has been in the book industry for 25 years. The BookFest has grown in leaps and bounds, from catering more to readers of Chinese books to where it stands today, with equal space dedicated to the newly-named English and Chinese Pavilions this year. Also new this year is the Lifestyle Pavilion occupying a floor of its own where stationery, music and multimedia products are housed. Last year, a record turnout of 600,000 people visited the BookFest at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, an estimated 40% of which were visitors from outside Klang Valley. While the turnout was extremely encouraging, it was clear that the space allocated was no longer sufficient for the enthusiastic crowd, say Lim. "On some days, particularly during a public holiday and weekend, we had people waiting at the entrance because they couldn't enter the hall. There were just too many people inside," she relates. Therefore, steps have been taken this year to meet the demand and enhance the BookFest experience. "We work very hard to improve the BookFest each year. This time around, we are taking a big step in expanding its scale, both in terms of number of titles and space, to provide customers with more variety and comfort. "It's a turning point for us, it's a new leaf, a new page; the Lifestyle Pavilion has more than doubled in area, and the English and Chinese books will be divided into two distinct sections. In total, the space occupied will be 125,000 sq ft (11,613 sq m), a 25% increase from last year," Lim says. With 618 booths (including the 119 booths at the Lifestyle Pavilion), over 60,000 different book titles and even better deals (including daily specials) up for grabs this year, the BookFest is book heaven for book lovers. Not all books at the fest will be available in bookstores, so if you're a keen collector, it would be advisable to check out the event. With books organised by genre and subject – fiction, teens' fiction, non-fiction, children's books, academic references, professional, self-help, health, art and craft, travel and so on – this year's BookFest will also feature "100 Most Meaningful Books of All Time", "Best Asian Writing" and about 50 titles from the "Oprah's Book Club" at the Popular Pavilion. "We worked with local vendors and made trips to Britain, the United States and Canada to select books to highlight in the 100 Most Meaningful Books of All Time. To add character to the browsing and shopping experience at the BookFest, we have also created concept themes like the Silver Screen at the Fiction section, Cafe de Popular at the Cookbook section and Dinoland at the Children's section," says Lim. And it's not just about books at the BookFest. Throughout the nine-day event, there will be author appearances, talks and autograph signing sessions. Former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad will be present at the launch of the Chinese edition of his bestselling memoir, A Doctor In The House. And if you've always wanted to meet writers like Amir Muhammad, Anas Zubedy, Patrick Teoh, Russell Lee and Shamini Flint, just to name a few, here's your chance. Lim says that cookbooks have always had a loyal following and at the BookFest, so an entire section will be dedicated to it. For fans of cooking demonstrations, the Cook-Out Day at the English Pavilion will feature cooking demonstrations on Sept 3. (At the Chinese Pavilion, another series of demonstrations will be held two day earlier, on Sept 1.) There will also be colouring competition for the kids, quiz shows and the Readers' Choice Awards featuring local writers and publishers. On your way to the Lifestyle Pavilion upstairs, check out the Discover and Learn exhibition on the same floor and find out how the world's tallest pencil, currently located in Subang Jaya, Selangor, and standing at an impressive 19.75m, was constructed, and how eco-friendly paper is made from palm fibre. At the Buy and Win contest at Lifestyle Pavilion, a total amount of RM27,000 worth of gift vouchers will be given out. "Like last year, we are also going to have a charity drive this year – the One Care, One Hope Charity Campaign. Part of the proceeds from sales of Malaysian actress Lee Sinje's bilingual book, The Rosy Bag Of Little Yellow Flower, and Taiwanese illustrator Jimmy Liao's Joyful Dover tote bag will be donated to Hope Education Foundation and Qing Ping Le Old Folks' Home," says Lim, adding that they are very excited that Liao will be present for the first time at the event as they have been trying to get him to come to the BookFest every year, ever since it started! From being largely a bilingual BookFest this year (there is a small section dedicated to Malay books), Lim predicts that, given the rate at which the Malay readership is increasing, there will come a time where it will be equally trilingual. "Most of the book fairs around the world has books only in one language. In Malaysia, we are able to have multi-lingual book fairs and this is something we are very proud of. It's a very unique positioning," she says. Lim hopes that the BookFest continues to grow and that they would eventually be able to bring in authors from the West to come to Malaysia. "Currently we have local authors and international authors from countries like China, Singapore and Taiwan. It is difficult to get the Western authors. Many think that the market here is too small. But we hope that in the future we will be able to convince them to visit," she says. She believes that the Singapore-born company, having been around since 1984 in Malaysia and now boasting 67 outlets in the country, has gathered enough experience, knowledge and goodwill in its 27 years here to be in a good position to organise successful large-scale events like this BookFest. A lot of work goes into it; the first meeting to discuss preparations for the BookFest was held six months ago, in February. Lim says she is proud of her team and glad that customers have put their trust in Popular and believed in their cause. "I believe that the reading habit is not something that happens automatically; it has to be nurtured and encouraged. We have a responsibility to promote reading and the BookFest contributes to this mission. "It's many months of planning and preparation, and it takes a lot of time, energy and focus. Without the support of our customers, we couldn't have expanded the BookFest and grown so much in the last years. We have grown from strength to strength and we hope to continue to evolve and improve," she says. Star Publications (M) Bhd is the BookFest@Malaysia 2011 media partner. ■ BookFest@Malaysia 2011 will be held from Aug 27 to Sept 4 at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre from 10am-10pm daily. Admission to the BookFest is with purchase of the BookFest catalogue (which comes with an extra edition for the Lifestyle Pavilion this year) for RM2.50 per entry or RM10 for multiple entries over the nine days. They are available at all Popular and Harris bookstore outlets now or at the BookFest entrance. Entrance is free for students 18 years old and below and for senior citizens aged 60 and above. For more information, visit bookfestmalaysia.com. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
| Fortune smiles on Susan Conley Posted: 08 Aug 2011 07:09 PM PDT SHE wrote a memoir about living in Beijing as an expat. So what? Lots of expats living in Asian countries do that. They write tongue-in-cheek about experiences foreign to them but quite normal to us living on this side of the world. Often, the writing is clichéd, giving a highly exoticised view of our world, when in fact our countries are often as modern, if not more so, than their home countries. Our fashion and technology move faster, our culture is growing in tandem, and our infrastructure reaching world class. So what makes Susan Conley's recently released book, The Foremost Good Fortune, any different? Is it just another foreigner talking about assimilating into our culture while making snide and slightly condescending observations, disguised as humour, about our idiosyncrasies? Actually, no. For one thing, Conley, 43, has a fluid, writing style that catches the nuances of living in Asia effortlessly. Her writing becomes the vessel through which you see her world, with neither prejudice nor preconceptions marring the view. It is simply her, observing her environment and bringing the reader along for the ride. For another, she punctuates each experience with a lot of soul, making the readers feel her homesickness as she tries to rally her children to face a world just as unknown to her. The words she chooses are lyrical and powerful, probably influenced by her love of and experience with poetry. She studied poetry in college (Middlebury College) and graduate school (San Diego State University) in America and was a poetry and literature professor at Emerson College in Boston. She admits poetry informs all her writing, making it more concrete and image-based. It also makes her more willing to be open to the use of metaphors. "I was very married to poetry for a number of years. I am grateful for the time I spent with poems, learning concision and distillation, and I am now equally glad to be trying the longer narrative forms," she says in an e-mail interview. In 2007, she went to China to live for two and a half years – husband Tony Kieffer, a fluent Mandarin speaker, had been asked to work with China's state-owned banks – and that was about the amount of time it took her to write the book. It was written in real time, so there was no benefit of hindsight. It started out as a travelogue, about what happens when you take two small kids, aged four and six, to live in Beijing who do not speak the language or know one friend. Conley got about 100 pages of that written – and then was diagnosed with cancer. That, of course, shifted the book's focus to also include the theme of disease. The foreign city that welcomed her family soon became home. Conley loved the juxtaposition of old and new, ancient and post-modern. "I would often wake up in Beijing and take a walk downtown to a hutong (narrow alleyway) and feel like I had stepped back in time. But then, I would explore a new uber-mall the next day and feel like I had flashed forward to another century," she says. "My family and I confronted cancer in China and so that made Beijing a difficult place to be for a while. but I do not equate cancer and Beijing now, and I think our door is open wide to the idea of living in China again." Conley and her family just spent three weeks travelling in China in June, seeing old friends and connecting the dots of their old life there. Conley feels it is important for her sons, Aidan and Thorne (now aged eight and 10 respectively), who have so many great memories of Beijing. Now that the book is out and Conley has put cancer behind her, she has gone back to working on a novel that was started before her family moved to Beijing. She wrote an initial draft of this novel before she began writing the memoir, so she has had to keep shifting between fiction and memoir and back again. An important difference between the two forms is voice, says Conley. "The voice of a memoir is consistent and discrete, once the writer lands on the 'right' voice for their project. But fiction is polyphonic and calls much more on the imagination and on the balancing of several interwoven stories at once. "It's worth mentioning that the poetry I studied in college and graduate school has also come into play in both my fiction and my memoir. Poetry has served me well, as it has grounded all my writing in image," says Conley. "(In writing), what has probably been my driving impulse is an urge to convey a very woman-centric look at the humanity of people, especially of children. I am so moved by and respectful of writers who seem to be able to offer you a glimpse of an entire world they have offered up in the pages of one single book. It is the power of story to allow us to transcend our own lives and enter into the lives of others in an act of deep communication and empathy," she says. She is finishing a draft of that novel right now. It will come out with Knopf with a targeted publication date of January 2013. Conley calls herself a morning writer. In her home (in Maine, in American's north-east), she wakes up early in the morning and sifts through the most important thoughts for her writing in the coming day: perhaps a certain character needs more developing, or a scene needs more background detail to provide important context for neighbouring scenes, or a passage needs more dialogue. She is a big student of dialogue. "I believe it can do a lot of work for a writer when it is used well," she says. She goes over these early morning thoughts and then she feeds her sons breakfast and takes them to school. "And if the writing gods are with me, I am able to go straight back to my small writing studio in my attic and begin to work on the ideas hatched earlier that morning," she says. Another project that's close to her heart is The Telling Room, which she co-founded in 2004. It is a creative writing lab, essentially a creative writing centre for kids of all ages that she started with two writer friends in downtown Portland, Maine's biggest city. Now that she is back in the United States, she is very much involved in The Telling Room again. "Our mission is to honour the act of simple storytelling and to get the kids in our community writing. I believe that if kids can be inspired by wonderful, nurturing teachers who are actual writers themselves, then light bulbs might go off in the children's heads," she says. "I have found that when you ask kids to write their stories – the story of how they immigrated to the United States or how they learned how to hula hoop or how their grandmother died – you offer these students a chance to write themselves into 'being'. The kids often achieve an emotional literacy that they weren't even aiming for. It is a wonderful by-product of writing. "I believe so many kids want to tell the stories of their life, but they haven't been asked, or their story hasn't been listened to or valued while they told it," she says. The centre has surpassed her original goals, and now she and her team have made a series of new goals for it to reach even more kids and offer even more innovative writing workshop programming. Her own kids will probably have intriguing tales of their own to tell about their sojourn in this part of the world.... ■ The Foremost Good Fortune is available in all major Malaysian bookstores nationwide. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 ulasan:
Catat Ulasan