The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 14 Dec 2012 02:41 AM PST Breed THIS modern gothic tale begins with a picture of happy couple Alex and Leslie Twisden living charmed lives – missing only children. When every conventional fertility treatment fails, they are driven to travel to Slovenia where they submit themselves to an unfathomable, terrifying procedure that finally gives them what they so fervently desire. But there are consequences. Fast forward 10 years and their twins, Adam and Alice, discover that their parents are harbouring a secret that's too frightening to even envision. Extreme Survivors: 60 of the World's Most Extreme Survival Stories THIS collection offers details of amazing stories of survival, including how 16 people managed to escape death when New York's Twin Towers collapsed after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001; the narrative of Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist who escaped the genocide of Pol Pot; the tale of 18-year-old William Shotton and how he navigated his ship after most of the crew perished from a mystery disease in 1893; and Naheeda Bi's 10 years in captivity after her notorious tribal kidnapping in Pakistan. These stories and more follow a Foreword by television personality Bear Grylls, the master adventurer himself. The No Excuse Guide To Success MOST of us have been guilty of playing the blame game at some time or another in our lives. It's terribly satisfying and seemingly serves to fashion a way out of our problems. This book, however, claims to be able to show readers how to stop this counter-productive routine. It says that making excuses is a destructive pattern in life that needs to be changed in order for someone to transform whines into wins. A Very Accidental Love Story ELOISE Elliot is one of the youngest newspaper editors of her time. Success, however, seems unfulfilling and upon the eve of her 30th birthday, Eloise realises that her life is empty. She then decides to have a child of her own as a single mother to try to fill that particularly hollow feeling. Fast-forward several years later, the daunting task of searching for the sperm donor, her daughter's father, becomes imminently needful and throws her into a wild quest for the truth. WTF Are Men Thinking? THIS book's subtitle, 250,000 Men Reveal What Women Really Want To Know, says it all, really. The authors, who are market researchers, polled 1,000 women about what questions they would ask of men; from there, the writers developed more than 100 questions that they then asked of – according to the book's title – 250,000 men. The book is structured so that you don't actually have to read it from cover to cover; the questions have been divided into six broad sections to allow readers to flip to sections they are particularly interested in: communication, dating, romance, sex, marriage, and work. Some of the questions are: Is he listening? Is it romantic if I make the first move? Do men ever not want sex? |
| Posted: 14 Dec 2012 02:40 AM PST Hellboy In Hell #1 HELLBOY is dead. And he is going to Hell. If you've been following the Hellboy series up to the latest issues (collected in The Storm And The Fury trade paperback), you'll know that Hellboy buys it in the end, getting his heart ripped out by the evil witch Nimue who swore to drag him into Hell with her. But wait. Just because he is dead, it doesn't mean our big red friend's story has ended. Well sure, he's as dead as a doorknob in the "real" world (in which his former pals in the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Development, or BPRD for short, have gone international), but his story continues with the brand new Hellboy In Hell series, where we will finally see what Hell has in store for the World's Greatest (Dead) Paranormal Detective. The best part is that Mignola himself is writing and drawing the book and character for the first time in almost half a decade. Holding court during a panel at the recent San Diego Comic Con, Mignola spoke at length about his return to the character he created. "Hellboy In Hell will be a regular book – the first four issues are monthly, then we'll do one-shots," he said, adding that there will also be several stories featuring a much younger Hellboy working with the BPRD in the past. Hellboy In Hell #1 really is everything you want a Hellboy book to be, with lots of action featuring the Big Red slugging it out with an old hammer-wielding foe and some large tentacle-y creatures while cracking his trademark one-liners; flying naked guys (don't ask), and even a puppet show of A Christmas Carol thrown in for good measure. It's an engaging, sometimes trippy read that highlights just how much Hellboy (and Mignola's art) has been missed all this time. If the recently released first issue is any indication, then throwing Hellboy into Hell is probably one of the best things to have happened to the character. Unconstrained by the trappings of the "real world", it gives Mignola the opportunity to go wild with his imagination. This new freedom also means he can do practically anything he wants without worrying about realism; including more fables or myths from other cultures, like he did with The Penanggalan short story, which was based on Malaysia's own penanggalan ghost. In an interview with Comic Book Resources (comicbookresources.com), Mignola said that the main characteristic for his "Hell" is that it's made up of everything he wants to draw. "(With Hellboy), when Hellboy went to Japan, Japan kind of had to look like Japan," he said in the interview. "Everything (in Hellboy In Hell) is a distorted version. I don't trip over things like, 'How ... do you draw a Buddist temple?' I can just make up my version of that. It's very liberating to me as an artist." With the launch of Hellboy In Hell, BPRD surpassing 100 issues recently and a new title called BPRD: 1948 (focusing on the early days of the bureau), as well more Lobster Johnson and Edward Grey: Witch Hunter books coming up, it truly is an exciting time to be a Mignola-verse fan. – Michael Cheang |
| Posted: 14 Dec 2012 02:40 AM PST THREE lucky readers stand a chance to win autographed copies of Defiance by C.J. Redwine, thanks to MPH Distributors. To be in the running, answer the following question and complete the slogan: 1. Which city does the protagonist of Defiance, Rachel Adams, live in? 2. Defiance means ... (in not more than 15 words). E-mail your answers to: OR Post to: MPH Distributors Sdn Bhd Ground Floor Warehouse Bangunan TH No. 5, Jalan Bersatu Section 13/4 46200 Petaling Jaya Selangor All entries MUST come with: Your full name, IC number and phone number E-mail subject headers or envelopes MUST have this information: Defiance Contest with MPH Distributors/The Star MPH Distributors will contact winners by phone or e-mail. The judges' decision is final. For enquiries, call MPH Distributors' marketing department at 03-7958 1688 or e-mail mphdist@gmail.com This contest closes: At midnight, Dec 28, 2012. |
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