tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-136084892024-03-11T11:22:11.364+08:00Bibliophobia...!An unopened book can be scary – who knows what may lurk within the pages?BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.comBlogger883125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-37071230245446220092024-03-10T22:50:00.000+08:002024-03-10T22:50:12.018+08:00Book Marks: Until August, Fried Rice, And Another Book BannedGabriel García Márquez's last and unreleased novel, Until August, has been published by his sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha. Thing is, the previously unfinished work was supposed to be destroyed. So, why? "Having reviewed the manuscripts, his family determined that they contained the essence of the writer who has captivated so many readers for decades," CNN reported. While conceding that BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-64119911796872936872024-03-04T15:50:00.001+08:002024-03-10T22:51:39.652+08:00Tempests And TribulationsIn Malaysian author Vanessa Chan's debut novel, The Storm We Made, the past catches up with Eurasian housewife Cecily Alcantara, who is lured into becoming a spy for Japan pre-World War II by Shigeru Fujiwara, a charismatic undercover Japanese military official.
In her espionage activities she finds an escape from the humdrum life of a mother and homemaker, a bigger purpose, and contact with BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-10116137909916127632024-02-28T22:36:00.001+08:002024-02-28T22:36:00.239+08:00Hopes For A New Dawn For Malaysian BooksellingSeveral organisations in the Malaysian bookselling and book-publishing sectors were interviewed in this article in theSun regarding the closure of bookstores in the past few years and some trends in reading and book-buying.
The article has a hopeful tone and ends on a positive note. But how will bookstores capitalise on the supposedly growing print leadership, the quality of what's being read BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-40339942911161051662024-02-25T22:24:00.000+08:002024-02-25T22:24:09.318+08:00Book Marks: Hugo Hiccup, Corrain, AI Book FraudThe exclusion of several authors from shortlists in last year's Hugo Awards, held in Chengdu, China, was reportedly decided by the award's administrators because of the venue. "Leaked emails from the organisers of the prestigious Hugo awards for science fiction and fantasy suggest several authors were excluded from shortlists last year after they were flagged for comments or works that could be BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-14516315971678496072024-02-12T15:20:00.001+08:002024-02-25T22:21:37.391+08:00A Stormy AffairNever delve too much into a stirring fantasy-romance romp between two enigmatic characters. Because that's what I did with Thea Guanzon's novel, The Hurricane Wars, and now I know it belongs to the romantasy subgenre and could be based on Guanzon's Star Wars fan fiction that ships opposing characters Rey and Kylo Ren.
Reading parts of it again, the parallels are hard to unsee. Stormships? Star BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-52467932269619447552024-02-05T14:25:00.001+08:002024-03-10T22:55:25.005+08:00Don't Fight Sleep To Chill OutSo who else is having trouble returning to daily life post-holiday in the new year because they borked their sleep cycles, especially after being on leave for over a week? Or are you (still) losing sleep over having to return to a full five- or six-day work week?
Tips on sleep like this are all over the web, so picking one or two lists to fix our sleep cycles and get better sleep should be a BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-65637196683722526232024-02-04T17:02:00.001+08:002024-02-04T17:02:00.147+08:00Book Marks: Somewhere In The Kuala, Dalit LiteratureA picture book with no dialogue, Somewhere in the Kuala, an illustrated children's book published by Suburbia Projects, takes readers around Kuala Lumpur. Readers follow two children who try to return home after being separated from their parents while on a tour of the city.
"Produced by illustrator Lisa Goh and lecturer/freelance designer William Chew, the book is a recipient of the Think City–BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-4619582340971404832024-01-29T12:05:00.003+08:002024-02-04T12:08:08.828+08:00Tales of Heartache, Hurt, and HopeCommon threads run through the stories in Saras Manickam's My Mother Pattu, a collection of short stories that doesn't look like one from the outside. In the face of adversity and its accomplices: racism, classism, cultural differences, patriarchal attitudes, suffocating traditions and others, the characters struggle to maintain their dignity, ideals, individuality, and humanity.
The window intoBPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-2985251490912846222024-01-28T19:59:00.006+08:002024-01-28T19:59:00.133+08:00Book Marks: Local Author News, Hugo ExclusionsI know I've been away for a bit, dropping my pledge to update once a week. But the publishing sphere seemed to have been quiet at the year-end and beginning of January 2024, so there wasn't much of note happening.
Also, I caught COVID in early January. The worst I've ever felt in a couple of years and I had to go see a doctor for medication and get more RTK test kits while ill. To my dismay, theBPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-49427980162541728632024-01-26T17:38:00.001+08:002024-01-27T20:15:35.806+08:00New Mess, New MysteryThe Mystery Guest by Nita Prose picks up from her previous book, The Maid, which came out in 2022 and features the same few characters that include Molly Gray, the protagonist and a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel.
In The Maid, the death of Molly's grandmother, who was also a maid, left her to navigate the messy webs of life by herself. She found comfort and security in her tasks, but her quirksBPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-47201541518874884192024-01-09T18:08:00.006+08:002024-01-27T20:16:32.058+08:00Teetering On The BrinkImagine a future where weather can be controlled, gnat-sized drones guard private property, and apps feed growing stores of data that reveal much about their users than they realise – all in the palms of several wealthy and powerful individuals obsessed with control and seeing steps ahead of other people. Meanwhile, climate change wreaks havoc here and there in the world, almost as if heralding BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-13564109801286046332024-01-01T21:12:00.000+08:002024-01-01T21:12:34.503+08:00End-Of-Year Kitchen HijinksSince I bought it last year, the tabletop oven has seen little use outside of warming up food and a batch of shortbread I baked as a test run. This year though, it's been used to bake fish, another batch of shortbread, and a couple of chicken meals.
The first was four (small) drumsticks on a bed of onion, carrot, and potato, with cloves of garlic scattered here and there. Marinade was salt, BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-91984001792798576182023-12-22T15:27:00.000+08:002023-12-22T15:27:06.291+08:00Malicious Sockpuppetry, Racism, And PlagiarismThe latest Goodreads drama over author Cait Corrain's setting up sockpuppet accounts to downvote books by several authors and upvote their upcoming romantasy debut came to a head when their agent and publisher cut ties with them when the whole thing blew up.
At least one observer expressed puzzlement over Corrain's actions: why would a debut author set to make a huge splash self-sabotage like BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-59292137891434208372023-12-10T21:51:00.001+08:002023-12-10T21:51:00.169+08:00Book Marks: BookTok on BBC, Salled Ben JonedAll right, let's get to it, shall we?
A self-published author and a bookshop owner tell the BBC how #BookTok is changing lives and publishing. But is the hashtag "pushing other book review sites to the side"? A clutch of one-minute videos may feel more genuine than text reviews, but in the age of AI, who can say? Different formats can complement or compete with each other. It doesn't have to be BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-18873081983890526302023-12-03T19:36:00.015+08:002023-12-03T19:36:00.145+08:00Book Marks: Genres, Singapore Libraries, Ian Fleming's Productivity Hack"Genre is a confining madness; it says nothing about how writers write or readers read, and everything about how publishers, retailers and commentators would like them to," writes Alex Clark in The Guardian. "This is not to criticise the many talented personnel in those areas, who valiantly swim against the labels their industry has alighted on to shift units as quickly and smoothly as possible."BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-53487138131292059982023-11-26T15:24:00.000+08:002023-11-26T15:24:02.212+08:00Book Marks: Big Fiction, AI, Malaysian Bus JourneysLacking material, I put off last week's post. As these things go, I probably should have expected to run smack into a deluge of stuff on books and publishing this week. Who was it that said publishing activities tend to slow down towards the end of the year?
Anyway, this is what cropped up in the past two weeks...
In The New Republic is a review of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-10118952244347919082023-11-24T17:12:00.001+08:002023-11-26T15:19:45.491+08:00Balmy Bookshop VibesRows of bookshelves stocked to the brim. The smell of books perfume the interior, with the occasional whiff of freshly brewed coffee. Gentle air conditioning, pushing away the warmth of the afternoon sun. From a corner, an almost imperceptible flap of a page being flipped. As you sit in a corner, you relax and become one with the ambience. The past, the future, and the world outside no longer BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-2773260674649529332023-11-12T19:48:00.001+08:002023-11-12T19:48:00.154+08:00Book Marks: Miscellaneous MarksThe weekly post was late last week, partly due to dearth of news and happenings. Not so this week, so let's take a look:
Literary social media platform Goodreads is getting users to help it combat review bombing. Publishers Weekly reported Goodreads' statement on the matter, as well as the platform's efforts to remove ratings and reviews that may be review bombs and its plea to its users to BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-66460279976507776442023-11-01T21:58:00.000+08:002023-11-01T21:58:22.146+08:00Book Marks: Writing Novels, Flower Moon, Scholastic U-Turn"Salman Rushdie has said that if authors are only allowed to write characters that mirror themselves and their own experiences, 'the art of the novel ceases to exist'," the Guardian reports. "If we're in a world where only women can write about women and only people from India can write about people from India and only straight people can write about straight people ... then that's the death of BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-47404522687706909842023-10-22T21:29:00.001+08:002023-10-22T21:29:22.138+08:00Book Marks: Frankfurt, Sensitivity, ScholasticThe Israel-Hamas war continues to affect the Frankfurt Book Fair, which has stated it stands with Israel. This, and the shelving of an award ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli for her novel Minor Detail, prompted pullouts from major Arab publishing organisations, inlcuding the Arab Publishers' Association, the Emirates Publishers Association, and the Sharjah Book Authority. Local BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-57432496244493274332023-10-15T22:08:00.000+08:002023-10-15T22:08:47.410+08:00Book Marks: Books3, Boey, And Bornean Folk TalesSome authors aren't happy about their books being included in the infamous data set Books3, used by Meta to train it's AI model. But several commentators and writers seem to be feeling philosophical about the whole thing.
TechDirt is telling people to learn to let go because "once you’ve released a work into the world, the original author no longer has control over how that work is used and BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-53973829243858982512023-10-08T20:44:00.000+08:002023-10-08T20:44:33.999+08:00Book Marks: Young SEA Authors, Authorship Is Tough"Because I've always wanted to publish my own book since I was six years old, but I kept pushing it aside all these years. So in 2018, I self-published the first Diary of a Rich Kid, using my own funds, with the help of my sister who became my second pair of eyes and gave feedback on the manuscript." A brief profile of Kuching-born author Malcolm Mejin in Malay Mail Online.
Meanwhile, The Star BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-46441287662325893932023-10-06T10:29:00.000+08:002023-10-06T10:29:41.695+08:00Moviemaking Magic And MadnessBill Johnson, director and screenwriter, makes a movie out of a memoir by Joe Shaw, a lecturer at an arts college. One thing leads to another and Shaw is invited to the set of Johnson's next film to witness the production and write a book about it: the book that will be known in this universe as The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, and instead of Shaw it is authored by Tom BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-3484489620714980102023-10-04T21:20:00.007+08:002023-10-11T09:17:24.735+08:00I Should Say SomethingWhen it was first reported, the ban on When I Was A Kid 3 and the circumstances that led to it shook me a bit. What a mess.
A while back, an Indonesian NGO led a protest at the Malaysian embassy in Jakarta over a chapter in the book that was said to have denigrated an Indonesian maid. The NGO asked for a total stop to the printing and sale of the book in Malaysia, and even for the author's BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13608489.post-23865002521145776212023-10-01T19:03:00.000+08:002023-10-01T19:03:00.142+08:00 Book Marks: BookTok, Booker, Copyrights, And Cosies
Are we done talking about BookTok and its influence on reading habits and publishing trends? No? Well, here's another article on how BookTok's hold on readers may be going beyond the platform. Are some bookstore displays looking more and more familiar to you? "The books most popular with BookTok – such as romance, fantasy and the hybrid genre 'romantasy' – are being picked up more and more by BPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08800253830319191628noreply@blogger.com0