bookmarks

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

It was everything I expected - a detective novel, exciting, with a bit of a romance thrown into it, and yet, something I wasn't expecting, kinda funny.


Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

If I had known about the book burning aspect of this great novel, I'd have read it a lot sooner. A little bit hard to get into at first, and a little distressing to read (burning books!) but truly awesome.


84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

Yet another book made into a film which I have to see (Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft!). This one's a collection of letters between an American scriptwriter (and booklover) and an English bookseller from 1949 to 1969. It's just such a sweet book, and I stayed up to finish it as I just couldn't put it down.

Firemen

They walked still further and the girl said, "Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?"
"No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it."
"Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames."
He laughed.

- Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451

how's the wedding planning?

It's a question often asked of me, although lately the answer has been: nothing much happening. It's still early I know, as friends have warned about the stress during the run-up to it. I just want to keep it simple and sweet, and stress levels low. And hopefully it will end better than this:



(via {Furi Kuri} weddings)

Why do I...

always get a craving for a cup of coffee after watching Gilmore Girls?

Civilwarland in Bad Decline

From the back of the book:

"America, in the near future, is a country of artificial experiences in cheesy shopping malls; where the machines faking dreams are always breaking down, and a company purporting to let urban racoons back into the wild is killing them, to save effort... [A] brilliant collection of short stories... you can't help loving this outstandingly tasteless and amusing volume"

Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday

What goes on in George Saunders' head?
I cannot help but wonder as I plunge into Civilwarland in Bad Decline.

"So I dive in and drag her out. It's not very deep and the bottom's rubber-matted. None of the Basques are bright enough to switch off the Leaping Trout Subroutine however, so twice I get scraped with little fiberglass fins. Finally I get her out on the pine needles and she comes to and spits in my face and says I couldn't possibly know the darkness of her heart. Try me, I say. She crawls away and starts bashing her skull against a tree trunk. The trees are synthetic too. But still."

The Wavemaker Falters

One Amazon customer review suggested that this book have a dosage label, of one story a month. It is a short book, of 179 pages but I have to agree, breathing space is required in between stories, even though it's a library book (although one story a month is a bit much).
It's not that it's an exhausting read, instead it is funny and totally intriguing. But it can get a little repetitive. Perhaps because while the settings are somewhat different, the premise is quite similar - an average person struggling in a black-hole dystopia. And like the nun taking that leap, reading each story one at a time (with long intermissions) is like jumping off a cliff - your feet leave the safety of the rock, you freefall, your stomach seems to be making its way up to your throat and you're ready to scream when your toes, then your the rest of you hit the cushion of water below and you plunge into the comforting cool darkness. And when you shoot back up for air, you're all ready to take the dive again. Except without all the bashing of the head against the synthetic tree.

Wyoming, China

The closest I’ve come to Wyoming is well, Nevada (so says Google maps). Wyoming is a place I can hardly imagine, yet Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories cut straight to the heart. I think it’s best described as Michael Knight did in a Wall Street Journal review: “Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms.” (via Powells). The best known of the stories is of course the romance of Ennis and Jack heartbreaking Brokeback Mountain, which was of course made into the Academy Award-winning movie. But all the other stories, of harsh, unforgiving lands, filled with lonely cowboys, despite being worlds away from what I know, are completely absorbing and affecting.



And on another continent....
It's not normally a book I would pick up, but the Picador Book of Contemporary Chinese Fiction seemed like a good introduction into well, contemporary Chinese fiction. There were even a couple of names I recognised (although hadn't read), like Su Tong (he of Raise The Red Lantern) and Wang Meng. Many of these short stories have morals behind them, such as Lin Xiu-wen's Black Walls, where a Mr Zhou is seen by his neighbours painting the walls and ceiling of his room black. The neighbours call a meeting and discuss what they should do and consider calling the police. Of course, one neighbour's young grandson pokes his head into the meeting and asks, why, if Mr Zhou is only painting his room and not everyone else's, do they kick up such a fuss? (groan). While this (and others) made me feel like I was reading a Moral Studies textbook, the collection on the whole was rather entertaining. It helped that most of the stories are pretty short and easily read while waiting for the bus. One of my favourites is Wang Meng's The Lovesick Crow and Other Fables, on the other hand, is quite a delight. The fables, such as The Comedy of Ducks, where ducks are riled after the publication of The Ugly Duckling: "Down with lakewater! Down with the farmer! Down with the turkeys! Down with the Chinese people!" they cry. The farmer, of course, solves the issue, the way a farmer will.

Ah, Caffeine

That moment of clarity.
When you sit up, your brain switches back on.
Hello!
The thoughts flow, the fingers fly on the keyboard.
The journal article you read once over and made no head or tail of, suddenly has a head, a tail, and even a whole body.
Time to make use of it while it lasts!

Roast

Watching Cookworks the other day made me feel like having roast chicken. The show's feature was really a turkey, and it looked moist and tender. And I wanted a moist and tender piece of meat heading straight for my mouth. A roast chicken would have to do!

I fell back on good ole Jamie Oliver, or at least an improvisation of his recipe, with ingredients I could find in the kitchen. Did I have rosemary? No. Did I have bacon slices? No. Still, the roast chicken was pretty yummy.



Pair that with a simple salad of butterhead lettuce, button mushrooms, a couple of small tomatoes, an avocado, dressed with some pepper, olive oil and lemon. Happy days.

flagged

The evening ceremony was about the same as in the morning, just done in reverse. The flag glided down the pole and was put away in the wooden box. The flag doesn't wave at night.
Why the flag has to be put away at night I have no idea. The country still exists at night, no? And plenty of people are hard at work. Doesn't seem fair that those people can't have the same flag flying over them. Maybe it's a silly thing to worry about - just the kind of thought a person like me is liable to fret over.

Haruki Murakami's Firefly
From Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“House Taken Over”

My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life. I can’t remember a time in which I didn’t have a library of some sort. The present one is a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I opened it for the first time. The scribbles on the margins, the occasional date on the flyleaf, the faded bus ticket marking a page for a reason today mysterious, all try to remind me of who I was then. For the most part, they fail. My memory is less interested in me than in my books, and I find it easier to remember the story read once than the young man who then read it.

Alberto Manguel writes about his 30,000-volume library

ex libris

There are some books that you race through, the exciting plot drives you on, the pages flip madly as you head for the finish line, sometimes even staying up way past bedtime.


And then there are books that you just want to take your time with, and hold back that need to read more. That's how I've been feeling about Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris. It's a collection of 18 essays she wrote over a period of four years, and they're all about books and reading.



As she says in the preface:

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves. How could it be otherwise?

She writes of marrying her and her husband's libraries together, how their American collection is alphabetised, whereas their English collection is in chronological order (and chronological even within each author).

"You mean we're going to be chronological within each author?" he gasped. "But no one even knows for sure when Shakespeare wrote his plays!"
"Well," I blustered, "we know he wrote Romeo and Juliet before The Tempest. I'd like to see that reflected on our shelves."
George says that was one of the few times he has seriously contemplated divorce.

Oh definitely a book that's to be savoured, page by page, word by word.


Read an excerpt here.

Where have you been all my life?

Oh boy, are we going to be such good friends!

Because when you can turn this


into this


(ok not such a great picture, but it's actually Leek and Potato Soup)


You've won me over. At first pulse.

mothers day

As I'm not much of a fan of cheesecake, it's something I've never made. But my mum does. So here's a lemon orange non-bake cheesecake. Happy Mothers' Day!

Decipher

A series of fourteen cryptograms for when you're bored at work, or just want to do something else than write reports.

let it rain

Every morning I wake up to a slightly cool (well compared to the night before) morning breeze and the faint hope that it will rain, that it will storm, that the temperature will not keep rising and that the dense humidity will not envelope me and leave a shiny sheen on every inch of my skin.

Oh for some of this



Or this


And on that note, some suitable songs, but as with most songs about rain, they're sad ones:

Tilly and the Wall - Let It Rain
Madeleine Peyroux - California Raining
Regina Spektor - 20 Years of Snow
Emiliana Torrini - Snow

Lightning flashes when you glance
I'm thunderstruck walk in slow motion
Ran a hand on a rainy railing
Cats and dogs falling but kept on walking
(The Postmarks - Looks like Rain)

Oh, anyway, it's looking like a beautiful day

Here's stuff I've been listening to recently.

Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid
Elbow sticks to what they know, and what they do best. As with Asleep in the Back, Cast of Thousands, and Leaders of the Free World, The Seldom Seen Kid is brilliant! I love the complexity of their music.
Love Weather To Fly, The Bones of You, Grounds for Divorce,


One Day Like This

Tina Dico (thanks to hucks)
One of my favourite tracks by this Danish singer is 'Give In' from the album In The Red, her first internationally released album.

The Raconteurs - Consolers of the Lonely
Quite a lot of it is pretty awesome, like Hold Up, Many Shades of Black, Rich Kid Blues. Others like These Stones Will Shout is a bit ho-hum.

eatin in the mornin

I love breakfast food. And I like eating breakfast.

And I also love poking my nose into what other people eat for breakfast. Such as this series by Jon Huck, and a blog of breakfasts, Simply Breakfast.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

At the recent Film Festival, director Wayne Wang (he of the Joy Luck Club film adaptation) was in town with two of his movies and I caught 'A Thousand Years of Good Prayers'. It was well, somewhat stereotypical. The film, revolving around a Chinese man's visit to his divorced daughter in America, is based on a short story by Li Yuyun. Li had arrived in the US to do a postgraduate degree in immunology, and according to Wayne Wang, had taken some writing courses at the university and ended up winning the 2005 Frank O' Connor International Short Story Award for one of the short stories in her collection.

I was wandering around the library at work the other day - one of the perks of the job, besides being able to occasionally work from home is that I have this great library at my disposal, as well as the ability to borrow forty books - when I came across the Li Yuyun collection. Despite some reservations from the movie screening, I picked it up. And I've so far read three of the stories and I must say that it's hooked me.

I expected most of the stories to be similar to A Thousand Years, that is, of Chinese immigrants in the US. But so far, the rest of the stories have been about life in China. I read of an old woman who is recently retrenched from a government factory and encouraged by a friend to marry an old man. His sons interviewed her and a week later, she moves into the house, only to find out that the old man has Alzheimer's.

I couldn't help but quickly turn to A Thousand Years, located towards the end of the collection. I read it through quickly. And as I finished it, I recalled what an audience member had asked at the Q&A session with Wayne Wang. Something along the lines of, the Russian dolls were not a feature in the book, so why was it included in the film? Wang insisted that it's in the book. But I just looked - it isn't. He should've left it out of the movie, along with the Russian music. They made for rather jarring, too obvious clues placed in the movie. It was as if he wanted to make doubly sure the audience would know that the daughter's friend was Russian.

The short story, while not as interesting as the others in the collection, was more subtle. It explained the "Thousand Years of Prayers" better, such as in this paragraph:

"We're the only family for each other now," Mr Shi says, almost pleading, but his daughter closes her bedroom door before he says more. Mr Shi looks at the dishes that are barely touched by his daughter, the fried tofu cubes stuffed with chopped mushrooms, shrimps and ginger, the collage of bamboo shoots, red peppers and snow peas. Even though his daughter admires his cooking every evening, he senses the halfheartedness in her praise; she does not know the cooking has become his praying, and she leaves the prayers unanswered.

That one part of the story spoke volumes, but it was entirely missing from the movie. Sure, it's a little bit 'Eat Drink Man Woman', a movie which I could watch over and over again (and er, kinda have). If I remember correctly, Wayne Wang said that the movie script was written by Li herself. So it makes me wonder if these details were something she put in, or was it the director?

Places I've eaten at recently

Brotzeit - It's got a lovely view, that is if you can ignore the massive construction hole on Sentosa where the casino (sorry, Integrated Resort) is supposed to be. The Kasespatzle, a Bavarian speciality, isn't much to look at but is surprisingly tasty. Spatzle is a type of egg pasta, and the Kasespatzle comes with a pretty yummy cheesy creamy sauce and topped with some slivers of onion rings. It's a dish to be shared, as it can get quite heavy. I was less impressed with the pork and veal sausage, which seemed a little bland. The pork knuckle on the other hand, was a crunchy delight, and served all chopped up on a bed of salad - pretty useful when sharing the dish. Wasn't terribly impressed with the beer - there's Paulaner on tap and a variety of bottled beers are available.

Persimmon - The Link Hotel is a bit of a walk from the MRT station, and can be a bit hard to find, unless you're familiar with the area. But once you spot those orange lights out front, there's Persimmon. Run by the people at Epicurious, it offers up some pretty good fusion food like a chicken salad that uses the flavours and sauces of Hainanese chicken rice. The spaghetti with porchetta and pinenuts was pretty good, although the porchetta on my plate was hardly crispy. And the fisherman's pie was a pretty large bowl of a lontong-like seafood stew with a rather massive slab of puff pastry on top. It was rather spicy and I was quite glad that I didn't order it, as I doubt I would've been able to eat more than half. Desserts were ho-hum, the pandan creme brulee winning over the very odd fruit crumble, which seemed to have all kinds of fruits in it, from grapes to strawberries to bananas. The white wine was quite a standout, although I can't remember where it was from now, Australia I think. But it was made from Japanese Kyoho grapes and had a nice sweet summery taste.

Da Mario Pizzeria - Of all the Places I've Eaten At Recently, this one was probably the best. It's a small joint tucked away at one corner of The Quayside at the Robertson Quay area. The Italian sausage and mushroom pizza was well, really pretty good. It had an awesome crisp crust - not too crisp and not too doughy! The canelloni was really tasty, stuffed with ricotta and spinach, covered with cheese and baked. And their puttanesca had a really good tomato sauce that was just right, not too tart, or too sweet. Plus it was chockful of olives, of the black and green varieties. I am definitely coming here again.

Ichiban-Tei - As I was walking around the Robertson area the other day, came across Ichiban-Tei, which had a pretty promising ramen menu. A quick google threw up some pretty decent reviews, so there I was on a Sunday evening, feeling a little guilty after watching the many joggers give their leg muscles (and heart and lungs) a good workout, while I was only exercising my jaw and stomach by wolfing down some chasiu ramen. The stock was a little too salty, so I gratefully reached for the jug of ice water at the table. But the chasiu had just the right amount of fat and was very very tasty, said I as I gulped down more water and left most of the soup in the bowl.

I hope you had some good eats over the past week.

Brotzeit
Vivocity
#01-149-151
Tel: 6272 8815

Persimmon
#01-07 The Link Hotel
50 Tiong Bahru Road
Tel: 62272271

Da Mario Pizzeria
60 Robertson Quay
#01-10 The Quayside
Tel: 623 57 623

Ichiban-Tei
60 Robertson Quay, #01-13,
Tel: 6733-3923

Choc Muesli Cookie, adapted (accidentally)

Making Bill Granger's Choc Oatmeal cookies is a snap. That is, if you were smart enough to check for all your ingredients beforehand. I wasn't.

It's simple enough. You start off preheating the oven at 180 degrees.

You get your butter, softened, and cream it with the brown sugar.
- Here's where I messed up and only brought out one stick of butter to soften, totally forgetting I wanted to make a double batch, which calls for 300g of butter, and not the 227g that the one stick provided.
Solution: Use margarine. Yeah, people will say, but margarine's not butter! Yes, I know that too. But what to do.

So I creamed my butter/margarine and brown sugar, beat my eggs and vanilla essence.
Then sifted flour (I had foreseen the need to actually buy plain flour, although in the end I didn't use the new packet I bought, and finished the remainder of an open packet), baking powder and salt together.

Then, dang! I forget to check if there were enough rolled oats. I poured it out onto the kitchen scales, realising already when I picked it up that it wouldn't be enough. It was short, by about half. I had oatmeal, but I didn't want Choc Oatmeal Porridge. B
Solution: I used the lovely Swiss muesli i'd picked up a few weeks ago. It has oats (and barley and raisins and apple bits and cornflakes). So in it went, along with a whole bag of chocolate chips.

Spoon the dough out onto a greased tray. Although Granger's recipe calls for the mound of dough to be pressed down with a fork, I skipped that and left it as a little mound, figuring the heat would flatten out anyway. And popped it into the oven. The recipe also calls for about 20 minutes, but by about 18 minutes, it had turned a lovely colour and was ready to be taken out of the oven.




And I must say, despite the addition of margarine and muesli, it was a pretty yummy cookie. I might even add that having some bits of raisins and apple in it actually added to the cookie. So this is instead a Choc Muesli Cookie, adapted (accidentally) from Bill Granger's fantastic Bills Food. The book is chockful of great simple recipes that I not only salivate over but once I read it go, hey that sounds easy enough, and actually go out and do it. So in addition to the best brownie recipe ever, I now have a best chocolate chip oatmeal cookie recipe ever.