This quote is from a character in the classic novel Zorba the Greek: "I had fallen so low that if I had had to choose between falling in love with a woman and reading a book about love, I should have chosen the book".
This had a painful sting of truth to it.
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
3 March 2011
28 February 2011
Ideal Partner
A friend posted this a link to this wonderful blog post on Facebook titled "Date a Girl Who Reads". She also commented that if it had been written by a guy, she and others should date him immediately (it was not). The post struck a chord, because I might have written something like that (though in a wistful what if tone of voice, as opposed to the exhortative it currently is).
I wish I could date a girl who reads, who loves books. I wish I will find a girl who will find the fact that I have a personal library of 2,000 plus books, an enormous turn on rather than a puzzling, impractical extravagance.
I wish to find a girl who reads, and loves good movies, and who loves the theater like me, who likes long rambly conversations over a glass of wine. A girl who is intense and intellectual. Who might possess a somewhat mordant wit.
I would date a girl who reads. Now I just have to find her.
I wish I could date a girl who reads, who loves books. I wish I will find a girl who will find the fact that I have a personal library of 2,000 plus books, an enormous turn on rather than a puzzling, impractical extravagance.
I wish to find a girl who reads, and loves good movies, and who loves the theater like me, who likes long rambly conversations over a glass of wine. A girl who is intense and intellectual. Who might possess a somewhat mordant wit.
I would date a girl who reads. Now I just have to find her.
10 February 2011
The Accidental Asian
The Accidental Asian | Eric Liu
Eric Liu epitomizes the typical second generation American: the son of two Taiwanese immigrants (who met in America) he went on to graduate from Yale and serve in the Clinton White House. This is a deeply personal collection of essays, which is equal parts memoir, and equal parts reflection on race, culture, and identity. Liu examines issues ranging from his own 'Asian-ness', the typical ideas associated with Chinatown, the Asian as the 'other', and the viability of the Asian American identity, in the prism of his own experiences and those of his immediate family.
One powerful aspect that ties his essays together is a ceaseless questioning, and a refusal to accept the widely held notion or the commonplace assumption. This is immediately evident in his first piece, a deeply moving reflection on his father rooted in questions about Chineseness and assimilation - both his own and his father's. His father was in many ways typically Chinese, proud of Chinese culture, deeply familiar with the Chinese classics with a grasp of the language equal to that of any Confusian scholar-official. Liu, despite attending Chinese classes, soon lost all facility for the language and with it his cultural roots as he grew increasingly American.
This could be seen as the typical immigrant story as Liu so eloquently writes:
More than that, assimilation is never the easy transformation for the second generation child as it is made out to be. As the author himself freely admits he often attributed his father's actions to his "Chineseness" but as he admits, with considerable insight this was often in response to his own cultural insecurities : "it was I who boxed against the shame and shadow of racial stigma" as a Chinese boy in an American world; to "cloak any handicap, real or imagined" that might accrue, to his race. Often, it is the second generation that is the one truly caught in between.
This overturning of easy assumptions is again at play in his essay "The Chinatown Idea". The very idea of a 'Chinatown' is often cited as evidence for a Chinese tendency to cling together, to refuse to assimilate. He again examines this through the lens of personal experience, in this case a powerful and touching portrait of a grandmother who lived for more than two decades in the same cinder-block apartment in New York's Chinatown. She seemed a powerful symbol of the typical immigrant Chinese, separated by a linguistic and cultural chasm, comfortable only in a familiar environment. Except Liu always felt that she had a desire to be somewhere else.
As Liu notes, we all have a certain idea of Chinatown, specifically that:
Liu calls this the "cruellest myth" because many of those who are in Chinatown do not wish to stay there, like his grandmother. Far from cloistering themselves they too wish for the American Dream but for them, whether due to their illegal immigrant status, or some vast linguistic chasm, assimilation is distant and unattainable.
It is thus not the insularity of the Chinese that sustains Chinatown, but the determined blindness of the rest of America in creating this myth of a separate entity, where the Chinese often exploit the Chinese, subject to different rules and standards, a "potemkin village" that hides a "nasty brutish shadow world".
After reading the essay, I felt a distinct sense of unease. But as Liu notes there are many Chinatowns: the insular enclave of foreignness, the shadowy world of exploitation, the thriving self sufficient community and the worst mistake one could make is the one that I made: to try simplify and generalize such a diverse portrait.
Ultimately, though, it is Liu's second essay that I could relate the most deeply to. The larger question of the essay (the "accidental Asian") is presented immediately and forcefully in a list of what makes him "white". Among the items he lists are: listening to NPR; marrying a white; speaking flawless, accentless English; subscribing to Foreign Affairs; not being too ethnic; and being mindful of minority militants, among others. As he notes: he never asked to be white, never sought out such a status but he found himself being "white by acclamation". Thus he has become an honorary white to some, a banana to others.
That certainly brought back memories. Of being called Sergaent Kantang (potato) in the army for my english speaking proclivities, as opposed to the Chinese speaking Hokkien swearing rice eaters that were typical of my race. I was a banana (yellow on the outside, white inside), a man with 'atas' (high) tastes - i.e. European cultural tastes. White by proclaimation, then?
I've made my own list: I am functionally monolingual, I speak in grammatically correct, complete sentences, I love the theater and musicals, I enjoy trivia nights, I drink my beer in British pubs or trendy bars (not coffee shops), I listen to jazz, I listen to classical music, I read literary novels, I have many foreign friends.
Of course this status came as much from the things I didn't do, a negation of the typical Chinese Singaporean: I don't speak mandarin (well), I don't speak a dialect, I do not listen to Chinese pop music, I don't watch Korean or Taiwanese TV serials, I hardly karaoke (and only English songs if I do), I don't use singlish. The only mainstream local custom I seem to enjoy doing is eating. That if anything is something that is truly universally Singaporean.
The bizarre fact is that our experiences are parallel, very similar, but like two lines running opposite to one another. As much as we have both become white, or been labeled white, for him it is as a minority Chinese attempting to assimilate into the larger culture. For me it is being born into the racial and cultural majority but have been emplaced into my own cultural (even linguistic) niche, as a result of background and education. As he has become part of the status quo, I have lost my place in it.
Yet in a sense he has become part of the majority, but a minority within the majority. He is not just white, but a certain type and class of white. Upper middle class, confident, socially mobile a far cry from the white trailer trash that used to hurl abuse at him on the bus. I too am a minority within a majority, culturally and linguistically. In that regard, though for different reasons, we are the same. We are both "accidental Asians".
Even though Liu's essays are deeply personal, it is has voice and his aptitude for the stirring image that captures the imagination. This is something unsurprising given that he was a Presidential speechwriter. I wish to end off with a sample from his final essay, Blood Vows about his marraige to his wife:
In this powerful memoir, and in his hands, one is impelled to believe that race doesn't really matter that much, and if it does, there are other greater things that can surpass it.
Eric Liu epitomizes the typical second generation American: the son of two Taiwanese immigrants (who met in America) he went on to graduate from Yale and serve in the Clinton White House. This is a deeply personal collection of essays, which is equal parts memoir, and equal parts reflection on race, culture, and identity. Liu examines issues ranging from his own 'Asian-ness', the typical ideas associated with Chinatown, the Asian as the 'other', and the viability of the Asian American identity, in the prism of his own experiences and those of his immediate family.
One powerful aspect that ties his essays together is a ceaseless questioning, and a refusal to accept the widely held notion or the commonplace assumption. This is immediately evident in his first piece, a deeply moving reflection on his father rooted in questions about Chineseness and assimilation - both his own and his father's. His father was in many ways typically Chinese, proud of Chinese culture, deeply familiar with the Chinese classics with a grasp of the language equal to that of any Confusian scholar-official. Liu, despite attending Chinese classes, soon lost all facility for the language and with it his cultural roots as he grew increasingly American.
This could be seen as the typical immigrant story as Liu so eloquently writes:
In our archetype of the immigrant experience, it is the first generation that remains wedded to the ways of the Old Country and the second generation that forsakes them. This we learn is the tragedy of assimilation: the inevitable estrangement between the immigrant father who imagines himself in exile and the American son who strains to prove his belonging.Except that Liu questions this assumption of the first generation immigrant, and the inevitable estrangement with their new adopted culture because:
we let ourselves think of the first generation's life as a mere chrysalis, an interlude between the larval existence of the homeland and the fully formed Americaness of the second generation. But the truth is that the father can become his own form of butterfly.In fact, his father did transform. A deep love and facility for languages was soon applied to English, and an understanding of culture enabled him to rise to respectable middle management in IBM. It was this very ability to adapt, and this openness to a new culture that gave his son the opportunity to transform himself fully into a typical American.
More than that, assimilation is never the easy transformation for the second generation child as it is made out to be. As the author himself freely admits he often attributed his father's actions to his "Chineseness" but as he admits, with considerable insight this was often in response to his own cultural insecurities : "it was I who boxed against the shame and shadow of racial stigma" as a Chinese boy in an American world; to "cloak any handicap, real or imagined" that might accrue, to his race. Often, it is the second generation that is the one truly caught in between.
This overturning of easy assumptions is again at play in his essay "The Chinatown Idea". The very idea of a 'Chinatown' is often cited as evidence for a Chinese tendency to cling together, to refuse to assimilate. He again examines this through the lens of personal experience, in this case a powerful and touching portrait of a grandmother who lived for more than two decades in the same cinder-block apartment in New York's Chinatown. She seemed a powerful symbol of the typical immigrant Chinese, separated by a linguistic and cultural chasm, comfortable only in a familiar environment. Except Liu always felt that she had a desire to be somewhere else.
As Liu notes, we all have a certain idea of Chinatown, specifically that:
Chinatown chooses to exempt itself from America: that it is purely the product of Chinese clannishness and insularity.Indeed, this is a particular cliche that I am ashamed to say I have repeated on countless occasions. After all it is only us Chinese who have Chinatowns all over the world (San Francisco, New York, Sydney). It must be a sign of our unique unwillingness to adapt to cultural morays, to assimilate. After all, Americans go abroad all the time and do not create "little Americas" all over the world now do they?
Liu calls this the "cruellest myth" because many of those who are in Chinatown do not wish to stay there, like his grandmother. Far from cloistering themselves they too wish for the American Dream but for them, whether due to their illegal immigrant status, or some vast linguistic chasm, assimilation is distant and unattainable.
It is thus not the insularity of the Chinese that sustains Chinatown, but the determined blindness of the rest of America in creating this myth of a separate entity, where the Chinese often exploit the Chinese, subject to different rules and standards, a "potemkin village" that hides a "nasty brutish shadow world".
After reading the essay, I felt a distinct sense of unease. But as Liu notes there are many Chinatowns: the insular enclave of foreignness, the shadowy world of exploitation, the thriving self sufficient community and the worst mistake one could make is the one that I made: to try simplify and generalize such a diverse portrait.
Ultimately, though, it is Liu's second essay that I could relate the most deeply to. The larger question of the essay (the "accidental Asian") is presented immediately and forcefully in a list of what makes him "white". Among the items he lists are: listening to NPR; marrying a white; speaking flawless, accentless English; subscribing to Foreign Affairs; not being too ethnic; and being mindful of minority militants, among others. As he notes: he never asked to be white, never sought out such a status but he found himself being "white by acclamation". Thus he has become an honorary white to some, a banana to others.
That certainly brought back memories. Of being called Sergaent Kantang (potato) in the army for my english speaking proclivities, as opposed to the Chinese speaking Hokkien swearing rice eaters that were typical of my race. I was a banana (yellow on the outside, white inside), a man with 'atas' (high) tastes - i.e. European cultural tastes. White by proclaimation, then?
I've made my own list: I am functionally monolingual, I speak in grammatically correct, complete sentences, I love the theater and musicals, I enjoy trivia nights, I drink my beer in British pubs or trendy bars (not coffee shops), I listen to jazz, I listen to classical music, I read literary novels, I have many foreign friends.
Of course this status came as much from the things I didn't do, a negation of the typical Chinese Singaporean: I don't speak mandarin (well), I don't speak a dialect, I do not listen to Chinese pop music, I don't watch Korean or Taiwanese TV serials, I hardly karaoke (and only English songs if I do), I don't use singlish. The only mainstream local custom I seem to enjoy doing is eating. That if anything is something that is truly universally Singaporean.
The bizarre fact is that our experiences are parallel, very similar, but like two lines running opposite to one another. As much as we have both become white, or been labeled white, for him it is as a minority Chinese attempting to assimilate into the larger culture. For me it is being born into the racial and cultural majority but have been emplaced into my own cultural (even linguistic) niche, as a result of background and education. As he has become part of the status quo, I have lost my place in it.
Yet in a sense he has become part of the majority, but a minority within the majority. He is not just white, but a certain type and class of white. Upper middle class, confident, socially mobile a far cry from the white trailer trash that used to hurl abuse at him on the bus. I too am a minority within a majority, culturally and linguistically. In that regard, though for different reasons, we are the same. We are both "accidental Asians".
Even though Liu's essays are deeply personal, it is has voice and his aptitude for the stirring image that captures the imagination. This is something unsurprising given that he was a Presidential speechwriter. I wish to end off with a sample from his final essay, Blood Vows about his marraige to his wife:
Let me explain why I married a white woman. It wasn't as if I had a plan. I wasn't trying to prove a point or defy convention. It was simply a matter of who was there and what was possible. Why did Carroll marry a Chinese man? Why do people of different races marry at all? For the same reason today that they go to school together, live together, travel together, work together: because they canwhat should immediately strike you is the fact that any explanation is even necessary. As he soon makes clear:
I chose. I chose to enter into a relationship with Carroll. Not with a "white woman", not with some nameless paragon of "white beauty" but with Carroll Haymon, who has always had an uncanny knack for finishing my sentences; who knows when to humour me and when not to; who, as a Southerner schooled in the North, is no stranger to acculturation; whose neck bends just so when she reads; who sings a soulful alto and scorns the designated-hitter rule; who has a way of putting complete strangers at ease. Nobody - and nobody's subconscious tricked me into falling in love with her.
In this powerful memoir, and in his hands, one is impelled to believe that race doesn't really matter that much, and if it does, there are other greater things that can surpass it.
7 February 2011
30 Books Before 30
I've decided to amend my previous list to keep things along the lines of the '30' theme. The 30 selections I have made are a rather eclectic bunch. The only defining criteria was that I do truly want to read all of the books on this list, and more than that I can actually stomach reading them.
It is for that reason that you won't fine Dante's Divine Comedy (too intimidating), Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (yawn), Chaucer's A Canterbury Tales (interesting but just too long and difficult), James Joyce's Ulysses (I would probably end up going what the hell?). There is one notable exception. I forced myself to include the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms; it is shameful enough that I am reading it in an English translation.
I will try and explain the stranger of my choices at some point, but here is the list for now in random order. Suffice to say this is quite a daunting list, and I had better get cracking!
It is for that reason that you won't fine Dante's Divine Comedy (too intimidating), Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (yawn), Chaucer's A Canterbury Tales (interesting but just too long and difficult), James Joyce's Ulysses (I would probably end up going what the hell?). There is one notable exception. I forced myself to include the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms; it is shameful enough that I am reading it in an English translation.
I will try and explain the stranger of my choices at some point, but here is the list for now in random order. Suffice to say this is quite a daunting list, and I had better get cracking!
- The Illiad
- The Odyssey
- The Analects | Confucius
- Romance of the Three Kingdoms
- Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained | John Milton
- The Rights of Man | Thomas Paine
- Moll Flanders | Daniel Defoe
- Emma | Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte
- Wuthering Heights | Emily Bronte
- Middlemarch | George Eliot
- Great Expectations | Charles Dickens
- Madame Bovary | Gustav Flaubert
- Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain
- War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy
- The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Moonstone | Wilkie Collins
- Walden and Civil Disobedience | David Henry Thoreau
- Democracy in America | Alexis de Tocqueville
- On the Origin of Species | Charles Darwin
- The Complete Sherlock Holmes | Arthur Conan Doyle
- Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man | James Joyce
- Lolita | Vladimir Nabakov
- Catch-22 | Joseph Heller
- 100 Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Trial and Metamorphoses | Franz Kafka
- Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry
- Murphy, Malloy, Malone Dies | Samuel Beckett
- The Spy Who Came in From the Cold | John Le Carre
- The Book of the New Sun | Gene Wolfe
14 January 2011
Books Bought Recently
In a vain attempt to reduce my already overflowing bookshelves (or rather to prevent further additions to them), I decided to begin taking note of my book purchases, and the rationale behind them. At year end, I will also do a review of how many of these books actually got read. This is also part of my long term aspiration to try and write about the books that I read, given my utter inability to remember anything I have read more than a few months afterward. Anyhow, this is the latest installment from January:
Beginner's Guide to Epistemology | Robert Martin: I obviously do not need yet another introductory book on epistemology, at least not for my own purposes. Since I am teaching it for Knowledge and Inquiry this year, I am buying this in view of mining it for teaching resources later this year. Or so I tell myself.
Lectures in the History of Political Philosophy | John Rawls: Despite the mind-numbing dullness of much of A Theory of Justice, Rawls was actually a good engaging lecturer, by all accounts. Given my genuine interest in political philosophy, this is a good addition, particularly since I never had a chance to examine historical thinkers (Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau) at University. I also managed to justify this on account of my involvement in the Raffles Renaissance Programme - I will be doing the Social Contract later this term and I need to read up. As a programme covering great books of social and political thought, this book will definitely come in handy.
Justice: Key Concepts Series | Tom Campbell: I have been eyeing this book for some time and I was initially put off by the price before I finally caved. It looks to be an excellent summation of the various theories of justice. I have learned never to underestimate the usefulness of books which effectively summarize complex ideas and debates. This looked to be one of them. Now, I just have to get round to devoting time to examining the issue of justice in greater detail and reading all the stuff I accumulated on political philosophy in the first place.
The Wind-Up Girl | Paolo Bacigalupi: Who would have thought! A book purchase made as a result of reading the Straits Time Sunday life section! It is a sign of how much I have neglected Science Fiction that I had no idea that this novel won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel. In times past I read Hugo and Nebula winners fairly voraciously. Bacigalupi was interviewed in the paper and my interest was definitely piqued. A novel set in 2030 Bangkok involving genetic manipulation and a mysterious made to order (genetically that is) girl? I just had to get it!
Worlds of Exile and Illusion | Ursula K Leguin: I was speaking to one of my student's last year about Ursula K LeGuin and she was lamenting how Le Guin's earlier "Hainish" novels were largely out of print and very difficult to find unlike The Left Hand of Darkness (which won both the Hugo and Nebula). Then I chanced upon this reprint, a compendium of the first three hanish novels, and I decided that I just had to get it. One of my quirks is that I still try and collect out of print, good science fiction, despite largely neglecting the genre in the past two years (or more). Science Fiction is probably the only field in which my knowledge extends beyond the status quo (what you would find in bookstores) to past works which are no longer well know, or commonly available. As an aside, I used to bump into that student many mornings coming out of the MRT station on the way to school. Inevitably, we both would have a different book in our hand each time. As two of the few people who were truly voracious readers, we would have a short chat about books, and authors. I certainly will miss those conversations.
The Secret Speech | Tom Rob Smith: I first chanced upon Tom Rob Smith when I borrowed his debut novel Child 44 from a university library. It was one of those impulse borrows ( book looks interesting, let's just grab it) which are less damaging that the impulse buys that might result from one being at a book warehouse sale or a bookstore. I was looking for an easy read on the train ride home, instead I got that rare thing - a taunt well written thriller which was an intelligent exploration of Stalinist Russia. The premise itself was mind-bogglingly simple, yet compelling. A young child is found murdered, a detective sets out on the trail and discovers more deaths. What seems a simple run of the mill idea takes on huge significance in the context of an utopian communist system, where serial killing is simply deemed to be impossible. I was delighted when the book was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008 given its obvious quality, but still surprised (how often do thrillers get such recognition?). On the strength of Child 44 alone, I bought this follow up novel. While it has been out for some time, I haven't seen a copy in a bookstore until now, so once I chanced upon it, I naturally bought it rather unthinkingly. Let's just hope Tom Rob Smith doesn't suffer from the curse of the second novel.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders | Daniyal Mueenuddin: The subcontinent is known for producing brilliant writers, and a seemingly never-ending conveyor belt of new talent - Arundhati Roy winning the Booker prize with her debut novel, Kiran Desai with her sophomore effort, Aravind Adiga rising suddenly to prominence with his first book. Mueenuddin seems to be the latest subcontinent writer to rise to garner such attention. He certainly fits the mould - ivy league educated, worked in white collar job (banking) before returning to his home country to manage a farm. Mueenuddin is Pakistani and is already being touted as an authentic voice of his country. I bought it, as one often does, purely due to the lavish praise heaped on it, and the fact that it was nominated for a slew of awards. I also thought of a colleague who loves fiction from the subcontinent when I bought it - the fact that I could lend it to her, and introduce her to yet another exciting young writer somehow added justification to the purchase.
A History of Christianity | Diarmaid McCulloch: Why oh why do I keep doing this? If there is one area where I have collected massive (both in quantity in number and the size of the books themselves) unread volumes it is history. I find a new history of say The Nazi Regime, or a new volume in a multi-volume history of Europe, or a new book chronicling Krushchev in the Cold War. It is highly acclaimed (by fellow historians). I, of course, would love to find out more about that particular historical period. I buy the book. I put it on a shelf - all 600-700 pages of it. At best, I skim a couple of chapters. The book is never read. When it comes to volumes of authoritative history, I suffer the ultimate manifestation of the book buyer's curse - the myth of best intentions. That myth goes along the lines of - I have always wanted to learn more about this subject; this book is well written and critically acclaimed; I might not read it immediately and it does look a bit daunting, but of course it will be worth the effort and I will get round to reading it eventually. Eventually never happens. So why did I buy a 900 page history of Christianity? Because I am interested in the subject. Because Diarmaid McCulloch is the foremost historian of Christianity writing today, because the book was lavished with great praise, and book of the year awards from individuals ranging from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Melvyn Bragg. Because I will read it someday. Perhaps after I finish McCulloch's own history of the Reformation (purchased at Oxford in 2005, not yet started), or perhaps after I have read equally noted historian Paul Johnson's own History of Christianity (purchased Sunny bookstore Singapore, read first 60 pages out of 700). Perhaps never.
Beginner's Guide to Epistemology | Robert Martin: I obviously do not need yet another introductory book on epistemology, at least not for my own purposes. Since I am teaching it for Knowledge and Inquiry this year, I am buying this in view of mining it for teaching resources later this year. Or so I tell myself.
Lectures in the History of Political Philosophy | John Rawls: Despite the mind-numbing dullness of much of A Theory of Justice, Rawls was actually a good engaging lecturer, by all accounts. Given my genuine interest in political philosophy, this is a good addition, particularly since I never had a chance to examine historical thinkers (Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau) at University. I also managed to justify this on account of my involvement in the Raffles Renaissance Programme - I will be doing the Social Contract later this term and I need to read up. As a programme covering great books of social and political thought, this book will definitely come in handy.
Justice: Key Concepts Series | Tom Campbell: I have been eyeing this book for some time and I was initially put off by the price before I finally caved. It looks to be an excellent summation of the various theories of justice. I have learned never to underestimate the usefulness of books which effectively summarize complex ideas and debates. This looked to be one of them. Now, I just have to get round to devoting time to examining the issue of justice in greater detail and reading all the stuff I accumulated on political philosophy in the first place.
The Wind-Up Girl | Paolo Bacigalupi: Who would have thought! A book purchase made as a result of reading the Straits Time Sunday life section! It is a sign of how much I have neglected Science Fiction that I had no idea that this novel won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel. In times past I read Hugo and Nebula winners fairly voraciously. Bacigalupi was interviewed in the paper and my interest was definitely piqued. A novel set in 2030 Bangkok involving genetic manipulation and a mysterious made to order (genetically that is) girl? I just had to get it!
Worlds of Exile and Illusion | Ursula K Leguin: I was speaking to one of my student's last year about Ursula K LeGuin and she was lamenting how Le Guin's earlier "Hainish" novels were largely out of print and very difficult to find unlike The Left Hand of Darkness (which won both the Hugo and Nebula). Then I chanced upon this reprint, a compendium of the first three hanish novels, and I decided that I just had to get it. One of my quirks is that I still try and collect out of print, good science fiction, despite largely neglecting the genre in the past two years (or more). Science Fiction is probably the only field in which my knowledge extends beyond the status quo (what you would find in bookstores) to past works which are no longer well know, or commonly available. As an aside, I used to bump into that student many mornings coming out of the MRT station on the way to school. Inevitably, we both would have a different book in our hand each time. As two of the few people who were truly voracious readers, we would have a short chat about books, and authors. I certainly will miss those conversations.
The Secret Speech | Tom Rob Smith: I first chanced upon Tom Rob Smith when I borrowed his debut novel Child 44 from a university library. It was one of those impulse borrows ( book looks interesting, let's just grab it) which are less damaging that the impulse buys that might result from one being at a book warehouse sale or a bookstore. I was looking for an easy read on the train ride home, instead I got that rare thing - a taunt well written thriller which was an intelligent exploration of Stalinist Russia. The premise itself was mind-bogglingly simple, yet compelling. A young child is found murdered, a detective sets out on the trail and discovers more deaths. What seems a simple run of the mill idea takes on huge significance in the context of an utopian communist system, where serial killing is simply deemed to be impossible. I was delighted when the book was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008 given its obvious quality, but still surprised (how often do thrillers get such recognition?). On the strength of Child 44 alone, I bought this follow up novel. While it has been out for some time, I haven't seen a copy in a bookstore until now, so once I chanced upon it, I naturally bought it rather unthinkingly. Let's just hope Tom Rob Smith doesn't suffer from the curse of the second novel.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders | Daniyal Mueenuddin: The subcontinent is known for producing brilliant writers, and a seemingly never-ending conveyor belt of new talent - Arundhati Roy winning the Booker prize with her debut novel, Kiran Desai with her sophomore effort, Aravind Adiga rising suddenly to prominence with his first book. Mueenuddin seems to be the latest subcontinent writer to rise to garner such attention. He certainly fits the mould - ivy league educated, worked in white collar job (banking) before returning to his home country to manage a farm. Mueenuddin is Pakistani and is already being touted as an authentic voice of his country. I bought it, as one often does, purely due to the lavish praise heaped on it, and the fact that it was nominated for a slew of awards. I also thought of a colleague who loves fiction from the subcontinent when I bought it - the fact that I could lend it to her, and introduce her to yet another exciting young writer somehow added justification to the purchase.
A History of Christianity | Diarmaid McCulloch: Why oh why do I keep doing this? If there is one area where I have collected massive (both in quantity in number and the size of the books themselves) unread volumes it is history. I find a new history of say The Nazi Regime, or a new volume in a multi-volume history of Europe, or a new book chronicling Krushchev in the Cold War. It is highly acclaimed (by fellow historians). I, of course, would love to find out more about that particular historical period. I buy the book. I put it on a shelf - all 600-700 pages of it. At best, I skim a couple of chapters. The book is never read. When it comes to volumes of authoritative history, I suffer the ultimate manifestation of the book buyer's curse - the myth of best intentions. That myth goes along the lines of - I have always wanted to learn more about this subject; this book is well written and critically acclaimed; I might not read it immediately and it does look a bit daunting, but of course it will be worth the effort and I will get round to reading it eventually. Eventually never happens. So why did I buy a 900 page history of Christianity? Because I am interested in the subject. Because Diarmaid McCulloch is the foremost historian of Christianity writing today, because the book was lavished with great praise, and book of the year awards from individuals ranging from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Melvyn Bragg. Because I will read it someday. Perhaps after I finish McCulloch's own history of the Reformation (purchased at Oxford in 2005, not yet started), or perhaps after I have read equally noted historian Paul Johnson's own History of Christianity (purchased Sunny bookstore Singapore, read first 60 pages out of 700). Perhaps never.
7 January 2011
The Haunted Hotel
The Haunted Hotel | Wilkie Collins
It has been my practice over the past few years to start the year with a flight of fancy, usually a fantasy novel of some kind. I had purchased The Haunted Hotel while browsing at Kinokuniya Bookstore at Bugis Junction, killing time before dinner with a friend. Having read the first forty pages in the bookstore itself, I was intrigued enough to purchase it and find out whether Countess Narona's marriage to Lord Monbarry would result in the dire premonitions she so feared.
Wilkie Collins was familiar to me on the stength of his two most famous works - A Woman in White, a staple of Gothic literature; and The Moonstone, considered by many to be the forerunner to the detective novel. I had never gotten round to reading either of those two works despite studying Gothic literature in school, and being a fan of detective and crime fiction, with The Moonstone being an influence on many fine writers in the genre.
It is tempting to see The Haunted Hotel as an interesting mixture of these two genres - the gothic novel and the detective novel. Elements of the supernatural do seem to be at play in the novel - dark premonitions, disturbing visions (or possibly hallucinations), a clearly overwrought and thus unreliable narrator, but these are tempered with rational explanation based on systematic enquiry (such as a report from an insurance office). This delicate balance is seen most clearly in the denoument of the novel's final act with a clever little plot device that offers the readers the chance to believe the conclusion as either the fantasy of a deranged mind, or the confessions of a dark and deadly crime.
Wilkie Collin's writing style is engaging, and captivating. You won't find here the long, conjuncted sentences of his peers such as Charles Dickens (who acted in two of Collin's melodramas). The novel is very readable (as much as that is an overused term), and it builds up the story and the tension gradually. It takes reading the great Victorian mystery and crime novels to appreciate how dire modern thrillers are (I insist on making a distinction between thrillers which I view as pulp novels, and crime novels which is a genre with more artfulness). This novel, slight at 200 pages, made me want to read Collin's two most famous works mentioned above.
All in all, this was a much darker flight of fancy than I am used to starting the year with. It was certainly no sword and sorcery fantasy novel, but it was perhaps a richer experience for that. Besides which, it is also in keeping with 2011 being a more serious, focused year for me.
It has been my practice over the past few years to start the year with a flight of fancy, usually a fantasy novel of some kind. I had purchased The Haunted Hotel while browsing at Kinokuniya Bookstore at Bugis Junction, killing time before dinner with a friend. Having read the first forty pages in the bookstore itself, I was intrigued enough to purchase it and find out whether Countess Narona's marriage to Lord Monbarry would result in the dire premonitions she so feared.
Wilkie Collins was familiar to me on the stength of his two most famous works - A Woman in White, a staple of Gothic literature; and The Moonstone, considered by many to be the forerunner to the detective novel. I had never gotten round to reading either of those two works despite studying Gothic literature in school, and being a fan of detective and crime fiction, with The Moonstone being an influence on many fine writers in the genre.
It is tempting to see The Haunted Hotel as an interesting mixture of these two genres - the gothic novel and the detective novel. Elements of the supernatural do seem to be at play in the novel - dark premonitions, disturbing visions (or possibly hallucinations), a clearly overwrought and thus unreliable narrator, but these are tempered with rational explanation based on systematic enquiry (such as a report from an insurance office). This delicate balance is seen most clearly in the denoument of the novel's final act with a clever little plot device that offers the readers the chance to believe the conclusion as either the fantasy of a deranged mind, or the confessions of a dark and deadly crime.
Wilkie Collin's writing style is engaging, and captivating. You won't find here the long, conjuncted sentences of his peers such as Charles Dickens (who acted in two of Collin's melodramas). The novel is very readable (as much as that is an overused term), and it builds up the story and the tension gradually. It takes reading the great Victorian mystery and crime novels to appreciate how dire modern thrillers are (I insist on making a distinction between thrillers which I view as pulp novels, and crime novels which is a genre with more artfulness). This novel, slight at 200 pages, made me want to read Collin's two most famous works mentioned above.
All in all, this was a much darker flight of fancy than I am used to starting the year with. It was certainly no sword and sorcery fantasy novel, but it was perhaps a richer experience for that. Besides which, it is also in keeping with 2011 being a more serious, focused year for me.
22 June 2010
A Million Words and Counting
A Million Word and Counting
by Paul Payack
Citadel Press, 2008
There have been innumerable books and articles on the notion that English has become the global language, the international language of business and the chosen medium of cross-cultural communication. Much has been made of how globalizing forces has cemented English's status as the lingua franca (perhaps lingua anglia?) - the majority of web pages and blogs are published in English, hundreds of millions of people around the globe want to learn it and it is the only feasible medium of exchange either in the corridors of power in Brussels or when a Chinese investor attempts to seal a deal in Africa (and vice versa).
Paul Payack, a self-styled word maven has shown a penchant for self-promotion when his site, the Global Language Monitor claimed to have found the millionth word in English. As many linguistic scholars have already pointed out, such as David Crystal, the doyen of word popularizers, the very exercise was a "load of rubbish". It became more so when the millionth word turned out to be the completely insipid choice of "Web 2.0", a selection made more out of self-interest and one that hardly fulfills the goals of highlighting the "diversity and dynamic growth of English" that was the supposed aim of the whole exercise.
This book turns out to be a prelude to all the needless hoopla. Payack claims himself not merely to be a word maven but a trivia fiend, and these qualities are on display here. He gives us numerous lists and groups of facts, no doubt culled from the archives of the Global Language Monitor. What he is forgotten is the basic principle that lists (and reams of trivia) are never interesting in themselves, but only hold value if they are relevant, and are fascinating only when they are out of the ordinary and not completely mundane.
What this book primarily consists of is groups and lists of English words organized according to various topics such as 'the silver screen', television' and 'celebrities' (including a random list of weird celebrity children names), most of which are pointless and mundane. A list of Top 25 'Bushisms' is hardly original though at least randomly funny. I hardly need a book like his to tell me that the top phrases associated with Hurricane Katrina were "disaster, catastrophe, apocalypse and end of the world" among others; nor was his Katrina word explainer really illuminating: explaining what cajun is was interesting, but do I really need a defintion of 'search and rescue', or 'superdome' or 'recovery' or 'sandbag'? Similarly, I nearly fell out of my chair in surprise and shock when he listed the frequently used tech words of 2007 as 'iPod, nano, cookie, megahertz, plasma, and blu-ray', among others.
The biggest disappointment is that when Payack veers away from the mundane, which is rare enough, he fails to go beyond listing various words and phrases to explaining how they might come about. So as an example, it was interesting to me that in Finnish English a "noobie" is a slang word for a rookie, or in Polish English "thanks for the mountain" roughly means thank you in advance. The problem is, Payack never does explain in any kind of detail how these terms might have come about, something that was supremely unsatisfying.
Worse is when Payack inundates us with completey pointless lists of facts, often without ever revealing their significance. So he gives us a list of the Top 25 Fashion Cities based on his company's predictive quantities indicator, saying that it is "surprising" but failing to reveal how he came by this list at all. More pointless are lists of every country and its capital city, or the names of powers of ten up to a googolplex and other reams of random information that anyone could probably find in an almanac. Within the random lists there are some nuggets that I found of genuine interest, such as a list of countries without a national language (now that is certainly something that never crossed my mind), but it was rather tiring sorting through all the chaff.
In sum, Payack's book is a disappointment in a field already chock full of books celebrating the rise of English as a global language. With such a broad and fascinating subject area, what is truly is amazing is that Payack has produced a book that contains so much that is insipid. Rather like Web 2.0 if you ask me. Global English, in all its varied diversity certainly deserves better.
by Paul Payack
Citadel Press, 2008
There have been innumerable books and articles on the notion that English has become the global language, the international language of business and the chosen medium of cross-cultural communication. Much has been made of how globalizing forces has cemented English's status as the lingua franca (perhaps lingua anglia?) - the majority of web pages and blogs are published in English, hundreds of millions of people around the globe want to learn it and it is the only feasible medium of exchange either in the corridors of power in Brussels or when a Chinese investor attempts to seal a deal in Africa (and vice versa).
Paul Payack, a self-styled word maven has shown a penchant for self-promotion when his site, the Global Language Monitor claimed to have found the millionth word in English. As many linguistic scholars have already pointed out, such as David Crystal, the doyen of word popularizers, the very exercise was a "load of rubbish". It became more so when the millionth word turned out to be the completely insipid choice of "Web 2.0", a selection made more out of self-interest and one that hardly fulfills the goals of highlighting the "diversity and dynamic growth of English" that was the supposed aim of the whole exercise.
This book turns out to be a prelude to all the needless hoopla. Payack claims himself not merely to be a word maven but a trivia fiend, and these qualities are on display here. He gives us numerous lists and groups of facts, no doubt culled from the archives of the Global Language Monitor. What he is forgotten is the basic principle that lists (and reams of trivia) are never interesting in themselves, but only hold value if they are relevant, and are fascinating only when they are out of the ordinary and not completely mundane.
What this book primarily consists of is groups and lists of English words organized according to various topics such as 'the silver screen', television' and 'celebrities' (including a random list of weird celebrity children names), most of which are pointless and mundane. A list of Top 25 'Bushisms' is hardly original though at least randomly funny. I hardly need a book like his to tell me that the top phrases associated with Hurricane Katrina were "disaster, catastrophe, apocalypse and end of the world" among others; nor was his Katrina word explainer really illuminating: explaining what cajun is was interesting, but do I really need a defintion of 'search and rescue', or 'superdome' or 'recovery' or 'sandbag'? Similarly, I nearly fell out of my chair in surprise and shock when he listed the frequently used tech words of 2007 as 'iPod, nano, cookie, megahertz, plasma, and blu-ray', among others.
The biggest disappointment is that when Payack veers away from the mundane, which is rare enough, he fails to go beyond listing various words and phrases to explaining how they might come about. So as an example, it was interesting to me that in Finnish English a "noobie" is a slang word for a rookie, or in Polish English "thanks for the mountain" roughly means thank you in advance. The problem is, Payack never does explain in any kind of detail how these terms might have come about, something that was supremely unsatisfying.
Worse is when Payack inundates us with completey pointless lists of facts, often without ever revealing their significance. So he gives us a list of the Top 25 Fashion Cities based on his company's predictive quantities indicator, saying that it is "surprising" but failing to reveal how he came by this list at all. More pointless are lists of every country and its capital city, or the names of powers of ten up to a googolplex and other reams of random information that anyone could probably find in an almanac. Within the random lists there are some nuggets that I found of genuine interest, such as a list of countries without a national language (now that is certainly something that never crossed my mind), but it was rather tiring sorting through all the chaff.
In sum, Payack's book is a disappointment in a field already chock full of books celebrating the rise of English as a global language. With such a broad and fascinating subject area, what is truly is amazing is that Payack has produced a book that contains so much that is insipid. Rather like Web 2.0 if you ask me. Global English, in all its varied diversity certainly deserves better.
10 January 2010
700 Sundays
700 Sundays| Billy Crystal
Those used to the name dropping and revelations that are a staple of celebrity biographies will be pleasantly surprised by this book, a quietly humourous portrait of Billy Crystal's family which ends just as he begins his ascent to Hollywood fame. The book covers Crystal's childhood as part of an extended Jewish family growing up on Long Island, centering on his relationship with his father, and delving into his three abiding passions in life - baseball, dixieland big band jazz, and what would eventually bring him fame and riches, stand up comedy.
The book had its impetus in a Broadway show, which won a Tony award, and it is easy to see its roots. The advantage is the powerfully authentic and often personal voice that comes out of many of the pages. You can almost audibly hear in your head Crystal's famous voice doing his shtick. The drawback stems from the same source: for however good it translates to prose, many parts of the book begs to be performed. You want to see him work the crowd and do the physical expressions that are fundamental to some of the portraits in the book. A number of jokes in the early part of the book fall particularly foul of the translation from theater hall to the page, in particular a re-enactment of his very own circumcision, which might have worked with Billy charm and sense of comic timing but doesn't seem that funny inked out.
What a family Billy had though. The stories abound, from his Uncle Milt founding the famous Commodore Records which meant that the young Billy had personal interactions with a whole slew of jazz musicians, both famous and forgotten. Indeed, it was Billie Holiday who took a young Crystal to watch his first movie, and Billy's grandmother decided to give Louis Armstrong a hilarious piece of advice when Louis visited the family, which Armstrong thankfully didn't take. Billy's father eventually came to work for Milt and helped in the running of the record business as well as staging jazz performances and dances, and the result is a wonderful portrait of the grandeur and sophisticated charm of big band dixieland jazz in its heyday.
A particularly powerful portrait from the book, one that is easily overlooked, comes in the third chapter which takes the form of an extended one way phone conversation between a favourite aunt and her friend in which she reveals, complete with numerous asides and digressions, her coming to terms with her daughter being lesbian, and the brave decision she made to attend her daughter's wedding. It was an utterly authentic, real and moving portrait of everyday domestic bravery which deserves to be celebrated.
One of Billy's big passions is baseball and this is well represented in the short book, from his first visit to Yankee stadium, which began a life long love affair, to numerous household games with his two older brothers where they played out entire imaginary games, including their very own backyard World Series. One of Billy's abiding memories of the 700 Sundays he spent with his father is his dad patiently teaching him the fundamentals of baseball, and Billy finally mastering a way to hit his father's wicked curveball, all of which served him well when he managed to win a baseball scholarship to College.
It was also Billy's father, along with an utterly hilarious Uncle called Berns who had a special talent for accents and mimicry which an inspired Billy soon adopted, who initiated Billy's love of comedy. Billy used to perform jokes (often boardering on the inappropriate and sometimes scandalous) copied from stand up acts he had seen, at large Crystal family gatherings. Thankfully, the extended family not only has the grace not to take offence at the gall of the young budding comedian, but actually laughed uproariously.
Tragedy was to strike when Crystal was 15, when his father died of a heart-attack during a weekly bowling game, following some angry words with Billy, leaving his son both heartbroken and guilty. The rest of the book is probably the weakest section, tapering off with largely narrative sections depicting Crystal dealing with his grief, meeting and falling in love with his future wife (which strangely seems a bit dead and lacking much sparkle), and eventually ending with the death of his mother.
700 Sundays is a short volume, but is an enormous surprise as celebrity autobiographies go. This is a funny, moving portrait of an All-American family that is equal parts laugh out loud hilarious and poignant. It certainly deserves to be read, and if you are so lucky, perhaps even seen.
Grade: B+
Those used to the name dropping and revelations that are a staple of celebrity biographies will be pleasantly surprised by this book, a quietly humourous portrait of Billy Crystal's family which ends just as he begins his ascent to Hollywood fame. The book covers Crystal's childhood as part of an extended Jewish family growing up on Long Island, centering on his relationship with his father, and delving into his three abiding passions in life - baseball, dixieland big band jazz, and what would eventually bring him fame and riches, stand up comedy.
The book had its impetus in a Broadway show, which won a Tony award, and it is easy to see its roots. The advantage is the powerfully authentic and often personal voice that comes out of many of the pages. You can almost audibly hear in your head Crystal's famous voice doing his shtick. The drawback stems from the same source: for however good it translates to prose, many parts of the book begs to be performed. You want to see him work the crowd and do the physical expressions that are fundamental to some of the portraits in the book. A number of jokes in the early part of the book fall particularly foul of the translation from theater hall to the page, in particular a re-enactment of his very own circumcision, which might have worked with Billy charm and sense of comic timing but doesn't seem that funny inked out.
What a family Billy had though. The stories abound, from his Uncle Milt founding the famous Commodore Records which meant that the young Billy had personal interactions with a whole slew of jazz musicians, both famous and forgotten. Indeed, it was Billie Holiday who took a young Crystal to watch his first movie, and Billy's grandmother decided to give Louis Armstrong a hilarious piece of advice when Louis visited the family, which Armstrong thankfully didn't take. Billy's father eventually came to work for Milt and helped in the running of the record business as well as staging jazz performances and dances, and the result is a wonderful portrait of the grandeur and sophisticated charm of big band dixieland jazz in its heyday.
A particularly powerful portrait from the book, one that is easily overlooked, comes in the third chapter which takes the form of an extended one way phone conversation between a favourite aunt and her friend in which she reveals, complete with numerous asides and digressions, her coming to terms with her daughter being lesbian, and the brave decision she made to attend her daughter's wedding. It was an utterly authentic, real and moving portrait of everyday domestic bravery which deserves to be celebrated.
One of Billy's big passions is baseball and this is well represented in the short book, from his first visit to Yankee stadium, which began a life long love affair, to numerous household games with his two older brothers where they played out entire imaginary games, including their very own backyard World Series. One of Billy's abiding memories of the 700 Sundays he spent with his father is his dad patiently teaching him the fundamentals of baseball, and Billy finally mastering a way to hit his father's wicked curveball, all of which served him well when he managed to win a baseball scholarship to College.
It was also Billy's father, along with an utterly hilarious Uncle called Berns who had a special talent for accents and mimicry which an inspired Billy soon adopted, who initiated Billy's love of comedy. Billy used to perform jokes (often boardering on the inappropriate and sometimes scandalous) copied from stand up acts he had seen, at large Crystal family gatherings. Thankfully, the extended family not only has the grace not to take offence at the gall of the young budding comedian, but actually laughed uproariously.
Tragedy was to strike when Crystal was 15, when his father died of a heart-attack during a weekly bowling game, following some angry words with Billy, leaving his son both heartbroken and guilty. The rest of the book is probably the weakest section, tapering off with largely narrative sections depicting Crystal dealing with his grief, meeting and falling in love with his future wife (which strangely seems a bit dead and lacking much sparkle), and eventually ending with the death of his mother.
700 Sundays is a short volume, but is an enormous surprise as celebrity autobiographies go. This is a funny, moving portrait of an All-American family that is equal parts laugh out loud hilarious and poignant. It certainly deserves to be read, and if you are so lucky, perhaps even seen.
Grade: B+
9 January 2010
Book Sale
Having spent a fair amount of time spring cleaning during the December holidays, I decided to organize a garage sale of sorts to get rid of old books and CDs which were no longer wanted. It was a kind of open house excuse to catch up with old friends as well. All in all, it was fairly successful. As expected, the interesting items were mainly the ones to go - double copies of good books like Ian Kershaw's Fateful Choices, and a volume of Frank Miller's Sin City.
Karin took several black leatherbound volumes of Agatha Christie as I expected she would; I also convinced her to take Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons - given her love of British comedy, I was sure she would love the book. I also managed to sell several other classic books among them a copy of E.M Forster's Howard's End, Greg Bear's Blood Music and several others.
Of course that left me with an enormous pile of hardbacks, which had mainly been purchased on offer from Borders, in the first place, which nobody wanted to touch. It's a classic rule which I have now learnt - nobody, and I mean nobody will touch hardback fiction, even secondhand. Blackwell's bookstore in Oxford knew that fairly well - one of their few rules governing the secondhand department was that they would not take any hardback fiction.
And of course old thrillers, Stephen King novels, and other such rather banal brainless reads were also left languishing, not that I was surprised. I mean, it was rather evident that my close friends were hardly the types who would pick up this stuff which was expressly dumped by me because I hadn't read them, or felt I would never read them, or found them to be horrible.
I also failed rather spectacularly to get rid of any CDs barring three Jars of Clay albums and Savage Garden's Affirmation. Admittedly, what was on offer was rather dire - Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Richard Marx, Bob Carlilse, Rick Price smacked of overwrought sentimental ballads and were precisely being sold being they were relics of embarrassing teenage years. And no, I deny any responsibility for the two Spice Girls CDs on sale. Still, there was some half decent rock stuff which nobody picked up.
It was good seeing some old friends again, and I was quite pleased that I managed to raise over $100 for charity - in this case Habitat for Humanity. I should really try and prune even more of the mountain of books that I own and sell them, but human beings are acquisitive creatures but nature, and it is always hard to part with what you own. Still, a enjoyable enough evening, and for a good cause.
Karin took several black leatherbound volumes of Agatha Christie as I expected she would; I also convinced her to take Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons - given her love of British comedy, I was sure she would love the book. I also managed to sell several other classic books among them a copy of E.M Forster's Howard's End, Greg Bear's Blood Music and several others.
Of course that left me with an enormous pile of hardbacks, which had mainly been purchased on offer from Borders, in the first place, which nobody wanted to touch. It's a classic rule which I have now learnt - nobody, and I mean nobody will touch hardback fiction, even secondhand. Blackwell's bookstore in Oxford knew that fairly well - one of their few rules governing the secondhand department was that they would not take any hardback fiction.
And of course old thrillers, Stephen King novels, and other such rather banal brainless reads were also left languishing, not that I was surprised. I mean, it was rather evident that my close friends were hardly the types who would pick up this stuff which was expressly dumped by me because I hadn't read them, or felt I would never read them, or found them to be horrible.
I also failed rather spectacularly to get rid of any CDs barring three Jars of Clay albums and Savage Garden's Affirmation. Admittedly, what was on offer was rather dire - Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Richard Marx, Bob Carlilse, Rick Price smacked of overwrought sentimental ballads and were precisely being sold being they were relics of embarrassing teenage years. And no, I deny any responsibility for the two Spice Girls CDs on sale. Still, there was some half decent rock stuff which nobody picked up.
It was good seeing some old friends again, and I was quite pleased that I managed to raise over $100 for charity - in this case Habitat for Humanity. I should really try and prune even more of the mountain of books that I own and sell them, but human beings are acquisitive creatures but nature, and it is always hard to part with what you own. Still, a enjoyable enough evening, and for a good cause.
13 October 2009
A Book A Day for 365 Days
Of all the new year resolutions that I have made, one of the few that I have successfully kept is a pledge made back in 2000 to try and read at least one book a week for the entire year. I've since gone from that initial target of 52 books to setting myself a more ambitious one of 100 books for the year (just under 2 a week). All this pales in comparison though to the goal that Nina Sankovitch set herself - she wanted to finish a book a day for one entire year, and write a reflection on each and every one of them. She started on October 29, 2008 and she's almost done - having read through Christmas, New Year's and Easter. She started her one year of reading as a means of helping her come to terms with her sister's death and of course to appreciate more about herself and the world. Her reviews and thoughts on reading are real gems, which I encourage everyone to read.
I can't help but be moved and impressed by Nina's journey, and perhaps, one day I will find the courage and the time to do something similar. The depth and breadth of her reading was very impressive - she would not read anything she had already read before; she would read an individual author's work only once, and she would read widely - essays, short stories, science fiction and fantasy, crime, literary novels, the occasional classic. Of course, the fact that she had only a day to complete it meant that each book was usually limited to under 300 pages (with novellas for busy days).
It was flattering to see a number of books I've already read that she encountered for the first time during her one year journey. These included The Watchmen (she found it far too violent and didn't enjoy it), Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman (we both loved it but as book lovers that was only to be expected), Ali Smith's The First Person and Other Stories (she found Smith's style irritating and distracting, I found it intriguing and fun), The 39 Steps (we both thought it farcical and not very exciting), and many others such as Ender's Game, Paul Auster's Man in the Dark, Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (she found the ending too staged, I thought he had earned it), Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, The White Tiger, Never Let Me Go and Stardust by Neil Gaiman (we both wanted more of faerie).
Anyhow here's a salute to Nina once again, and I'll go back to her list and I'll sure be glad to find some interesting new reads that might help me fulfil my goal of reading 100 books next year.
I can't help but be moved and impressed by Nina's journey, and perhaps, one day I will find the courage and the time to do something similar. The depth and breadth of her reading was very impressive - she would not read anything she had already read before; she would read an individual author's work only once, and she would read widely - essays, short stories, science fiction and fantasy, crime, literary novels, the occasional classic. Of course, the fact that she had only a day to complete it meant that each book was usually limited to under 300 pages (with novellas for busy days).
It was flattering to see a number of books I've already read that she encountered for the first time during her one year journey. These included The Watchmen (she found it far too violent and didn't enjoy it), Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman (we both loved it but as book lovers that was only to be expected), Ali Smith's The First Person and Other Stories (she found Smith's style irritating and distracting, I found it intriguing and fun), The 39 Steps (we both thought it farcical and not very exciting), and many others such as Ender's Game, Paul Auster's Man in the Dark, Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (she found the ending too staged, I thought he had earned it), Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, The White Tiger, Never Let Me Go and Stardust by Neil Gaiman (we both wanted more of faerie).
Anyhow here's a salute to Nina once again, and I'll go back to her list and I'll sure be glad to find some interesting new reads that might help me fulfil my goal of reading 100 books next year.
1 July 2009
Counterknowledge
Random crackpot conspiracy theories have been around for ages. We all have our favourites such as insisting that JFK was assassinated by more than the lone gunman but instead fatally shot by a mysterious shooter on the grassy knoll (either way, there is no disputing that he ended up quite dead) . Indeed, if one were to be completely spurious about it, I wouldn't be surprised to find that more Americans believe in the existence of UFOs than the theory of evolution.
Damian Thompson takes direct aim at some of the more nonsensical recent crackpot theories in his book on Counterknowledge subtitled "how we have surrendered ourselves to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history". These might make rather easy targets, but Thompson argues that their influence has grown rather perniciously. Indeed, counterknowledge which he defines as "misinformation packaged to look like fact" has gone from being at the fringe of society to having spread to the mainstream. UFOs are a classic example of this, but the list now encompasses such unfounded scares and unabashed rubbish as a 9/11 being an American-Israeli conspiracy, MMR immunization causing autism, quack nutritionism, alternative treatments in general, particularly for HIV/AIDS, creationism, and such meta-historical nonsense as Jesus fathering a child, China 'discovering' America and the holocaust never occuring.
As he notes, one of the paradoxes of our age is that while "our techniques for evaluating evidence are subtler than before..... counterknowledge is corrupting intellectual standards". It must be said that he does skirt around the more intellectually interesting question of why this might be the case. Mention is made, obviously, of the internet, and the information revolution which has increased the "privatization of knowledge" and has made everyone an expert. He also delves into Sociology arguing that modernity leads to the "dismantling of authority structures" and our dedication to what Anthony Giddens calls the "reflexive project of the self". Still, more interesting analysis on this paradox of more easily available knowledge leading to the growth of so-called counterknowledge would have been welcome.
Where Thompson does succeed well is gleefully deflating some of these crackpot theories. He does this with gleeful abandon and not inconsiderable wit. He delights in showing the intellectual bankruptness of such quack cures as homeopathy, craniosacral therapy and other so called 'alternative' medicines. More scarily, he shows how some of those remedies are now marketed officially in high street stores such as Boots, or worse how homeopathy is available as a treatment from the NHS and as a degree course at the University of Westminster. Nutritionism, or rather those who abuse the label also comes under fire from him, and his cynicism is amply justified when we consider that (Dr.) Gillian McKeith actually earned her Phd from a non-accredited American University on the basis of a correspondence course. Worse still is the case of Patrick Holford, a 'nutritionist' whose degree in psychology better explains his blatant attempts to market quack products like a 'crystal' which will protect one from allegedly harmful electromagnetic radiation emanating from mobile phone towers.
Ours has been labelled the information age with good reason: advances in technology has allowed us almost instant access to unlimited information. But as Damian Thompson has pointed out, this has also led to the pernicious spread of misinformation. We might shrug off mass mails about HIV infected needles being left on train seats in order to infect people (the virus can't survive any length of time openly exposed), but it is more scary for society at large when this extends to autism scares over MMR jabs, cancer scares over cellphone antennaes and the belief that China discovered America in 1421 (and Europe in 1431 too apparently).
Damian Thompson takes direct aim at some of the more nonsensical recent crackpot theories in his book on Counterknowledge subtitled "how we have surrendered ourselves to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history". These might make rather easy targets, but Thompson argues that their influence has grown rather perniciously. Indeed, counterknowledge which he defines as "misinformation packaged to look like fact" has gone from being at the fringe of society to having spread to the mainstream. UFOs are a classic example of this, but the list now encompasses such unfounded scares and unabashed rubbish as a 9/11 being an American-Israeli conspiracy, MMR immunization causing autism, quack nutritionism, alternative treatments in general, particularly for HIV/AIDS, creationism, and such meta-historical nonsense as Jesus fathering a child, China 'discovering' America and the holocaust never occuring.
As he notes, one of the paradoxes of our age is that while "our techniques for evaluating evidence are subtler than before..... counterknowledge is corrupting intellectual standards". It must be said that he does skirt around the more intellectually interesting question of why this might be the case. Mention is made, obviously, of the internet, and the information revolution which has increased the "privatization of knowledge" and has made everyone an expert. He also delves into Sociology arguing that modernity leads to the "dismantling of authority structures" and our dedication to what Anthony Giddens calls the "reflexive project of the self". Still, more interesting analysis on this paradox of more easily available knowledge leading to the growth of so-called counterknowledge would have been welcome.
Where Thompson does succeed well is gleefully deflating some of these crackpot theories. He does this with gleeful abandon and not inconsiderable wit. He delights in showing the intellectual bankruptness of such quack cures as homeopathy, craniosacral therapy and other so called 'alternative' medicines. More scarily, he shows how some of those remedies are now marketed officially in high street stores such as Boots, or worse how homeopathy is available as a treatment from the NHS and as a degree course at the University of Westminster. Nutritionism, or rather those who abuse the label also comes under fire from him, and his cynicism is amply justified when we consider that (Dr.) Gillian McKeith actually earned her Phd from a non-accredited American University on the basis of a correspondence course. Worse still is the case of Patrick Holford, a 'nutritionist' whose degree in psychology better explains his blatant attempts to market quack products like a 'crystal' which will protect one from allegedly harmful electromagnetic radiation emanating from mobile phone towers.
Ours has been labelled the information age with good reason: advances in technology has allowed us almost instant access to unlimited information. But as Damian Thompson has pointed out, this has also led to the pernicious spread of misinformation. We might shrug off mass mails about HIV infected needles being left on train seats in order to infect people (the virus can't survive any length of time openly exposed), but it is more scary for society at large when this extends to autism scares over MMR jabs, cancer scares over cellphone antennaes and the belief that China discovered America in 1421 (and Europe in 1431 too apparently).
12 June 2009
15 Books
I've succumbed to yet another Facebook meme that has gone rabid. This one can be basically called 15 Books. You are supposed to choose 15 books that you love, or that had a major influence on your life. It was a very difficult task for me, given how much I enjoy reading, but here is the list I've come up with:
Near Misses: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes, Practical Ethics by Peter Singer, Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George, Bartholomew and the 500 Hats by Dr Seuss, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisevitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R Tolkien
- Dune | Frank Herbert
- The Sandman Graphic Novels | Neil Gaiman
- The Passion | Jeanette Winterson
- Housekeeping | Marilynne Robinson
- Atonement | Ian McEwan
- Disgrace | J.M Coetzee
- The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Things They Carried | Tim O'Brien
- In Cold Blood | Truman Capote
- King Lear | William Shakespeare
- Ex Libris | Anne Fadiman
- A Wrinkle in Time | Madeleine L'Engle
- True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle | Avi
Near Misses: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes, Practical Ethics by Peter Singer, Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George, Bartholomew and the 500 Hats by Dr Seuss, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisevitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
26 May 2009
Telegraph 100 Essential Novels
It is in the vogue for newspapers to come up with lists of novels that everyone should read now, and the latest list I have found is on the Telegraph website. I probably only discovered it so late because I don't read the Telegraph as a general rule but was directed there when a friend sent me a link about a new Jane Austen biography, claiming, you guessed it, to have found that mysterious man that broke her heart and eventually led her becoming the ultimate literary chick lit novelist.
The Telegraph's selections are:
100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
96 One Thousand and One Nights by Anonymous
95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
83 Germinal by Emile Zola
82 The Stranger by Albert Camus
81The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
76 The Trial by Franz Kafka
75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
68 Crash by JG Ballard
67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez
59 London Fields by Martin Amis
58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
51 Underworld by Don DeLillo
50 Beloved by Toni Morrison
49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
47The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
38 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope
36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
30 Atonement by Ian McEwan
29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
24 Ulysses by James Joyce
23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
22 A Passage to India by EM Forster
21 1984 by George Orwell
20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
1 Middlemarch by George Eliot
I've personally managed almost a quarter of them. 24 out of 100. Mostly classic choices on the list but some odd ones - Waiting for the Mahatma by R.K Narayan? The Savage Detective by Robert Bolano? Strangely, it is those odd ones that I want to seek out first, if only to slake my curiousity as to why they were included!
The Telegraph's selections are:
100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
96 One Thousand and One Nights by Anonymous
95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
83 Germinal by Emile Zola
82 The Stranger by Albert Camus
81The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
76 The Trial by Franz Kafka
75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
68 Crash by JG Ballard
67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez
59 London Fields by Martin Amis
58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
51 Underworld by Don DeLillo
50 Beloved by Toni Morrison
49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
47The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
38 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope
36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
30 Atonement by Ian McEwan
29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
24 Ulysses by James Joyce
23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
22 A Passage to India by EM Forster
21 1984 by George Orwell
20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
1 Middlemarch by George Eliot
I've personally managed almost a quarter of them. 24 out of 100. Mostly classic choices on the list but some odd ones - Waiting for the Mahatma by R.K Narayan? The Savage Detective by Robert Bolano? Strangely, it is those odd ones that I want to seek out first, if only to slake my curiousity as to why they were included!
17 April 2009
Science as Magic (or Religion)
It was Arthur C. Clarke who proposed, as one of his three 'laws', that a civilisation, coming into contact with science and technology far in advance of them, would view such technology as magic. This idea is hardly a novel one, and anyone who has read the tragic tale of Cortez and his small band of conquistadors overcoming the mighty Aztec empire will clearly see its antecedents. The Aztecs, unable to comprehend Spanish technology such as guns, came to view the conquistadors as reincarnated Gods with predictably disastrous consequences for themselves.
The supposedly opposing poles of Science and Magic has long provided a powerful theme for Science Fiction and Fantasy writers. A pioneer in this, aided by the fact that she was working in both the Science Fiction and Fantasy fields, was Andre Norton, most notably in her Witch World series of novels.
In those novels, a technologically advanced civilisation, fleeing some kind of self-generated catastrophe that has made their homeworld uninhabitable, enters a much more primitive world through a portal, seeking to use their more advanced technology to subjugate the native inhabitants and claim it for their own. However, they are opposed by a matriarchal society whose leaders are witches and able to harness magic (actual magic, not the science in disguise variety).
A new and novel treatment of this ongoing theme is Sharon Shinn's Samaria series of novels, particularly her second novel, Jovah's Angels. In a marvelous twist of irony, she takes the two typically opposing poles of science and mysticism and welds them together in one sure stroke. Our modern scientific way of thinking is perceived to have been borne out of the enlightenment, which involved a total rejection of mysticism and religious dogma. But what if science were the source of mysticism and religion?
In Samaria all beings worship the god Jovah (the parallel with Jehovah is not coincidental). A special group of beings with wings - Angels - are given the task of ensuring society in Samaria is harmonious. These angels can intercede with Jovah by 'praying', for example to change weather patterns, ask for seeds to be sent down and even medical supplies in times of plague or illiness.
However, Jovah also demands obedience from its subjects as any good god would. To prove that the peoples of Samaria still live in harmony, a Gloria must be sung every year led by the Archangel and his Angelica or spouse, with representatives from each of the many races that live on the planet. Three specially appointed prophets 'speak' to Jovah and intercede with him in some long forgotten tongue using some special device.
Shinn's genius is that Jovah is no god but is the computer of the interstellar ship that brought the original colonists to Samaria. The prophets use a simple keyboard to correspond with the God, and the Angels' - beings created through genetic engineering at the dawn of Samarian colonization - prayers are picked up by Jovah's long range sensors where the computer triggers the necessary responses. Control of the weather is enabled through influencing the planet's upper atmosphere, seeds and medicines can be released and dropped from the ship's massive storage hangers, and if the Samarians choose to disobey, the ship's lasers can smite a mighty hole in the planet below.
This is Clarke's third law brought to spectacular life, and Shinn's strong characterization, and utilization of biblical terminology lends the first two books in the series a really strong feel. The implications are strongly felt but neatly sidestepped. Alleluia, despite the realization that everything she believed and worshiped if not quite a lie then is undoubtedly drastically wrong, decides to hide the truth. Samaria cannot know because the implications would be immense - and catastrophic.
Still, given the slow rise of technology (which the original settlers had renounced as being the root of evil), there will eventually come a time when the peoples of Samaria will begin to question the mythology and religion they held so blindly. More fundamentally, it would only take the first telescope pointed up at the Samarian night sky to reveal the orbiting spaceship and raise fundamental questions that will not be left unanswered.
A long running jibe at the irrationality of religion is to posit that there is a giant teacup orbiting the outer edge of the solar system, and that it will eventually bring out the annihilation of the earth. For the people of Samaria, it is a spaceship not a teacup. Perhaps, mankind should not be so quick to laugh, and as we continue to peer out into the darker reaches of our universe, we might just find some hint as to the beginnings of our creation. Now that is a kind of faith in itself.
The supposedly opposing poles of Science and Magic has long provided a powerful theme for Science Fiction and Fantasy writers. A pioneer in this, aided by the fact that she was working in both the Science Fiction and Fantasy fields, was Andre Norton, most notably in her Witch World series of novels.
In those novels, a technologically advanced civilisation, fleeing some kind of self-generated catastrophe that has made their homeworld uninhabitable, enters a much more primitive world through a portal, seeking to use their more advanced technology to subjugate the native inhabitants and claim it for their own. However, they are opposed by a matriarchal society whose leaders are witches and able to harness magic (actual magic, not the science in disguise variety).
A new and novel treatment of this ongoing theme is Sharon Shinn's Samaria series of novels, particularly her second novel, Jovah's Angels. In a marvelous twist of irony, she takes the two typically opposing poles of science and mysticism and welds them together in one sure stroke. Our modern scientific way of thinking is perceived to have been borne out of the enlightenment, which involved a total rejection of mysticism and religious dogma. But what if science were the source of mysticism and religion?
In Samaria all beings worship the god Jovah (the parallel with Jehovah is not coincidental). A special group of beings with wings - Angels - are given the task of ensuring society in Samaria is harmonious. These angels can intercede with Jovah by 'praying', for example to change weather patterns, ask for seeds to be sent down and even medical supplies in times of plague or illiness.
However, Jovah also demands obedience from its subjects as any good god would. To prove that the peoples of Samaria still live in harmony, a Gloria must be sung every year led by the Archangel and his Angelica or spouse, with representatives from each of the many races that live on the planet. Three specially appointed prophets 'speak' to Jovah and intercede with him in some long forgotten tongue using some special device.
Shinn's genius is that Jovah is no god but is the computer of the interstellar ship that brought the original colonists to Samaria. The prophets use a simple keyboard to correspond with the God, and the Angels' - beings created through genetic engineering at the dawn of Samarian colonization - prayers are picked up by Jovah's long range sensors where the computer triggers the necessary responses. Control of the weather is enabled through influencing the planet's upper atmosphere, seeds and medicines can be released and dropped from the ship's massive storage hangers, and if the Samarians choose to disobey, the ship's lasers can smite a mighty hole in the planet below.
This is Clarke's third law brought to spectacular life, and Shinn's strong characterization, and utilization of biblical terminology lends the first two books in the series a really strong feel. The implications are strongly felt but neatly sidestepped. Alleluia, despite the realization that everything she believed and worshiped if not quite a lie then is undoubtedly drastically wrong, decides to hide the truth. Samaria cannot know because the implications would be immense - and catastrophic.
Still, given the slow rise of technology (which the original settlers had renounced as being the root of evil), there will eventually come a time when the peoples of Samaria will begin to question the mythology and religion they held so blindly. More fundamentally, it would only take the first telescope pointed up at the Samarian night sky to reveal the orbiting spaceship and raise fundamental questions that will not be left unanswered.
A long running jibe at the irrationality of religion is to posit that there is a giant teacup orbiting the outer edge of the solar system, and that it will eventually bring out the annihilation of the earth. For the people of Samaria, it is a spaceship not a teacup. Perhaps, mankind should not be so quick to laugh, and as we continue to peer out into the darker reaches of our universe, we might just find some hint as to the beginnings of our creation. Now that is a kind of faith in itself.
30 January 2009
Brideshead Revisited
The status this novel has as one of the quintessential Oxford novels is more than cause enough for me to want to read it. Although I purchased a lovely hardback edition while studying at Oxford, I never did get round to reading it there. I picked it up again due to the impending release of a new movie adaptation of the book in November 2008, intending to finish the novel before watching the movie. I managed neither. My friend Karin recently purchased the 11 episode ITV adaptation (dating from 1981 and starring a youngish Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder and scripted by the recently deceased John Mortimer of Rumpole fame). Since she lent it to me, I decided to finally get round to reading the book, and after that watching the ITV series.
The novel itself is to a large degree an examination of the decline of the English aristocracy through the eyes of Charles Ryder's relationship with the Marchmain family. Indeed, it is a telling point that Ryder makes his fame as an artist by painting the aristocratic houses before they are forced to close or to be sold, profiting as it is from their financial decline while also capturing them it their last glory. Similarly, the decline of the Marchmain clan is seen through Charles' eyes particularly through his relationship with Sebastian Flyte (his old Oxford chum) and Julia, his sister.
Given Waugh's own fervent catholicism, it is unsurprising that religion plays a significant role in the novel. As it is presented in the novel, religion has the ultimate power to redeem, though it also suggests that to try and come closer to God is to invite suffering. Religious redemption comes especially to Sebastian, who finds a measure of solace and self-worth in religion from his dissolute and drunken lifestyle. It also ends up as the irreconcilable stumbling block between Charles and Julia. To Waugh's credit, both sides of Catholicism are presented, and Lady Marchmain's holier than though embracement of martyrdom isn't shied away from. One can't help but feel that the whole notion of faith and guilt and redemption is handled better by Waugh's fellow Catholic Englishman Graham Greene.
The novel itself is to a large degree an examination of the decline of the English aristocracy through the eyes of Charles Ryder's relationship with the Marchmain family. Indeed, it is a telling point that Ryder makes his fame as an artist by painting the aristocratic houses before they are forced to close or to be sold, profiting as it is from their financial decline while also capturing them it their last glory. Similarly, the decline of the Marchmain clan is seen through Charles' eyes particularly through his relationship with Sebastian Flyte (his old Oxford chum) and Julia, his sister.
As for the much vaunted Oxford section, it was a world almost totally alien to me, despite having spent three years in one of the more traditional colleges (women were only admitted in 1979). It was a time of servants, and real separation between the majority who were privileged and those who were not. This upper-class aristocratic reserve was a highly endangered species in my Oxford, ironically as belittled in modern times as those who were not similarly privileged were treated by them in the past. The lifestyle of secretive dining clubs where languid philosophical debates were had in accents that could sear through butter were akin to sightings of a mythical highly endangered species - the occasional report filtered in, but one wondered if they were real or just imaginary. The last vestiges of Oxford as it was.
I should say straight out that I didn't particularly enjoy the book. Reading it in several bits and pieces over a holiday in Cambodia (on the two flights, on a long bus ride between Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City, and in various hotel rooms) certainly didn't aid my appreciation of it. Perhaps as a result I failed to see how subtly Waugh manages to tie the threads of the different sections together. Most critics acknowledge that Brideshead is the most richly written of Waugh's works (perhaps directly as a result of the wartime shortages and privations he faced during the writing of the novel - his various appetites fulfilled on the page where it could not be fulfilled in real life) but I found the language occasionally turgid and sometimes excessive.
Given Waugh's own fervent catholicism, it is unsurprising that religion plays a significant role in the novel. As it is presented in the novel, religion has the ultimate power to redeem, though it also suggests that to try and come closer to God is to invite suffering. Religious redemption comes especially to Sebastian, who finds a measure of solace and self-worth in religion from his dissolute and drunken lifestyle. It also ends up as the irreconcilable stumbling block between Charles and Julia. To Waugh's credit, both sides of Catholicism are presented, and Lady Marchmain's holier than though embracement of martyrdom isn't shied away from. One can't help but feel that the whole notion of faith and guilt and redemption is handled better by Waugh's fellow Catholic Englishman Graham Greene.
28 January 2009
You Are What You Read (and Watch)
I read a lovely piece in the New York Times called "It's Not You, It's Your Books" (
As a keen reader myself, her story resonated with me tremendously. After all, I am a person who first became attracted to one of my eventual girlfriends (we dated for a year) after she noticed that I was holding a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of the Hills at a party and mentioned that she enjoyed his books, especially The Remains of the Day. I will freely admit that if I visit the home of a friend (or any home at all), one of the things that I will surreptitiously do is quickly scan the bookshelves to see what lies therein.
As Donadio acknowledges, reading and what a person reads need not be the deal-breaker in a relationship. In fact, inveterate bookworms often get along smashingly well with counterparts for whom the daily newspaper and Reader's Digest is the limit of their literary tastes. Sara Nelson, who wrote the book memoir So Many Books, So Little Time admitted she married a man who read nothing and could not understand her love of reading. He tolerated her eccentric habit however, grew used to sleeping with the glow of a reading lamp in the background, and proved useful by building her bookshelves (he was a set designer by trade).
Indeed, the fact is that the written word is hardly the popular medium of choice in our modern generation. Book loving friends tell me that they are happy to find someone who reads at all - being picky about literary taste would probably mean a life of singlehood dreaming of Heathcliff and Mr Darcy (if you are female) and the appropriate female literary fantasy equivalent if you are male (Lolita? Elizabeth Bennett?). Still as Sloane Crosley, a publicist told Donadio, "if you're a person who loves Alice Munro and you're going out with someone whose favourite book is the Da Vinci Code, perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal".
One undoubtedly popular modern day entertainment medium, however, is the cinema. Almost everyone watches movies. In
In fact, choosing the movie for a first date is an interesting exercise, one often fraught with difficulty. Taking a girl to the latest high octane
The specific movie you bring your date to can also be very illuminating. I remember taking a girl to watch My Summer of Love, a small indie movie about a young working class English girl who falls for a richer, more posh girl home for the summer from boarding school. She took my choice of a movie with a lesbian theme as a sign of a refreshing open-mindedness about homosexuality (the choice of the movie itself was completely coincidental, I had desperately wanted to watch it). We both enthused about being able to talk about specific scenes that we loved, including a beautiful shot of the two girls in the dark silhouetted by a camp fire.
I once fell completely for a girl with whom I had been exchanging long emails, more often than not about movies. She had amazing taste in movies (in my opinion) and it was refreshing to discuss Altman and Kubrick and Woody Allen with someone who was similarly enthusiastic. One eureka moments transpired when I told her I was keen to find a copy of a Kubrick war movie which was supposed to be a classic. She enthusiastically replied that it was a fantastic coincidence and she had just seen it on DVD and it was great! Turns out that I was talking about Path of Glory and she was referring to Full Metal Jacket. Our passion for film never did translate into very much else, but that was a moment where I truly felt a meeting of minds.
There are however, cases where the opposite happens. A girl I was having dinner with declared that she loved local Singaporean director Jack Neo and she would watch anything he did. I mean Jack Neo isn't bad but, surely there are better directors out there? After she decided one of her favourite movies of all time was I Not Stupid, an involuntary shudder went down my spine. It would be increasingly hard for me to date someone if what I wanted to see was Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen), Burn After Reading (Coen brothers), and My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar Wai) when what they preferred was The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Mamma Mia!, and Night in Rodanthe (just to use 2008 as an example).
Things came to a head recently when a date (whom I had just taken to see a movie) told me over dinner that she hadn't liked Wall-E. In fact she found it boring, was tempted to walk out (but didn't), found the plot completely unsubtle and pointless, and I mean, there wasn't even any dialogue in the first half an hour! I was mildly apoplectic. How can a person dislike and be totally bored by a Pixar film? This is a movie that scored close to 100% on the tomatoemeter (at Rotten Tomatoes). It was a beautiful love story to boot (shouldn't that at least appeal to some extent to a girl?). It was also powerfully human and very moving.
Is that the end then? Well, she is cute. But if I do pursue things, and they don't work out, I can always call a friend and moan - "but she didn't even like Wall-E!"
9 November 2008
Book Buying Spree
Borders was having another huge discount offer (they seem almost periodic now), and I decided to make use of it to brighten up my life with some serious book buying. Strangely enough, I purchased only one new book the previous month (not counting another book purchased as a gift to a friend). It was a second hand copy of The Chicago Manual of Style, purchased at a bargain $9 at a Bras Basah bookstore while on the way back from the National Library building. That is not to say that I didn't spend a significant amount of time browsing, perusing, handling and accumulating scores of titles. I merely restricted myself to getting most of them from the library and ultimately returning many of them unread or at least uncompleted.
This prudence in the area of book buying was not to last, despite my best intentions for this to be so. I first went down to Border's on Friday afternoon. Borders was not only having a coupon discount promotion (30% off for any single book, with an additional 10% off for Border's members) but a storewide discount for anyone (35% off if you buy 5 titles or more, additional 10% for members). I printed out 4 coupons just in case I didn't have that many titles to buy, but as has proven so often in the past, the real challenge was trying not to buy too many titles. Worse still, I ended up going down to Borders again on Sunday afternoon with my sister after a family lunch at Ichiban Boshi.
In sum, the damage was as follows:
Islam: The Religion and the People by Bernard Lewis
The Messengers: The meaning of the Life of Muhammed by Tariq Ramadan
The Whiter Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008 Booker Prize Winner)
Changing Places by David Lodge
Shakespeare's Language by Frank Kermode
Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk
Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz
Microtrends by Penn and Zalesne
My sister also got the following:
Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Social Intelligence by Daniel Goldman
a Paperchase Tote bag
Quirkology
a Horse book
a CD/book on beginner's Malay
Regarding the purchases, I have made it a habit to read the Booker Prize winning (and often the shortlisted) novels, so I just had to purchase the White Tiger, this year's winner. Ramadan's book on the Prophet Mohammed had been recommended to me by a friend (Linda from RSIS) so taking her advice I decided to buy (and hopefully, read) it. Bernard Lewis is an expert on Islam and his book represents a basic primer on Islam, its very sects and beliefs which is well written and easy to read.
Given Barack Obama's recent victory in the US Presidential election both my sister and I thought it beneficial to buy his two bestselling novels, to get a more in depth look at the man and his ideas. We were both more interested in Dreams of My Father, his autobiographical account of his family and his search for an identity.
The Audacity of Hope is a far more political book, written when Obama's star was in the ascendancy, a front-lining speech to the Democratic National Convention already under his belt, and just about to begin his term as the junior Senator from Illinois. It seems commonplace, compulsory even for an aspiring politician (often candidates for the Presidency) to write a book, outlining in broad strokes their manifesto, and why they should be the 'chosen one'. Both books offer a glimpse into Obama's guiding principles and should make interesting reading.
This prudence in the area of book buying was not to last, despite my best intentions for this to be so. I first went down to Border's on Friday afternoon. Borders was not only having a coupon discount promotion (30% off for any single book, with an additional 10% off for Border's members) but a storewide discount for anyone (35% off if you buy 5 titles or more, additional 10% for members). I printed out 4 coupons just in case I didn't have that many titles to buy, but as has proven so often in the past, the real challenge was trying not to buy too many titles. Worse still, I ended up going down to Borders again on Sunday afternoon with my sister after a family lunch at Ichiban Boshi.
In sum, the damage was as follows:
Islam: The Religion and the People by Bernard Lewis
The Messengers: The meaning of the Life of Muhammed by Tariq Ramadan
The Whiter Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008 Booker Prize Winner)
Changing Places by David Lodge
Shakespeare's Language by Frank Kermode
Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk
Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz
Microtrends by Penn and Zalesne
My sister also got the following:
Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Social Intelligence by Daniel Goldman
a Paperchase Tote bag
Quirkology
a Horse book
a CD/book on beginner's Malay
Regarding the purchases, I have made it a habit to read the Booker Prize winning (and often the shortlisted) novels, so I just had to purchase the White Tiger, this year's winner. Ramadan's book on the Prophet Mohammed had been recommended to me by a friend (Linda from RSIS) so taking her advice I decided to buy (and hopefully, read) it. Bernard Lewis is an expert on Islam and his book represents a basic primer on Islam, its very sects and beliefs which is well written and easy to read.
Given Barack Obama's recent victory in the US Presidential election both my sister and I thought it beneficial to buy his two bestselling novels, to get a more in depth look at the man and his ideas. We were both more interested in Dreams of My Father, his autobiographical account of his family and his search for an identity.
The Audacity of Hope is a far more political book, written when Obama's star was in the ascendancy, a front-lining speech to the Democratic National Convention already under his belt, and just about to begin his term as the junior Senator from Illinois. It seems commonplace, compulsory even for an aspiring politician (often candidates for the Presidency) to write a book, outlining in broad strokes their manifesto, and why they should be the 'chosen one'. Both books offer a glimpse into Obama's guiding principles and should make interesting reading.
18 August 2008
Book Club Experience - Down and Out in Paris and London
I stumbled upon a book club on Ginny's Facebook profile, and decided to join it on a whim. My mom has been a member of a book club for some months now (she complains regularly about the lack of stimulating discussion during the meetings and of her own inability to finish reading the books). I had never been part of a book club before and I thought that it would be an interesting experience, so long as I managed to curb my more outspoken tendencies.
On the whole it was a very enjoyable evening. The book we discussed was Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell's semi-autobiographical account of his years living in poverty in the eponymous cities. Orwell is a lucid, compelling and quite captivating writer, whether he is describing the mayhem and long hours working in a Paris hotel, or a whole host of fascinating characters that he chances upon in both Paris and London, he is very much able to put a human face on poverty. His descriptions of working in a kitchen in Paris as a plongeur is shocking to say the least in its vivid portrayal of dirt and grime where hygiene far from being a buzzword, is very much an afterthought.
Orwell also excels in describing the whole host of tramps, beggars and assorted misfits that he chances upon while he is down and out, from a Russian friend determined to win back a job as a waiter (despite a gamy leg), with whom he scours Paris for work, to the characters that haunt the cafes, bars and cheap lodging houses of the city. While out of work in London, Orwell chances on a whole host of interesting characters, including a particularly fascinating philosophical chalk artist called Bozo, who reads Shakespeare, acts as an amateur astronomer (he watches for comets) and is sadly, only so interesting because he is quite unrepresentative of the rest of the tramps who have been worn down to a nub by grinding poverty.
Of course, given his socialist leanings, Orwell peppers his book with commentary about poverty, but these have the immense benefit of being informed by personal experience and hardship. This is rather unlike the moralistic hectoring that tends to predominate in any writing on poverty, whether accusing these individuals of being wastrels and being a tremendous burden on society, or presenting them as victims of circumstance unconscionably neglected and forgotten by others. The great irony of course is that those who write about poverty are often individuals who have never gone a day without food and who have wanted for nothing. Orwell strikes a rather balanced note, and is well-served by letting his own descriptions speak for themselves. Anyone reading about the harsh disciplinarian treatment that one is subject to at a Salvation Army shelter is bound to shudder at how these men are treated if not quite as animals, then at the bare minimum wayward and slightly thick schoolboys who need to be shown a firm hand.
The book, given its central theme of poverty lent itself nicely to a discussion of poverty in modern day societies. One central topic of debate was over welfare - or in the case of some countries in Singapore, the lack thereof. There were legitimate questions being raised about the propensity of many individuals to bear a sense of victimhood and to have a sense of expectation that society owes them a debt (whether justified or not). However, there was a general appreciation about how poverty is often an accelerating downward spiral and the fact that individuals often need assistance not merely to climb out of but merely to see the possibility of a future for themselves in such circumstances.
As the evening progressed, the discussion turned to a whole host of wide-ranging topics, from euthanasia, and whether we should support it, the Singapore organ donation act, HIV/Aids education, single unwed mothers, and many other fascinating topics. I must say that it was quite delightful to be part of a enlivening intellectual discussion once again, and it was something that I missed greatly from my time at Oxford. I have high hopes that future book club meetings will be as fascinating.
4 May 2008
MPH Warehouse Sale
My mother noticed that there was a MPH warehouse sale taking place over the weekend, and asked me as early as Thursday if I was interested in going. I was hesitant on two counts - firstly, it is held at the Singapore Expo which is quite far from my home, and secondly, every single time my family goes to MPH warehouse sales, we usually end up coming home with cartons of books, having burned at least a $500 hole in our pockets.
However, we did end up going after our usual family lunch. The sister even expressed interest in going down at around 7pm after she finished her last therapy session in Tampines, which was relatively near-by, but I told her that it was unlikely that we would be staying that long. So, naturally, she rang at 7pm to find that my mother and I were still at the Expo having accumulated several boxes full of possible buys.
But I must say, this was quite a stupendous haul that we managed. But here are the three most stupendous bargains that we got on th day:
The Lord of the Rings hardcover Illustrated Edition - retail price 75 pounds total, purchased for S$21
The World's Greatest Wine Estates by Robert Mondavi - retail price over S$100, purchased for S$7
The Lonely Planet Citescape Box Set (10 Books) - retail price 45 pounds, purchased for S$10
There were also a fair number of books that I found there at bargain prices that I would have been more than willing to pay full dollar for including:
The Judgement of Paris - The Great 1976 Wine-Tasting
1491: America Before Columbus by Charles Mann
Crusader Nation: The US in Peace and the Great War
The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong (Hardback)
The Wealth of Nations: A Biography by P.J O'Rourke
First Man: The Authorized Biography of Neil Amstrong (Hardback)
Q School by John Feinstein
This also fails to mention books by John Updike, Don DeLillo, Orhan Pamuk, Ismail Kadare, and lots of other Vintage trade paperbacks that we purchased along with two volumes of 3 in 1 hardback Tintin reprints, 7 volumes of the graphic novel series Transmetropolitan, three beautiful Lonely Planet coffee table books, and stacks of interesting random history and non-fiction.
All in all, it will suffice to say that it was a very good day indeed.
However, we did end up going after our usual family lunch. The sister even expressed interest in going down at around 7pm after she finished her last therapy session in Tampines, which was relatively near-by, but I told her that it was unlikely that we would be staying that long. So, naturally, she rang at 7pm to find that my mother and I were still at the Expo having accumulated several boxes full of possible buys.
But I must say, this was quite a stupendous haul that we managed. But here are the three most stupendous bargains that we got on th day:
The Lord of the Rings hardcover Illustrated Edition - retail price 75 pounds total, purchased for S$21
The World's Greatest Wine Estates by Robert Mondavi - retail price over S$100, purchased for S$7
The Lonely Planet Citescape Box Set (10 Books) - retail price 45 pounds, purchased for S$10
There were also a fair number of books that I found there at bargain prices that I would have been more than willing to pay full dollar for including:
The Judgement of Paris - The Great 1976 Wine-Tasting
1491: America Before Columbus by Charles Mann
Crusader Nation: The US in Peace and the Great War
The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong (Hardback)
The Wealth of Nations: A Biography by P.J O'Rourke
First Man: The Authorized Biography of Neil Amstrong (Hardback)
Q School by John Feinstein
This also fails to mention books by John Updike, Don DeLillo, Orhan Pamuk, Ismail Kadare, and lots of other Vintage trade paperbacks that we purchased along with two volumes of 3 in 1 hardback Tintin reprints, 7 volumes of the graphic novel series Transmetropolitan, three beautiful Lonely Planet coffee table books, and stacks of interesting random history and non-fiction.
All in all, it will suffice to say that it was a very good day indeed.
30 March 2008
Goodbye Arthur C. Clarke
I was sad to hear of the passing of noted Science Fiction novelist Arthur C Clarke in his adopted home of Sri Lanka on 19th March. Clarke was responsible along with Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert's Dune and a few other choice SF classics for igniting my interest in Science Fiction during my teenage years - an interest that remains to this day, even if the amount of Science Fiction I read is now tragically reduced (Note to self: should start reading more SF again). In honour of the occasion of his passing, this blog post is dedicated to a retrospective of my reading of Clarke over the years.
I cannot now recall precisely which was the first Clarke novel I read. My first encounter with his work may well have been a collection of his short stories, likely Expedition to Earth or Reach for Tomorrow. I do remember reading Rendezvous with Rama, on account of the book having scooped both the Hugo and Nebula Awards (the two most prestigious honours in the Science Fiction world)when I was in Secondary School along with The Fountains of Paradise (another Hugo winner). Despite the honours it received, I found Rendezvous to be a thoroughly dull read. Perhaps it was a deficit in my sense of imagination, but I couldn't feel any sense of wonder despite Clarke's attempts at evoking the tremendous size and scale of the alien spacecraft.
Fountains of Paradise was typical of Clarke in that it presented an intriguing idea - a 'space elevator' rising from near the equator (a fictional Sri Lanka moved slightly southwards to cross the equatorial boundary). Such an elevator would vastly reduce the fuel costs necessary to propel an object or spacecraft out of earth orbit. It is also sadly, suffering a bit from Clarke's occasionally wooden prose style and characterization.
Of all of Clarke's works, my absolute favourite must be Childhood's End. The book is probably the best written of Clarke's novels, with prose that sparkles, and an ending that I can only describe as transcendent. It remains probably his most critically recommended work to date.
It can be argued that Clarke was a more effective writer in the short story mold which suited his strengths as a Science Fiction writer. The short story allowed him to put his immense imagination and capacity for generating powerful ideas to great use with a more limited need for complex characterization. This could be said to be an attribute he shared with fellow Science Fiction Isaac Asimov (about whom it can be uncharitably said that all his characters are mere parodies of each other). Clarke may well have been amused by that - he and Asimov had earlier made a pack to name the other person if they were ever asked whom they thought the best Science Fiction writer was.
Arthur Clarke was ultimately a man of ideas - and not just fictional ones. At the end of World War II (which he spent working on Radar - so crucial to the British victory in the Battle of Britain), he published a famous article expounding the possibility of geosynchronous satellites. One of my favourites is his so-called 'third law' - that any technology that is sufficiently advanced can be mistaken for magic.
One thing is for certain: there is little doubt that his legacy in the Science Fiction field will endure.
I cannot now recall precisely which was the first Clarke novel I read. My first encounter with his work may well have been a collection of his short stories, likely Expedition to Earth or Reach for Tomorrow. I do remember reading Rendezvous with Rama, on account of the book having scooped both the Hugo and Nebula Awards (the two most prestigious honours in the Science Fiction world)when I was in Secondary School along with The Fountains of Paradise (another Hugo winner). Despite the honours it received, I found Rendezvous to be a thoroughly dull read. Perhaps it was a deficit in my sense of imagination, but I couldn't feel any sense of wonder despite Clarke's attempts at evoking the tremendous size and scale of the alien spacecraft.
Fountains of Paradise was typical of Clarke in that it presented an intriguing idea - a 'space elevator' rising from near the equator (a fictional Sri Lanka moved slightly southwards to cross the equatorial boundary). Such an elevator would vastly reduce the fuel costs necessary to propel an object or spacecraft out of earth orbit. It is also sadly, suffering a bit from Clarke's occasionally wooden prose style and characterization.
Of all of Clarke's works, my absolute favourite must be Childhood's End. The book is probably the best written of Clarke's novels, with prose that sparkles, and an ending that I can only describe as transcendent. It remains probably his most critically recommended work to date.
It can be argued that Clarke was a more effective writer in the short story mold which suited his strengths as a Science Fiction writer. The short story allowed him to put his immense imagination and capacity for generating powerful ideas to great use with a more limited need for complex characterization. This could be said to be an attribute he shared with fellow Science Fiction Isaac Asimov (about whom it can be uncharitably said that all his characters are mere parodies of each other). Clarke may well have been amused by that - he and Asimov had earlier made a pack to name the other person if they were ever asked whom they thought the best Science Fiction writer was.
Arthur Clarke was ultimately a man of ideas - and not just fictional ones. At the end of World War II (which he spent working on Radar - so crucial to the British victory in the Battle of Britain), he published a famous article expounding the possibility of geosynchronous satellites. One of my favourites is his so-called 'third law' - that any technology that is sufficiently advanced can be mistaken for magic.
One thing is for certain: there is little doubt that his legacy in the Science Fiction field will endure.
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