Friday, May 29, 2009

Library Loot (28 May 2009)

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Alessandra that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

A really really short list this Library Loot, for two reasons:
1) I walked to the library (about 25 minutes, rather pleasant, although it started getting windy on the way back).
2) It wasn't the main branch of the library this time, but the smaller branch along Grand Avenue. This one has a much more limited collection and a rather musty odor lurking around.

However, I did pick up
Bonk by Mary Roach
Having adored Stiff, I can't wait to read this one.

The study of sexual physiology — what happens, and why, and how to make it happen better — has been a paying career or a diverting sideline for scientists as far-ranging as Leonardo da Vinci and James Watson. The research has taken place behind the closed doors of laboratories, brothels, MRI centers, pig farms, sex-toy R&D labs, and Alfred Kinsey's attic.

Mary Roach, "the funniest science writer in the country" (Burkhard Bilger of The New Yorker), devoted the past two years to stepping behind those doors. Can a person think herself to orgasm? Can a dead man get an erection? Is vaginal orgasm a myth? Why doesn't Viagra help women—or, for that matter, pandas? In Bonk, Roach shows us how and why sexual arousal and orgasm, two of the most complex, delightful, and amazing scientific phenomena on earth, can be so hard to achieve and what science is doing to slowly make the bedroom a more satisfying place.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Originally published in 1929, A Room of One's Own eloquently states Woolf's conviction that in order to create works of genius, women must be freed from financial obligations and social restrictions.
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
I've been trying to get my hands on this for a while!
Out Stealing Horses has been embraced across the world as a classic, a novel of universal relevance and power. Panoramic and gripping, it tells the story of Trond Sander, a sixty-seven-year-old man who has moved from the city to a remote, riverside cabin, only to have all the turbulence, grief, and overwhelming beauty of his youth come back to him one night while he's out on a walk. From the moment Trond sees a strange figure coming out of the dark behind his home, the reader is immersed in a decades-deep story of searching and loss, and in the precise, irresistible prose of a newly crowned master of fiction.

See more Library Loot here

Malibu and more

After having had our fill of Disney and Anaheim, we moved over to the beach for some


clam strips and fries

fish and chips

at the super casual Malibu Seafood





The Getty Villa, modeled after the Villa dei Papiri in Italy



On our last day, we breakfasted at Cora's Coffee Shoppe on a cheddar and prosciutto omelette, and orange pancakes with fresh blueberries.


Followed by a stroll around the Santa Monica pier to walk off breakfast, before climbing back in the car for the long drive back home. This time E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime entertained me on the road, where we passed tens of thousands of cows, cows, cows (even with the windows up and the vents closed, their smell managed to seep into the car).

Malibu Seafood Fresh Fish Market and Patio Café
25653 Pacific Coast Hwy
Malibu, CA 90265

Cora's Coffee Shoppe
1802 Ocean Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90401

A (Southern) California Adventure I


The 6+ hour drive to Los Angeles was often straight and very flat and pretty boring. When it wasn't my turn to drive, I did some reading using the Stanza app on the iPod Touch, reading E Nesbit's Five Children and It.


We hit the usual LA spots - driving through a residential area and tada... the Hollywood sign.

The very packed and very touristy Hollywood Boulevard and its famous landmark (which we drove past).


We had a late brunch at Home in Los Feliz (no pics though). A pretty good crab cakes benedict (ie the poached eggs sit on crab cakes) and some beef hash. The neighbourhood library was holding a little sale and I snagged my very own copy of 84, Charing Cross Road for a mere 25 cents. After driving around Laurel Canyon and Beverly Hills and then to Rodeo Drive, we had a hearty dinner of Korean food at BCD Tofu House.


California Adventure - more fun than I expected!



The incredibly deceptive ferris wheel, in which some of the cars swing as the wheel turns.

The Hollywood Tower of Terror, from a Bug's point of view



Home
1760 Hillhurst Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90027

BCD Tofu House
3575 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90010

Thursday, May 28, 2009

The Tricking of Freya by Christine Sunley

The bewitching landscape of Iceland is the setting for Christine Sunley’s impressive debut, The Tricking of Freya. The novel is written in the form of a letter from Freya to the cousin she's never met, the daughter of her Aunt Birdie who lives in Gimli – Icelandic for heaven – a village in Canada settled by Icelandic immigrants who fled after a volcanic eruption destroyed their farmlands. Some of the immigrants settled in, quickly adopting the new culture and reinventing themselves as Canadians. Others are like Birdie, who tries to keep her heritage alive by speaking the language and studying the history.

Freya is enthralled by Birdie, whom she meets for the first time at the age of seven during a summer vacation to Gimli. Birdie, a poet, enchants the girl with bedtime tales of sagas and ghost stories. But Freya's favorite tales are the ones of the grandfather she has never met, the poet Olafur. To Freya, Birdie is amazing:

"I believed myself to be Birdie's one true ally in the world, and for that loyalty I was gifted her affection, the heightened magic that was life in her presence."
However, her dear aunt is temperamental and prone to mood swings. She makes it difficult for Freya and her mother, Anna, to leave Gimli to return home to Connecticut each summer, sometimes threatening to kill herself. Birdie's dramatics are often taken as ways to grab the limelight - that is, until she tricks 13-year-old Freya into traveling with her to Iceland for what Birdie calls a "surprise vacation." For Freya, there is no choice: "If I doubted Birdie's word, I'd be doubting her. Doubting her sanity, her suitability, her fitness."

Birdie explains that they are going to Iceland to retrieve the letters her father, the poet Olafur, wrote to his brother in Iceland, but the trip goes awry and scars Freya for many years. She never sees her aunt again, gives up speaking Icelandic, and pushes any memories of Iceland and Gimli far back into the recesses of her mind.

The Tricking of Freya showcases Sunley’s love for the enchanting culture and complicated language of Iceland; the book is peppered with magical Icelandic words and epic tales. Sunley brings this foreign landscape to life with such mesmerizing descriptions of its scenery:

"Iceland is land alive, the earth split open, forming and re-forming before your eyes. Vast vistas of swirling black and neon green moss-drenched landscapes. Volcanoes in all directions and at every stage of existence: smoldering, dormant, extinct. Glaciers on the move, their hoary tongues licking the edges of meadows. Water falling everywhere, trickling spilling clamoring rumbling down rocky crevices and canyons. And spitting up boiling hot from holes in the ground."
There is no better way to armchair travel.

I was initially wary of the Icelandic setting and epic family history, as I was not sure if I would be able to relate to the book. I wondered if the stark setting would take too much attention away from the plot and the characters. But Sunley has a firm hold of this story and steers it skillfully through the land of fire and ice. Her characters are dynamic, and Freya especially grows on you as Sunley admirably crafts her with an astute understanding of children.

The climax is perhaps a little predictable, but overall, this coming-of-age tale is quite a brilliant debut and a definite page-turner.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com.

Friday, May 22, 2009

Snack trip



We've got an early start tomorrow so I made some snacks for the road trip. First up, some oatmeal raisin cookies (using the recipe from the oatmeal tin - surprisingly rather good and mmm.... chewy).

And a butter cake. Google pointed me to this recipe over at Rasa Malaysia, which in turn came from About.com.

I didn't quite follow the (rather vague) instructions, because, as my mom always said: wet ingredients first, then the dry. So that's what I did. More specifically, blended the butter till soft, added the sugar, blended that a bit more with the electric hand mixer, then added the eggs, milk and vanilla extract. Then sifted the flour, baking powder and salt into the wet ingredients. And mixed that all by hand (my hand mixer's 'low' speed is an underestimation of its power - 'low' is hardly low at all). And about 53 minutes later, butter cake. The smell of baking lingered for most of the afternoon. And as I settled down to a slice of cake and a cup of tea, I realised that this was the taste, the texture, the comfort that I had been hungering for for most of the week, I just didn't know it.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The Quick and the Way Behind

Despite what this blog's been looking like over the past few days (ie stagnant), I've been reading, and doing other things like having a DIY sushi party, but mostly reading. So here are some quick notes on the books that I've recently put down:

Things I've Been Silent About - Azar Nafisi
I wanted to like this book, as I remembered enjoying Reading Lolita in Teheran. But I didn't really connect with this book, and constantly kept picking up other books to read instead. There were some interesting moments, and I wished she had included more about her interest in reading as a teenager in England. I managed to finish it but would only give it 3 stars (out of 5).

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami
First off, I am not a runner. Yeah I used to do some jogging but that has fallen by the wayside. But Murakami made me want to go for a jog. And that says a lot. I don't think you have to be a runner to read this book, as he talks about how running keeps him writing (and vice versa). He insists that he's not a talented writer, but it's about hard work and determination, much like in training for a marathon (and he's done several!). It's a short read, but quite enjoyable.

Maus - Art Spiegelman
I don't know what I was thinking when I picked up Volume I and not Volume II. Perhaps it was because I was already struggling to carry the over-ambitious stack of books. But whatever, Maus is a definite must-read! Not just for its depiction of the war and the Holocaust but also for how Spiegelman presented his parents, especially his father, whose story this is.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler

"Dinner alone is one of life's greatest pleasures. Certainly cooking for one reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam."
Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant is a great collection of pieces on eating alone - whether it be cooking for one or eating alone in a restaurant - by people like Nora Ephron, Ann Patchett, Dan Chaon, Laurie Colwin and more. There were lots of bits on anchovies and other types of fish, plenty on the starches and on beans. I couldn't help nodding along while reading, provided that I remembered not to read at night - it sure made me hungry.

So what do you eat when you're alone? I like to have a salad of avocado, tomato, coriander and lemon with a slice of toast. Bacon and avocado sandwiches. Spaghetti with prawns and peas (both from the freezer). Cheese on toast. I love to open a can of clam chowder and have it, yes, with some toast. Or I'll make a clear vegetable soup, or use the tom yam paste to make a soup, throw in some cabbage, crabstick, udon and plenty of coriander.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It by Tilar J. Mazzeo

The story of the visionary young widow who built a champagne empire, showed the world how to live with style, and emerged a legend.

Veuve Clicquot champagne epitomizes glamour, style, and luxury. But who was this young widow — the Veuve Clicquot — whose champagne sparkled at the courts of France, Britain, and Russia, and how did she rise to celebrity and fortune?

In The Widow Clicquot, Tilar J. Mazzeo brings to life — for the first time — the fascinating woman behind the iconic yellow label: Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin.A young witness to the dramatic events of the French Revolution and a new widow during the chaotic years of the Napoleonic Wars, Barbe-Nicole defied convention by assuming — after her husband's death — the reins of the fledgling wine business they had nurtured. Steering the company through dizzying political and financial reversals, she became one of the world's first great businesswomen and one of the richest women of her time.

Although the Widow Clicquot is still a legend in her native France, her story has never been told in all its richness — until now. Painstakingly researched and elegantly written, The Widow Clicquot provides a glimpse into the life of a woman who arranged clandestine and perilous champagne deliveries to Russia one day and entertained Napoléon and Joséphine Bonaparte on another. She was a daring and determined entrepreneur, a bold risk taker, and an audacious and intelligent woman who took control of her own destiny when fate left her on the brink of financial ruin. Her legacy lives on today, not simply through the famous product that still bears her name, but now through Mazzeo's finely crafted book. As much a fascinating journey through the process of making this temperamental wine as a biography of a uniquely tempered woman, The Widow Clicquot is utterly intoxicating.

Intoxicating? Not for me. The story is yes, pretty interesting, especially for those times. Plus I never knew that Veuve Clicquot meant 'Widow Clicquot' and I learnt plenty about the evolution of champagne, such as how it used to be supersweet, sweeter even than today's ice wine (which is for me, already too much), and how they used to have problems with bottling, resulting in cellars full of broken bottles on warm days.

I admired the amount of research done as well as the imagination required to bring the widow's story to life, but this book was for me like a house wine (yes, it was inevitable), it's palatable but lacks oomph. Unfortunately, this book about the brilliant sparkling alcohol is a bit flat.

Library Loot (May 6 and 13 2009)


Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Alessandra that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

Here's what I picked up last week at the library.

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street - Helene Hanff (my mini review)
Friendly Fire - A.B. Yehoshua
A couple, long married, are spending an unaccustomed week apart. Amotz, an engineer, is busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren. His wife, Daniella, flies from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister. There she confronts her anguished seventy-year-old brother-in-law, Yirmiyahu, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by “friendly fire." Yirmiyahu is now managing a team of African researchers digging for the bones of mans primate ancestors as he desperately strives to detach himself from every shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli.

With great artistry, A. B. Yehoshua has once again written a rich, compassionate, rewarding novel in which sharply rendered details of modern Israeli life and age-old mysteries of human existence echo one another in complex and surprising ways.

The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It - Tilar J. Mazzeo
The story of the visionary young widow who built a champagne empire, showed the world how to live with style, and emerged a legend.

Veuve Clicquot champagne epitomizes glamour, style, and luxury. But who was this young widow — the Veuve Clicquot — whose champagne sparkled at the courts of France, Britain, and Russia, and how did she rise to celebrity and fortune?

In The Widow Clicquot, Tilar J. Mazzeo brings to life — for the first time — the fascinating woman behind the iconic yellow label: Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin.A young witness to the dramatic events of the French Revolution and a new widow during the chaotic years of the Napoleonic Wars, Barbe-Nicole defied convention by assuming — after her husband's death — the reins of the fledgling wine business they had nurtured. Steering the company through dizzying political and financial reversals, she became one of the world's first great businesswomen and one of the richest women of her time.

Although the Widow Clicquot is still a legend in her native France, her story has never been told in all its richness — until now. Painstakingly researched and elegantly written, The Widow Clicquot provides a glimpse into the life of a woman who arranged clandestine and perilous champagne deliveries to Russia one day and entertained Napoléon and Joséphine Bonaparte on another. She was a daring and determined entrepreneur, a bold risk taker, and an audacious and intelligent woman who took control of her own destiny when fate left her on the brink of financial ruin. Her legacy lives on today, not simply through the famous product that still bears her name, but now through Mazzeo's finely crafted book. As much a fascinating journey through the process of making this temperamental wine as a biography of a uniquely tempered woman, The Widow Clicquot is utterly intoxicating.

David Golder, the Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair - Irene Nemirovsky
After reading Suite Française, I knew I had to read more by Nemirovsky. Definitely looking forward to this one!
Readers everywhere were introduced to the work of Irène Némirovsky through the publication of her long-lost masterpiece, Suite Française. But Suite Française was only the coda to the brief yet remarkably prolific career of this nearly forgotten, magnificent novelist. Here in one volume are four of Némirovsky's other novels — all of them newly translated by the award-winning Sandra Smith, and all, except David Golder, available in English for the first time.

David Golder is the novel that established Néirovsky's reputation in France in 1929 when she was twenty-six. It is a novel about greed and loneliness, the story of a self-made business man, once wealthy, now suffering a breakdown as he nears the lonely end of his life. The Courilof Affair tells the story of a Russian revolutionary living out his last days — and his recollections of his first infamous assassination. Also included are two short, gemlike novels: The Ball, a pointed exploration of adolescence and the obsession with status among the bourgeoisie, and Snow in Autumn, an evocative tale of White Russian émigrés in Paris after the Russian Revolution.

Introduced by celebrated novelist Claire Messud, this collection of four spellbinding novels offers the same storytelling mastery, powerful clarity of language, and empathic grasp of human behavior that would give shape to Suite Française.

Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant - Jenni Ferrari-Adler (ed)
A delightful and unexpected collection of pieces by writers, foodies, and others — including Nora Ephron, Marcella Hazan, and Ann Patchett — on the distinctive experiences of cooking for one and dining alone.

If, sooner or later, we all face the prospect of eating alone, then Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant provides the perfect set of instructions. In this unique collection, twenty-six writers and foodies invite readers into their kitchens to reflect on the secret meals they make for themselves when no one else is looking: the indulgent truffled egg sandwich, the comforting bowl of black beans, the bracing anchovy fillet on buttered toast.

From Italy to New York to Cape Cod to Thailand, from M. F. K. Fisher to Steve Almond to Nora Ephron, the experiences collected in this book are as diverse, moving, hilarious, and uplifting as the meals they describe. Haruki Murakami finds solace in spaghetti. Ephron mends a broken heart with mashed potatoes in bed. Ann Patchett trades the gourmet food she cooks for others for endless snacks involving saltines. Marcella Hazan, responsible for bringing sophisticated Italian cuisine into American homes, craves a simple grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich. Courtney Eldridge, divorced from a fancy chef, reconnects with the salsa she learned to cook from her cash-strapped mother. Rosa Jurjevics reflects on the influence of her mother, Laurie Colwin, as she stocks her home with salty treats. Almost all of the essays include recipes, making this book the perfect companion for a happy, lonely — or just hungry — evening home alone.

Part solace, part celebration, part handbook, Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant offers a wealth of company, inspiration, and humor — and, finally, recipes that require no division or subtraction.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami
In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he’d completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a dozen critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and—even more important—on his writing.

Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and takes us to places ranging from Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvelous lens of sport emerges a panorama of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs, and the experience, after fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back.

By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is rich and revelatory, both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in running.

The Speed of Light - Javier Cercas

Javier Cercas’ third and most ambitious novel has already been heralded in Spain as “daring,” “magnificent, complex, and intense,” and “a master class in invention and truth.”As a young writer, the novel’s protagonist—perhaps an apocryphal version of Cercas himself—accepts a post at a Midwestern university and soon he is in the United States, living a simple life, working and writing. It will be years before he understands that his burgeoning friendship with the Vietnam vet Rodney Falk, a strange and solitary man, will reshape his life, or that he will become obsessed with Rodney’s mysterious past.

Why does Rodney shun the world? Why does he accept and befriend the narrator? And what really happened at the mysterious ‘My Khe’ incident? Many years pass with these questions unanswered; the two friends drift apart. But as the narrator’s literary career takes off, his personal life collapses. Suddenly, impossibly, the novelist finds that Rodney’s fate and his own are linked, and the story spirals towards its fascinating, surreal conclusion. Twisting together his own regrets with those of America, Cercas weaves the profound and personal story of a ghostly past.


And today, I picked up:
Maus - Art Spiegelman
I've been trying to get hold of a copy for a while. The library always seemed to be out, but today, I was in luck, with three (three!) sitting on the shelf, waiting for me.

"Making a Holocaust comic book with Jews as mice and Germans as cats would probably strike most people as flippant, if not appalling. [This book] is the opposite of flippant and appalling. To express yourself as an artist, you must find a form that leaves you in control but doesn't leave you by yourself. That's how Maus looks to me — a way Mr. Spiegelman found of making art."
- William Hamilton, Books of the Century, The New York Times Book Review

What It Is - Lynda Barry
I couldn't take my eyes off this book, it has a crazy cover and a quick flip showed that every page was as crazy, if not more so!

What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or remember. Bursting with full-color drawings, comics, and collages, autobiographical sections and gentle creative guidance, each page is an invigorating example of exactly what it is: "The ordinary is extraordinary." Lynda Barry explores the depths of the inner and outer realms of creation and imagination, where play can be serious, monsters have purpose, and not knowing is an answer unto itself.

How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? These types of questions permeate the pages of What It Is, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. Her insight and sincerity will tackle the most persistent of inhibitions, calling back every kid who quit drawing to again feel alive at the experiential level. Comprised of completely new material, this is her first Drawn &  Quarterly book.

Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.

The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears.

Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

Vagrants - Yuyun Li
(hey MT, did you get hold of this one yet?)
Brilliant and illuminating, this astonishing debut novel by the award-winning writer Yiyun Li is set in China in the late 1970s, when Beijing was rocked by the Democratic Wall Movement, an anti-Communist groundswell designed to move China beyond the dark shadow of the Cultural Revolution toward a more enlightened and open society. In this powerful and beautiful story, we follow a group of people in a small town during this dramatic and harrowing time, the era that was a forebear of the Tiananmen Square uprising.
Women in their beds - Gina Berriault
Oh dear, now I can't remember where I heard about this book from. But thanks to one of the blogs I read, I came across this collection of stories. Sounds pretty good.
This remarkable collection received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club of California, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol II - Alan Moore
This was a good day for browsing the graphic novels shelf (yeah, it's just that one shelf).
Moore continues his trip through pulp genres with this second volume of The League. This collection includes plenty of faux-Victorian backup material, including the comic book series' original covers, and a lengthy prose short story by Moore. Although the film version was a bust, the source material remains an enjoyable, beautifully executed adventure series. Set in an alternate, technologically advanced 1898 London, the story finds legendary literary heroes Allan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Hawley Griffin (the Invisible Man), Edward Hyde and Mina Murray fighting battles that the British Empire can't handle without them. Here, the eclectic team is defending Earth from a Martian invasion, partially set in motion by another pulp hero, Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars. Moore spares no opportunity to play up the team's origins. Edward Hyde, the monstrous side of Dr. Jekyll, is a nasty brute, while Nemo is an imperious egomaniac, and the once-dashing Allan Quartermain is in the twilight of his powers, yet manages to romance Mina Murray, of Dracula notoriety. Moore remains faithful to the stories' structures (e.g., the Martian invasion is a pulpy romp, complete with burning farm houses, silly-looking creatures and plenty of political intrigue). O'Neill, his artistic collaborator, continues his fine run on the series. His drawings are influenced by 19th-century woodcuts but remain loose and lively. His exquisite renderings of machines and urban landscape remain a reason to look at this series—rarely has an adventure comic been so much fun to observe.

What did you get at the library this week?

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

On writing

I never had any ambitions to be a novelist. I just had this strong desire to write a novel. No concrete image of what I wanted to write about, just the conviction that if I wrote it now I could come up with something that I'd find convincing. When I thought about sitting down at my desk at home and setting out to write I realized I didn't even own a decent fountain pen. So I went to the Kinokuniya store in Shinjuku and bought a sheaf of manuscript paper and a five-dollar Sailor fountain pen. A small capital investment on my part.
Haruki Murakami
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff

Oh how I adored 84 Charing Cross Street, a book of letters from an American reader in New York to an English bookseller in London. Then to discover that there was a film version, which I watched with trepidation - would the movie ruin it all for me, as many film versions of books tend to? And especially, how would all these letters translate into visuals? Fortunately, it was extremely watchable, helped along by Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins (after writing this, I feel like watching it all over again). And now when I picture Helene Hanff, Anne Bancroft pops into my head.

And why was I picturing Helene Hanff? Cos I just read The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, that's why. Helene finally makes it to London and gets to meet Frank's family. It wasn't as lovely as 84 Charing Cross Street, but it was a quick and fun read, a nice break from reading of the horrors of genocide in Rwanda. Hanff is conversational, occasionally funny, but it was just nice to read about England, and by someone who is so enamoured of this country. It made me want to book a ticket to London!

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard

"Those strips of no-man's land between the checkpoints of new lives, new scents and affections. At the same time they set off a reflex of unease that I have never been able to repress. As the customs officials rummage through my suitcase I sense them trying to unpack my mind and reveal a contraband of forbidden dreams and memories."

Travel writer Charles Prentice is in beautiful Estrella de Mar. But not for work. He's there because his brother has pleaded guilty to setting a fire that has killed five people. Charles knows it's not his doing and sets out to discover the truth. But this community of Englishmen is not an easy one to crack. "In many ways Estrella de Mar was the halcyon county-town England of the mythical 1930s, brought back to life and moved south into the sun." It is a creepy little place, full of secrets, drugs and crime that strangely goes unreported. The tennis coach Crawford has a strange way of waking up the neighborhood, and bringing it back to life - vice, crime, vandalism, arson, drugs. You name it, it's probably happening. And Charles, in a bid to get in with the right crowd in order to uncover the truth, gets sucked into this clubhouse of depravity.

I wasn't quite expecting Cocaine Nights to turn out this way. I was even more surprised that I quite liked it. It was different, and it was quite fascinating how all the characters get trapped in their little whirlpool, as it spins madly away.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Murder, murder, murder

"Take the best estimate: eight hundred thousand killed in a hundred days. That's three hundred and thirty-three and a third murders an hour - or five and a half lives terminated every minute. Consider also that most of these killings actually occured in the first three or four weeks, and add to the death toll the uncounted legions who were maimed but did not die of their wounds, and the systematic and serial rape of Tutsi women - and then you can grasp what it meant that the Hotel des Milles Collines was the only place in Rwanda where as many as a thousand people who were supposed to be killed gathered in concentration and, as Paul said very quietly, 'Nobody was killed. Nobody was taken away. Nobody was beaten.'"
- Philip Gourevitch
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by

Growing pile

My TBR list is growing and growing, thanks to the great posts for Short Story Month on Emerging Writers Network.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage

Aggressive. It's a word I'd never thought to use to describe a book. But when I saw the Publisher's Weekly review of De Niro's Game, I have to admit that 'aggressive' is a completly apt word to describe this book, for Rawi Hage's debut novel is indeed aggressive. It is vivid, and it is explosive, and not just from all that bombing.

De Niro's Game is set during Lebanon's civil war and narrated by Bassam, a teenager trying to make it in Beirut and emerge alive: "War is for thugs. Motorcycles are also for thugs, and for longhaired teenagers like us, with guns under our bellies, and stolen gas in our tanks, and no particular place to go." His friend George, or De Niro, works for a militiaman and quickly rises in the ranks of Beirut's underworld. Bassam on the other hand refuses to have any part of that and dreams of escaping to Rome.

Hage delivers the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of Lebanon into the hands of the reader, but I seem to have forgotten to note down quotes before I returned the book to the library. I know this sounds so wrong but somehow Hage manages to romantically describe the horrors of war: "Bombs were falling like monsoon rain in distant India."

Of course, this book is full of violence and terror: "Ten thousand bombs had fallen and I was waiting for death to come and scoop its daily share from a bowl of limbs and blood." Even dogs are running wild and attacking anything in sight. But life goes on for Bassam, although he eventually flees for Paris, where the book takes a different turn.

I far preferred reading about life in Beirut than Bassam's exploits in Paris, where the story seemed to flounder a little bit. But overall, it was pretty captivating and my verdict: Read it.

The Lazy Review: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene. Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war."
Adichie continues to amaze me with her writing. I loved Purple Hibiscus, but Half of a Yellow Sun far surpasses that, especially her ability to write from three very different points of view, without throwing the story off balance. The three characters' tales segue almost seamlessly into this gorgeous novel. I forgot all about reading my other books and kept my nose firmly in this book until it was finished. It was moving and completely compelling, even though I was at first hesitant about reading a book about this war which I knew nothing about.

Read it!