The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 14 Apr 2013 02:18 AM PDT FOR week ending April 7, 2013: Non-fiction 1. Syed Mokhtar Albukhary: A Biography by Premilla Mohanlall 2. Chicken Soup For The Soul: Think Positive by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen & Amy Newmark 3. Reclaim Your Heart by Yasmin Mogahed 4. Only 13: The True Story Of Lon by Julia Manzanares & Derek Kent 5. A Street Cat Named Bob by James Bowen 6. Wreck This Journal (Black): To Create Is To Destroy by Keri Smith 7. Escape From Camp 14 by Blaine Harden 8. Snowing In Bali: The Incredible Inside Account Of Bali's Hidden Drug World by Kathryn Bonella 9. Bossypants by Tina Fey 10. You Can Read Anyone: Never Be Fooled, Lied To, Or Taken Advantage Of Again by David J. Lieberman Fiction 1. The Host (movie tie-in) by Stephenie Meyer 2. Warm Bodies (movie tie-in) by Isaac Marion 3. Life Of Pi by Yann Martel 4. One Day (movie tie-in) by David Nicholls 5. The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult 6. Manuscript Found In Accra by Paulo Coelho 7. Bloodline by James Rollins 8. The Garden Of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng 9. Family Pictures by Jane Green 10. The Time Of My Life by Cecelia Ahern > Weekly list compiled by MPH Mid Valley Megamall, Kuala Lumpur; www.mphonline.com. |
| Posted: 14 Apr 2013 02:17 AM PDT Go! Get writing and enter these competitions for children's book authors. It's a great way to get feedback and exposure. CAN you believe that we're already into the fourth month of the year? April is my favourite month because it's my birthday month. I am 46 years old on April 14, which should be ... today! Looking forward, I'm guessing I'll have bought myself a birthday present or two – books, of course. Also, a friend told me that she got me the new Virago edition of Rumer Godden's Thursday's Children – squee! I won't pretend I popped out of my mother waving a copy of Goodnight Moon, but I know I was being read to nightly by the time we moved into our big, beautiful, haunted house on Jalan Pawang in Segamat, Johor, so that's at least 43 years of loving books – now that's something to celebrate. As I think I said early this year (or was it last?), I'm trying to read more local and regional fiction. Thanks to the efforts of Malaysian imprints like Buku Fixi, Fixo Novo, and Silverfish Books, and Singaporean publishers Maths Paper Press and Epigram Books, it's not been hard to keep myself supplied with reading material. Epigram also has some quite interesting children's fiction, and Marshall Cavendish has published some decent picture books this year: Pura The Cat by Tan Soon Meng, illustrated by Ann Gee; and Extraordinary Eloise by Charlene Chua, illustrated by Paula Pang, are particularly noteworthy. I believe MPH and other Malaysian publishers have produced some children's books in English, but for some reason I haven't been sent any review copies ... a "friend" says that it's no wonder really, as surely my bad reviews are to be avoided at all cost! I can only roll my eyes at such a remark. I don't write bad reviews as a matter of course, you know, and I hope what I offer is constructive criticism. Anyway, if publishers publish unedited books, do they really expect this not to be pointed out? An author friend believes that we can't afford to be totally honest as the industry here is so small, but I really do believe that we can't afford not to write frank, critical reviews. After all, don't we want better books to be published? Don't we hope that authors and illustrators will get better at what they do? I'm hopeful in any case, because I've met writers and book artists out there who are keen to learn and improve. What's also important is that they are given the opportunity to share their work. And also that their publishers (and editors) help them make the best of what they've written. Well, what's encouraging is that aspiring children's book authors now have three competitions to submit their work to: The Scholastic Asian Book Award (held every two years), The SingTel Asian Picture Book Award and The Calistro Prize (both annual contests). I'm looking forward to reading the winning entries of last year's Calistro Prize as well as the 2012 Scholastic Asian Book Award. The latter's winning entries will be published early next year to coincide with the announcement of the winners for the 2014 award (the contest is now held every two years), and I hope to see the Calistro winners sometime this year. Aspiring and published authors should submit their entries for the Scholastic Asian Book Award 2014 by Oct 21, 2013; and the Calistro Prize 2013, by Sept 30, 2013. For more details go to scholasticbookaward.asia and calistroprize.wordpress.com. The SingTel Asian Picture Book Award 2014 (tinyurl.com/bsv924q) will be announced at the Asian Festival for Children's Content in Singapore next month. Singapore also has the Hedwig Anuar Book Award for children's books published in Singapore, and I think that it would be good to establish a similar award in Malaysia, to encourage the creation and publication of high quality children's and young adult books. Any book lovers keen to sponsor this award should get in touch with me. Now! Happy Reading! > Daphne Lee is a writer, editor, book reviewer and teacher. She runs a Facebook group, called The Places You Will Go, for lovers of all kinds of literature. Write to her at star2@thestar.com.my. |
| Posted: 14 Apr 2013 02:10 AM PDT Jung Chang and Jon Halliday talk candidly about Wild Swans, Mao and China. ELEGANT in a white dress with embroidered flowers, Jung Chang and her academician husband Jon Halliday walked into the shade after their visit to the Kuan Imm Temple, the oldest Chinese temple in historic George Town. "The temple brings back childhood memories for me," Chang explains. "Of course, nothing like the Kuan Imm Temple exists any more. China today is just one big city after the next. They are all the same. What we saw this morning reminds me of what China has lost," she says. Earlier this year, Chang and Halliday had been invited by hoteliers Christopher Ong and Karl Steinberg to speak at the first "literary dinner" held at Kebaya, the contemporary Peranakan restaurant at the newly restored boutique hotel Seven Terraces (listed by Conde Nast Traveller as the best new hotel for 2013). Wild Swans: Three Daughters Of China is of course Chang's famous family story that spans a century of China's history; first published in 1991, the book has sold some 10 million copies and has been translated into 30 languages. This success has enabled both Chang and Halliday to become professional writers. "I taught for a bit in London (as Senior Visiting Fellow at King's College, University of London) but now I do research for our books," says the affable Halliday, 74. "We met in the late 1970s when I was working for the BBC, doing a documentary about North Korea. We needed to get the Chinese perspective and someone introduced me to Jung. That was how we met." Wild Swans, which was followed by their jointly written bestseller Mao: The Unknown Story, meant numerous speaking engagements and world travel. "We got mainly positive responses for both books but also a fair share of criticism," says Halliday. "Wild Swans, for example, was said to have been written for Western readers. Mao received a lot of intellectual criticism but not many challenged us about the facts." Socialist in his youth, the Anglo-Irish Jon grew up to become an historian specialising in modern Asia. His brother, the international relations specialist and author Fred Halliday, sat on the editorial board of the respected journal, New Left Review. When asked about this background and what he felt when some of the harsher criticisms about Mao said that the book is "one-sided" in painting an almost entirely negative picture of Mao, Halliday defends the research and novel-style approach to the biography. "We collected copious documents from Russian, Chinese and Western archives. We have not been challenged on that score. We also interviewed lots of people who had direct and personal experiences with Mao. They have attested to the thinking and actions of Mao," he says. That thinking was certainly nationally influential, judging by the memories Chang shares: "When we were growing up in Mao's China, we used to think that 'hello' was a bad word. Only the capitalists from the West would use it. Hello was accompanied by an even more terrible lifestyle symbol, Coco-Cola! This was how restricted our lives had become," Chang, now 62, explains. In a sense, the coming together of Chang and Halliday is an analogy for the meeting of idealism and reality. When they met, both belonged to a world stage defined by ideology. Halliday was coming from Socialist Britain where the Labour Party had created the Welfare State and the National Health Service. Chang, as most readers will know from Wild Swans, came of age in a China defined by central planning with Mao as the prime mover. The little red book met Coco-Cola in 1970s London, when socialism was at its nadir and utopian ideals were soon to give way to the Thatcherism of the 1980s. The scales were soon to fall from their eyes and this "re-education" as it were became the catalyst for Chang's little-known first book, Madame Sun Yat-Sen: Soong Ching-Ling, part of Penguin's "Lives of Modern Women" series at the time. (It was released as "By Jung Chang with Jon Halliday".) "That was my first publication but I do not consider it my first book. It was written in a style that was uncritical," says Chang, explaining that, "Later, after much more research, I discovered that some of her diaries had been censored. Her critical side, her disagreements with what Mao was doing in China, all that had been kept from the public." The writing of Wild Swans was an exorcism of this god that had failed Chang and Halliday's generation. Its success was built upon the world of publishing and the capitalist economy. Yet it is also the culmination of a great personal journey. "I was able to write it because my mother, who had come to England, left me 60 tapes. It was her personal history and for me, putting our experiences into words, enabled me to go on with life," says Chang. "For the longest time, all our emotions were pent-up. Some of us who had lived through the Cultural Revolution (from the mid 1960s to the 1970s) are not ever able to face up to it. Wild Swans is my first book in the sense that it enabled me transform trauma into memory." Wild Swan's strength lies in its revelatory approach. In some ways, it is inspired by oral history. There are clear elements of a confessional and, through that structure, readers can easily identify with the powerful forces that were transforming Chinese society in the first half of the 20th century. It led Chang and Halliday to their second project, taking on the cult of Mao itself. "Mao the historical personality had been carefully cultivated and built up over the years. It was not only a project by the Communist Party in China but was an international project involving journalists, devoted fans and academics from the West as well. "The power of Mao's image as the 'father of modern China' is constructed and vigorously protected by the current regime. We felt justified when people who had lived through Mao's rule congratulated us," Chang says about reaction to the book, adding that "We met and spoke to Chin Peng, who led the communist uprising in Malaya. Mao encouraged such uprisings to the detriment of thousands." Chin Peng, according to Chang, "was eventually discarded". A natural extension of the personal approach that worked so well with Wild Swans, the Mao biography's subjectivity led to a lot of criticism from academia, the strongest being that the book seemingly portrayed only the monstrosity of Mao, a man with no redeeming features. "In our lectures overseas, we do have to explain that Mao had completely turned China upside down," Chang says. "I was a barefoot doctor sent to the rural areas to work as an electrician and technician because Mao believed that formal education was unnecessary. Hidden from public view, he remained a sainted figure whilst millions of Chinese were suffering in China." Having buried the memory of Mao, Chang and Halliday have embarked upon a rehabilitative journey. Their new book about the Empress Dowager Cixi is a happier conjunction of history, memory and personality. Of the charismatic woman who controlled China for almost half a decade until her death in 1908, Chang says: "I have always been intrigued by the story of the Empress Dowager and one question keeps cropping up: would China have been spared its turbulent and tragic entry into the 20th century if the reforms carried out by the Empress Dowager had succeeded?" A Penang connection with the Empress Dowager exists in the form of a little known intellectual named Gu Hongming (Koh Hong Beng in the local Penang Hokkien dialect), according to Chang and Halliday. "We have come across Gu in our research. He wrote and published many articles in the North China Daily criticizing Western colonialism and supporting the reform policies of the Empress Dowager. He even published a book defending Cixi after the Boxer Rebellion (of 1900), pleading for the preservation of the monarchy," Chang says. What Gu was most concerned about was the wholesale displacement of Chinese history, culture and identity – all to be sacrificed for the sake of imitating Western-style "modernity". "Instead of the wholesale sacrifice of our customs and a rejection of our living heritage, Cixi's brand of reforms, started in the 1860s, was altogether more gradual and comprehensive. Would a different kind of modernization have been possible? Would we have been spared Mao?" ponders Chang. "Like here in Penang, China could have preserved something of itself," she says. |
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