The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 16 Oct 2011 12:30 AM PDT FOR the week ending Oct 9, 2011: Non-fiction 1. I Moved Your Cheese: For Those Who Refuse To Live As Mice In Someone Else's Maze by Deepak Malhotra 2. A Doctor In The House: The Memoirs Of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad by Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad 3. Quantum Leaps: 100 Scientist Who Changed The World by Jon Balchin 4. Power Of X: Enter The 10 Gods by Joey Yap 5. The You Code: What Your Habits Say About You by Judi James and James Moore 6. Life Is What You Make It by Peter Buffett 7. Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother by Amy Chua 8. Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going by Han Fook Kwang, et al 9. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking 10. Wonders Of The World: 100 Incredible And Inspiring Places On Earth by Igloo Books Ltd Fiction 1. Only Time Will Tell by Jeffrey Archer 2. Aleph by Paulo Coelho 3. The Black Prism by Brent Weeks 4. Letter From A Stranger by Barbara Taylor Bradford 5. Viscount Breckenridge To The Rescue by Stephanie Laurens 6. One Day (movie tie-in) by David Nicholls 7. Empire Of Silver by Conn Iggulden 8. A Game Of Thrones: A Song Of Ice And Fire by George R. R. Martin 9. Room by Emma Donoghue 10. Kill Alex Cross by James Patterson Weekly list compiled by MPH Mid Valley Megamall, Kuala Lumpur; mphonline.com. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Posted: 16 Oct 2011 12:29 AM PDT I'M doing a meme called 30-Day Book Challenge that involves answering a question a day about the books in your life. It doesn't sound very challenging, but if you are a voracious reader, it's not easy to choose from the many books you've enjoyed when asked to identify "a book you've read more than three times" or "your favourite series", or "a book that you wish more people would read". (For those who don't know what meme means: it's an idea that spreads like a virus, through blogs, e-mails, networking sites, etc.) I'm now at Day 6 of the meme. Yesterday (Day 5), I picked a book that makes me happy (Tales From The End Cottage by Eileen Bell), and today ("a book that makes you sad") I've chosen A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. Both are books for children and, looking at the other questions, I think children's titles will figure a lot in my answers. It's not just because I read a lot of children's fiction (I do, but I read as much fiction written with adult readers in mind); I think it's because it's in children's stories that I'm more likely to find what I'm looking for in a book. "A book that makes me happy" says it all. I read to feel good and while I may have liked doom and gloom in my 20s, I don't any more. A week or two ago, I started reading Lynda La Plante's Anna Travis mysteries, but after two books I decided to pack it in. Murder mysteries are exciting, but they have become increasingly violent and bloody, with the crimes often sexual in nature. Give me instead crime fiction by Ellis Peters, Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers. The murders in those books might be most foul but the reader is spared graphic descriptions of the acts and the victims. Plus, I think I've had enough of surly sleuths wrestling with their inner demons. I much prefer debonair detectives with "shoulders tailored to swooning point", or even eccentric Europeans obsessed with the symmetry of their moustaches. I think one of the things that distinguishes children's books from those written for adults is the positive nature of the stories they tell. This does not mean that they never deal with the more unpleasant aspects of life, or explore serious issues and ask difficult questions, but the conclusions and resolutions reached are typically hopeful, life-affirming ones. A children's book might be sad, but I have yet to come across one that was utterly miserable and did not offer some light at the end of the tunnel, or changed the protagonist in some positive way. A Monster Calls is about suffering and death, but it's also about acceptance and peace. Children are murdered and lose all they have in Morris Gleitzman's Once And Then but the books are also about the strength of the human spirit and the power of forgiveness. The Velveteen Rabbit (Margery Williams), The Miraculous Journey Of Edward Tulane (Kate DiCamillo), Ways To Live Forever (Sally Nicholls), The Sad Book (Michael Rosen), The Summer Of My German Soldier (Bette Greene), Baby (Patricia MacLachlan), The Selfish Giant And The Happy Prince (Oscar Wilde), Bridge To Terabithia (Katherine Patterson), Black Beauty (Anna Sewell) and many more children's books make me weep, but they all also raise smiles, or at very least, make me feel oddly heartened, unlike, say, any of critically-acclaimed Chinese author Su Tong's novels. Those are just full of misery, despair and injustice, with no promise at all of a better future. Some might say that it's unrealistic to always offer hope or depict hopefulness in books, but I think that hope is an emotion that can be found in the most dire of situations, and it has been shown, time and time again, to be the key to man's triumph over great adversity. I believe that children's literature should not shy away from revealing life's truths no matter how painful, but I also believe that it should inspire not discourage. So, while there need not always be a happily-ever-after ending, things should never be totally bleak. Even the smallest glimmer of hope would be enough to make the reader smile. 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 content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Posted: 16 Oct 2011 12:26 AM PDT Half a century on, and this book still resonates. HYPER-cynical anti-war novel Catch-22 is 50 this month, and Joseph Heller must be chortling in his grave over how apropos the phrase he coined remains today – applying to everything from the US jobs crisis to a bottomless war in Afghanistan. In addition to a fresh edition of the novel, publishers have rolled out new books to coincide with the anniversary, including a major Heller biography and a memoir by his daughter. The absurdist, often cartoonish, story about a hard-to-kill World War II pilot trapped in a perverse bureaucratic cycle, has sold more than 10 million copies and introduced to the English lexicon one of the most penetrating new phrases of the 20th century. Released at the dawn of the 1960s, Catch-22 seemed to foretell the ghastly American war in Vietnam, and prophesied a counter-culture spirit that would dominate the last half of that decade. Despite its slow pacing and repetitiveness, "remarkably, college students are still reading it," says Tracy Daugherty, a professor of English at Oregon State University in America and author of this year's Just One Catch, a major new biography of Heller. "But the basic situation – an average person caught in a maddening bureaucratic nightmare – still resonates, maybe more than ever as our institutions have only grown more bloated," he points out. The novel's catch – "anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy" – has rattled militaries worldwide for decades. Daugherty says it is the people seeking to enter the US workforce who instantly relate to one of today's obvious logical impossibilities: to get a job, you need experience, but to get experience you need a job – "They live with that paradox every day." With America's longest-ever war dragging into its 11th year in Afghanistan, officials sometimes get sucked into the pretzel logic about a conflict that from afar may look like an infinite loop. On Sept 16, 2009, ex-soldier and former diplomat Rory Stewart, who walked across Afghanistan in early 2002, just months after the US invasion, laid out what might well be the primary military catch-22 scenario of the 21st century: "You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban," Stewart told a US Senate hearing. The novel's protagonist Captain Yossarian may or may not be insane, but one thing is clear: the novel's anti-hero bombardier wants out of a war routine that he is convinced will ultimately take his life. "They're trying to kill me," Yossarian explains to his friend Clevinger. "No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger responds. "Then why are they shooting at me?" "They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger says. "They're trying to kill everyone." The black-humour exchange set the novel's cynical tone, which author and cultural observer Morris Dickstein says "rapidly became the default mindset" of American youth, inspiring movies like Dr Strangelove. Heller, who died in 1999 at age 76, had tapped his own World War II experience flying 60 missions as a B-25 bombardier. At first they were largely uneventful, but by the 37th mission, things turned bloody. "There was a gunner with a big, big wound in his thigh, and I realised then, maybe for the first time, they were really trying to kill me," Heller said. After that, "I was scared stiff." Heller's catch phrase almost never came to be, though. He had first called his book "Catch-18", but Leon Uris was releasing his novel Mila 18 that year, and a numeric clash was to be avoided. Heller penned more novels but none came close to matching the influence of his debut. Daugherty wrote that when Heller was asked "How come you've never written a book as good as Catch-22?" the author shot back: "Who has?" – AFP Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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