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Posted: 14 Oct 2012 08:53 AM PDT

THE Frankfurt Book Fair is spotlighting child and youth literature and its role at the avant-garde of the publishing world with playful apps for smartphones and tablet computers as well as interactive games.

The media world for children and youngsters breaks new ground for publishers in the digital age by pushing the boundaries far beyond the printed book, say organisers of the world's biggest book fair, which opened in Frankfurt, Germany, on Wednesday. The event ends today.

Electronics giant Sony and Nintendo, the titan in electronic games, were slated to be among about 7,400 exhibitors at the five-day fair, reflecting innovations in an industry where "content is king", the fair's director said.

"Children's and youth media are a prototype for what is happening in the publishing industry but also for what is happening at the moment socially," Juergen Boos told reporters.

Sony will showcase its new Wonderbook device, which under the guise of a classic book links up to a PlayStation console to display 3D images on screen for its young user.

As well as homing in on which trends may evolve into universal standards, industry movers and shakers will ponder whether new technology limits the imagination, or encourages it to expand.

"In order to keep up with the changing reading and learning habits of future generations, we need to constantly create new formats and develop and expand popular topics and trends," Boos said.

He said around 1,500 publishers who deal exclusively with the children and youth market were due to attend the Frankfurt fair, describing the sector as a growth area.

The fair not only acts as a kind of "scout" and "navigation system" but is also a forum for bringing together different multimedia representatives to get a project off the ground, Katja Boehne, the fair's spokeswoman, said.

"When someone has a children's book, they look for musicians, they look for technology companies, they also look for computer games experts – and then together, a children's book is initiated," she said.

Dealing with the development of offshoot products from a book has become a trend at the Frankfurt event, she added.

Technological innovation however is not the only way in which children's literature has changed, with content moving away from being either "moral" in style or purely entertaining. "Demanding children's and youth literature, which we now have, has basically also become more entertaining," Boos said highlighting a children's book about a dysfunctional family by New Zealand writer Kate De Goldi.

Education is another major theme at this year's fair which displayed a "classroom of the future" offering an insight into how tomorrow's students will learn with interactive or digitised aids.

With several debt-wracked eurozone countries feeling the pinch, Boehne said they had been pleasantly surprised that attendance figures had remained steady and saw it as a "symptom of the crisis" that exhibitors felt the need to keep in touch with business partners. – AFP Relaxnews

Book Review: 'A Perfectly Good Man' is quietly brilliant

Posted: 14 Oct 2012 08:49 AM PDT

An easy writing style feeds the reader a complex tale of what constitutes goodness.

A Perfectly Good Man

Author: Patrick Gale

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 406 pages

THERE are writers who burst into your life with a razzmatazz of the sort that makes you ransack their backlist and rush out to buy their latest book as soon as it is published, and there are writers who quietly snuggle up to you and nuzzle their way into your affections. If my favourite hard-boiled crime thrillers fit the first category, those by Patrick Gale are a fine example of the second.

Gale is not a writer of melodrama and thrills and adventure but a quiet and perceptive commentator on life and relationships, especially family ones; a writer whose grasp of the big picture (in this case, among other things: What is goodness? How do we attain it?) is firmly rooted in our everyday actions. And when you think about it, he is of course right. Goodness for most of us is not the heroics of a gunfight at the OK Corral; it is moments of kindness, support, compassion and generosity. There is no such thing as abstract goodness, it has to be made flesh or it goes the way of all good intentions. Nowhere.

Barnaby Johnson is the perfectly good man of the title. There is of course a slight ambiguity about that wording; perfectly good also implies not quite good enough. Little wonder, then, that Gale prefaces the book with a quotation from 15th century priest/writer Thomas à Kempis: "All perfection in this life hath some imperfection bound up with it; and no knowledge of ours is without some darkness". The extent of Barnaby's imperfection is not revealed until well into the book but the opening scene is indicative of some of the moral complexity that is to follow.

As parish priest of two remote country churches, Barnaby is called to one of his parishioners. Lenny Barnes is paralysed from the waist down and wheelchair-bound after an accident playing rugby. Under cover of pouring Barnaby a glass of water, Lenny pours himself a lethal cocktail and drinks it. The fatal dosage of drugs bought on the Internet means he will be dead within five minutes. Barnaby gives him the final sacraments rather than calling an ambulance that he knows will not arrive in time. Does that make him an accessory to suicide, a criminal offence?

At the coroner's inquest, Barnaby is challenged.

"So let me get this right for the record, Mr Johnson. Knowing Lenny Barnes to be dying, you did nothing to help him?"

"No, I helped him."

"How?"

"By prayer. He asked me to pray for him."

A Perfectly Good Man is divided into sections that are initially somewhat confusing. Barnaby's life is effectively told backwards, while the stories of those around him are more chronologically straightforward. These include his wife Dorothy, his daughter Carrie and his adopted Vietnamese son Jim, who later insists on being known as Phuc, with all the trauma and re-orientation that shift of names implies. In a wider circle are other local parishioners and contacts including the wild Australian potter Nuala, who is Lenny's mother, and the book's most insidious character, Modest Carlsson.

If Barnaby is the flawed good man, Modest Carlsson is the closest thing in the novel to everyday evil. His assumed name is a cover for a past in prison where he served time for a sexual offence, after which he found a new life as a second-hand bookseller specialising in pornography. Physically repellent, Carlsson is an ugly toad of a man who follows Barnaby around masquerading as a faithful parishioner while searching for flaws in his character and performance. When he finally finds one, he uses it to destructive and devastating effect.

Gale has many gifts as a writer. The first is an easy, mellifluous, fluent style that is seductively easy to read. In fact, so easy to read is Gale that I wonder sometimes if this, perversely, has had an adverse effect on him being taken as the serious novelist that he actually is, prepared to tackle complex and difficult themes.

But perhaps the finest of his qualities is that he writes with utter authenticity about family and relationships. Time and time again in A Perfectly Good Man I was aware that his analysis of and reflection on his characters' emotional and spiritual lives rang completely true.

There is an elevated ordinariness about Barnaby that is completely engaging as he searches for the way to be a good man, while knowing in his heart that he falls far short of what he would like to be. Tolerance, kindness, compassion – these are the qualities that Barnaby has to access, the sharpest tools in his priestly toolbox, but they do not make for an easy life and they are not fit for all purposes.

I need hardly add that I was gripped and impressed by A Perfectly Good Man and it reminded me of how much I had enjoyed Gale's earlier Notes From An Exhibition.

Slowly but surely Patrick Gale is moving from my "snuggle up and nuzzle" list to the "must have as soon as it comes out" list. Read this and you will know why.

Best-sellers

Posted: 14 Oct 2012 02:52 AM PDT

FOR the week ending Oct 7, 2012:

Non-fiction

1. Unstoppable: The Incredible Power Of Faith In Action by Nick Vujicic

2. 1D: The One Direction Story by Danny White

3. Sodomy II: The Trial Of Anwar Ibrahim by Mark Trowell

4. The Magic by Rhonda Byrne

5. The Lady And The Peacock: The Life Of Aung San Suu Kyi Of Burma by Peter Popham

6. No Easy Day: The Only First-hand Account Of The Navy Seal Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden by Mark Owen & Kevin Maurer

7. I Declare: 31 Promises To Speak Over Your Life by Joel Osteen

8. Soul Food: Stories To Keep You Mentally Strong, Emotionally Awake And Ethically Straight by Dan Clark

9. Guinness World Records 2013 by Guinness World Records Ltd

10. A World Without Islam by Graham E. Fuller

Fiction

1. The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

2. Fifty Shades Of Grey by E.L. James

3. Sidney Sheldon's Angel Of The Dark by Tilly Bagshawe

4. The Sins Of The Father by Jeffrey Archer

5. Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult

6. The Perks Of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

7. The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom

8. Winter Of The World by Ken Follett

9. Eighty Days Yellow by Vina Jackson

10. The Innocent by David Baldacci

n Weekly list compiled by MPH Mid Valley Megamall, Kuala Lumpur; mphonline.com.

Kredit: www.thestar.com.my

Ahad, 14 Oktober 2012

The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf

The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf

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