More Read Reads And The George Town Lit-Fest

More than a year after the launch of Readings from Readings, the second volume is on its way. This time though, the publisher is crowd-sourcing funds for the project. Head here for more details.

If all goes well, Readings from Readings 2 will be launched on Sunday, 25 November, 4pm at Studio@Straits (86 Lebuh Armenian), during the George Town Literary Festival.

Others scheduled to appear include Dr John Robertson, author of The Battle of Penang; Dina Zaman, Shivani Sivagurunathan, Linda Christanty, Chiew-Siah Tei, A. Samad Said, Alfian Sa’at, Omar Musa, Jasmine Low, Jerome Kugan, Az Samad and Tan Twan Eng. Among those who will be moderating panel discussions are Amir Muhammad, Ann Lee, Rehman Rashid and Umapagan Ampikaipakan.

...The programme alone is making me drool. Should I?

The George Town Literary Festival will take place at several venues in George Town, Penang, from 23 (Friday) to 25 (Sunday) November 2012. Details at gtlfestival.blogspot.com, or email info@penangglobaltourism.com or call +604 264 3456.

Book Blogger Blah-Blah-Blah

This is very late, I know, but I only had time and free brainspace to regurgitate this after scratching off several items from my mental list of to-dos.

I don't know how many book bloggers cried when Sir Peter Stothard, chair for this year's Booker panel, asserted that their "mass of unargued opinion" will tsunami the output by bona fide literary critics. "There is a great deal of opinion online, and it's probably reasonable opinion, but there is much less reasoned opinion."

He also mentioned his predecessor's focus on "readable" books, arguing that readability can be "interesting", but "great art for the most part resists it to a degree". "Someone has to stand up for the role and the art of the critic," he added, "otherwise it will just be drowned – overwhelmed. And literature will be worse off."

I imagine people who, without finishing the article(s) hyping up Stohard's statements, going, "La sir! How snobbish!" or "At least we don't refer to the New York Times for what to read."

I was hesitant about shooting my keyboard off while this thing was still hot, because at some point I want to stop, and I can't seem to when talking about stuff like book blogging or reviewing.

A simple reply from me would be, "Rubbish." Too short? Okay...

By now it should be clear that book prizes such as the Man Booker aren't for types who pick 'readability' over 'art'. Books that can be considered 'readable art' or even 'absolutely re-readable art' are possible, but what determines that is for the most part subjective. How to explain the polarised views people have for certain books, apart from blaming rogue reviewers and easily gamed ranking systems?

That few things out there are universally loved - or hated - keeps reviewing and criticism exciting. People apply different yardsticks to measure a book's readability, bringing to bear their own knowledge and previous reading experiences.

The subsequent richness of opinion on a book or any other work can be complex and hard to cut through, but one gets a really huge buffet of viewpoints from which to choose, digest, and maybe add to.

Anybody who spends time and money to buy and read a book is entitled to an opinion, even if it's just "My cat can write better erotica" - who knows, it might just be true. Even if it doesn't advance one's appreciation of the book, at least it's entertaining and, well, if it isn't, move on to the next soapbox.

And the opinion deluge wouldn't necessarily drown out the more "critical" voices which, by virtue of their writing, should rise above the inane. Serious book people will learn how to recognise this cream; it is, after all, like picking what's good to read off the shelves. It's fine, I guess, to indulge in something 'vacuous' on occasion, as long as one recognises what it is.

One's understanding and knowledge of a particular kind of work can only increase as the discussion goes on and intensifies. That can only get better, but only if the contributions improve in quality. They will, over time, despite scepticism from Booker Prize panel chairs.

Book prizes such as the Booker may have a part to play as an established gatehouse that brings good but lesser-known reads into the spotlight, like this piece suggests. That they're not about recommended "beach reads" is pretty much self-evident. Their picks and their relevance at a time when reads appear to be dumbing down, however, will continue to be a subject of at times intense debate.

News: Amazon Reviews, Book Pride and "It's NOT A Hobbit!"

Author Steve Weddle is "befuddled" over Amazon's removal of his positive review of another author's book, for which he makes no money.

Amazon's rationale? "We do not allow reviews on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product. This includes authors, artists, publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product."

Weddle's befuddled, because he has no financial interests "in the product or a directly competing product". Also:

...what is this "directly competing product" stuff? I mean, if I were selling a rotary-enhanced-lippo-vac, I could understand if the nice people at Amazon did not want me reviewing someone else's rotary-enhanced-lippo-vac. That makes sense.

Point. But Weddle is not the only author whose Amazon book reviews have been deleted.

So this is how Bezos's jungle is responding to the sockpuppetry affecting its rankings and reviews system, hmm? What's frustrating, though, is that Amazon isn't, for the time being, telling people exactly why it's doing the stuff it does.

What with this and deleting or locking e-books in people's Kindles, small wonder Amazon-published books are still not welcome in some bookstores.

On a possibly related note: What's this with Twitter "withholding" tweets that may have infringed copyrights? Hope they know this may also affect the RTs on the platform.

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Tolkien estate says prof - and everyone else - can't call Homo floresiensis a "hobbit"; Village Voice Media sues Yelp over generic phrase "best of"; and and William Faulkner estate sues over a paraphrased quote in the movie Midnight in Paris. Will bars and lounges be prohibited from selling the Vesper?


In other news:

• RIP Elizabeth Kuanghu Chow a.k.a Han Suyin.
• Elie Wiesel to write a book with Barack Obama?
• Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick highlights what they feel is the problem with America's history books. Across the pond, a "spellcheck generation" can't spell simple words.
• Isn't it just so Anthony Bourdain for his imprint's first book to be about meat?
• Remarkable story about an author helping a Russian who's pirating his book. It's not Coelho...
• Malaysian books as year-end presents? Why not? Except that this is more of a rant about why governments of some countries don't seem to be proud of their books and writers.
• How not to write comics criticism. Points can apply - somewhat - to book criticism as well.
• "If you loved Fifty Shades, you'll love this book." I scoffed at this blurb -or something like it - on the cover of Sylvia Day's Bared to You. Still scoffing, just because. La la la la la not reading you....
• Will this court case affect how former college students dispose of their textbooks?
• Writing a book? Here's three things that should go into a book's first page.
• E-devices, it seems, are changing how - and what - we read.
• Ian McEwan praises the novella. Are we looking at an upcoming trend?
• Are bad books better than no books? No. Because there's always the Internet. Or fresh air. Or coffee bars. Or bookstores. Or Ramly burger stands. Or...

Ruined Splendour

I enjoyed this book.

Alright, so the three industries aren't really dead yet - just in shambles, thanks largely to the technology that enabled me to post this. But they'll pick themselves up, hopefully, and live on.

Apologies to Justin Cronin and Karl Lagerfeld for any offence caused. The mental cues just ... leapt in there.

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Splendour from ruin

Even broken lives can be beautiful, as this darkly funny novel suggests

first published in The Star, 04 November 2012


Why do KL drivers slow down to stare at multi-vehicle pile-ups? Could there be something ... beautiful about them? Considering the things that pass for sculptures of modern art, perhaps. But such morbid beauty isn't just found in mangled metal.

The pile-up of broken lives in Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is just as fascinating. The comic-tragic tale unfolds from several directions as the protagonists race towards the inevitable collision. And it's all because of Richard Burton.

In 1962, Porto Vergogna (literally, "port of shame") is a dying Italian fishing town and home to young Pasquale Tursi, keeper of the oddly named Hotel Adequate View. Tursi's daydreams of building tennis courts are interrupted by the arrival of Dee Moray, an American starlet who was supposed to be in Liz Taylor's Cleopatra. It's not long before Tursi starts thinking about a different kind of "love". However, stuff happens and, one day, she vanishes.

In the present day, several people are failing in their romances and careers. Claire Silver, assistant to film producer Michael Deane, is disappointed with her porn-addict boyfriend and the box office bombs her boss made. Shane Wheeler's dreams of being a writer also bombed, along with his marriage and finances. Across the pond, Pat Bender's latest music-comedy act goes belly-up, ending his rock star ambitions.

Hoping for a break, Wheeler pitches a story to Deane, so he's off to meet his assistant, Silver. Wheeler's knowledge of Italian helps when an elderly Italian man, a now-aged Tursi, shows up with one of Deane's old business cards – and a story that moves Wheeler, Silver and Deane to help him.

There's a tingling sense of anticipation that's maintained throughout the novel, the promise of a spectacular collision that only happens during a rare alignment of some major cosmic bodies.

The third-person narrative is mostly the spilling of the characters' thoughts. The jumps in the timeline, punctuated with excerpts from several characters' manuscripts or screenplays, can be initially hard to follow but the dark, often vulgar comedy helps.

Another compelling aspect about Walter's novel is that its backdrop can be considered "beautiful ruins" as well: the film, book and music industries, as represented by the principal characters. Gawk and maybe chuckle at the references to trashy reality TV shows, bad movie ideas and English professors who write popular horror fiction (makes one think of Justin Cronin). Although their worlds are crumbling, the protagonists manage to cling on, just in time for Tursi's arrival. In helping the old Italian find a missing piece of his past, their hope is rekindled.

What one feels about this book is captured by Wheeler's reaction to the present-day Deane, a "lacquered elf" whose obsession for eternal youth has given a 72-year-old man the face of a "nine-year-old Filipino girl" (makes one think of Karl Lagerfeld). "Try not to stare," Silver advises Wheeler.

Like Wheeler, you'll fail. You can't help it. Even if you have almost no idea what's going on, there's no way you can take your eyes off Walter's ruined lives as they converge and finally crash into each other. I don't really fancy how some loose ends are tied up, but at least it rules out a sequel if they decide to bring it to the silver screen.

"Go read this now" would not suffice. The splendour of Beautiful Ruins, like the pyramids and temples of Ancient Egypt, must be personally witnessed to be understood. You will not be able to look away. Be awed at the chaos and brilliance of his work, and be moved by a story of optimism and a decades-old love.

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Beautiful Ruins

Jess Walter
Harper (2012)
337 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-06-220713-5

Growing Up With Ghosts

At first, the idea of the supernatural in the setting seemed interesting, only because I haven't read anything like this. But I'm no 140-plus-books-a-year person.

In the end, though, I felt underwhelmed. This book broke no mould or new ground. That "octopus scene" touted in some promo material appeared gratuitously tacked on. The protagonist's ordeals lent little poignancy to her survival.

Maybe I should've titled it "Growing old with ghosts".

Cassandra's abilities reminded me of Brian Lumley's Necroscope character, a man who can talk to the dead and raise an army of dead people. Despite this and her toughness, she remains bound by the restrictions from the religious and social mores of her day. She is used, abused, disbelieved and betrayed, particularly by the men in her life.

One would think being a female necromancer would set her free from all that, but perhaps it's due to her reluctance to abuse her gift, or the author's attempts to avoid turning an adult book into some young adult fantasy.

Guess some ghosts are harder to exorcise than others.

This particular time period may yet yield more stories, but I think it's time writers start letting Southeast Asia's pre-war/wartime/post-war era fade into the evening mists along with its gardens, jungles, horrors and other emotional baggage.

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Growing up with ghosts

Don't read too much into this dark tale

first published in The Star, 02 November 2012


In present-day Japan, an old lady searches for a book in a library and finds pages torn from it and a picture of her younger self in it defaced. Then, walking outside, she sees a pair of crows collide in mid-flight. In the evening, she gets a mysterious phone call asking for an interview and, much later, a seemingly otherworldly visitor. Shaken, the old lady reaches for a voice recorder and starts recalling her dark past.

One thing about ghost stories these days is that they seem to be about more than just ghosts – or not at all. There are ghosts galore, as well as undead and nature spirits, in Sandi Tan's The Black Isle but it feels as though their presence is more for effect and atmosphere in a tale about a little girl born in the 1920s, who has to grow up real quick when she's uprooted from her native Shanghai and sent to a tropical backwater.

The girl, Ling, is the elder of a pair of brother-sister twins and the black sheep of the lot that includes her brother Li and a pair of younger twin girls. Her life starts to change when she discovers her gift.

... She sees dead people ... all the time....

Don't bother calling up filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan about possible copyright infringements of his hit 1999 movie, The Sixth Sense. Nothing of the sort here.

The first ghost Ling sees is of her former babysitter, who vanishes after leaving behind a message: That Ling would leave home for a faraway place. It isn't long before Ling is packed off to South-East Asia, along with her dad and twin brother, to help better the family fortunes.

They end up on the "Black Isle"; from the map in the book, it looks like – but is not quite like – Singapore. The island is "dirty" – haunted – and would get "dirtier" when the Japanese come a-knocking.

It's not long before we see hints that her "gift" is more of a bane than a boon. Nobody believes in her sightings as a child, which would later lead her to adopt the name Cassandra, after the tragic princess and prophetess of Troy. But when the Black Isle finally gains its independence, will she also be free of her ghosts?

One observation made about The Black Isle is that the work straddles young adult and adult fiction, which I find is very much the case. The pages breeze along, despite their not-so-bright tone. But I wonder if the novel was set during a time of conflict as an excuse to weave in elements of dark fantasy.

Racism, swearing and lurid descriptions of all sorts of bad behaviour made me feel uncomfortable, even though the whole novel overall was well-written and – perhaps, a little too – well-imagined.

The Black Isle itself is said to be an amalgam of a number of South-East Asian countries whose evolution mirrors Malaysia's. That, as well as the inclusion of elements of regional folklore and myth makes the novel more relatable, albeit well-worn in its familiarity. As a result, there's little compulsion to pick this book up again after one is done with it.

Still, that so much from real life is incorporated into a supernatural tale begs one to seek out hidden messages in the threads of the story.

Old wisdom contends that each place has its ghosts and penunggu (Malay for "guardians"), and the notion that they will rise up against any injustice done to it, just as the Black Isle's did, has a certain appeal. But raising ghosts and invoking the past can be dangerous, especially if it is to inflame passions or advance someone's selfish agenda.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into what could be a simple ghost story set in familiar territory, meant only to be enjoyed on a sleepless night in a dimly lit room. Can you blame me? After a spell on Sandi Tan's shadowy Black Isle, you'd probably start seeing things, too.

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The Black Isle

Sandi Tan
Grand Central Publishing (August 2012)
472 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-4555-1654-4

News: Random Penguins, Amazon, And Self-Publishing Grows (Some More)

Penguin and Random House have merged into what could be the world's largest book publishing firm. Apparently, news of the merger "rattled" publishing ... and kicked off a meme. "Penguin House" sounds like something Owl City would compose. "Random Penguin"? Not so much.

But they're going to call it Penguin Random House. Key facts of the two entities from the Guardian here.

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Amazon reportedly slaps British publishers with 20% value-added tax on ebook sales. Not as hair-raising as how it allegedly erased the contents of customer's Kindle without a detailed explanation, though the contents were reportedly restored later. Or the note she received after her Kindle was wiped:

"We wish you luck in locating a retailer better able to meet your needs."

In some dystopian future where Amazon is the only retailer, that would bite.

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EPUB 3.0 now said to help publishing of Japanese e-books, many of which follow a particular format. Will e-books finally take of in the land of the keitai shosetsu?

And Forbes states the obvious: "self-publishing shows rapid growth". For those itching to hop onto that bandwagon, here are some points to ponder before self-publishing your book.

Meanwhile, others ask whether self-publishing authors are ruining it for e-book publishing with dirt-cheap e-books.


In other news:

• Nobel troubles rear its head for Mo Yan, whose accolades raise piracy fears for his books and concerns over fate of his village when the 'Mo Yan theme park' is up.
• Kurdish publishers at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair can't seem to keep politics off the table.
• Fraud-exposing crime writer Jeremy Duns may have revealed another possibly dodgy book reviewer.
• A different point of view on the Bourdain's foodie machismo. The opening line lampshades his writing style: "In Rome, visiting friends in May, I ordered the sweet, unctuous lining of a cow's stomach thrice, and ate it each time in a state of pure gustatory contentment."
• A bookstore guy on what goes into a bookstore.
• Donated hollowed-out book found packing heat. Origins unknown.

Language Pollution And Le Mot Juste

first published in The Malaysian Insider, 24 October 2012


Some time ago, some linguistic Paul Revere came riding out of a foggy night, lantern in hand, yelling, "The Britishisms are here!"

Apparently, some common British terms are creeping into American English, thanks in part to British-made entertainment drifting from the other side of the pond.

I'd like to think the New York Times article was written with some tongue in the writer's cheek, but in case it isn't, here's the irascible and oft-quotable John Scalzi's classic response to it. Yeah, "silly, silly article."

Creeping foreign influences on language, I guess, is everybody's issue. Especially when one's country happens to be an important crossroads along key trade routes, part of or originator of an empire, or some combination of the afore-mentioned. The need to invent words in one's native language for some foreign object or concept can be seen as one attempt to keep things "local".

As it becomes easier for the world to creep (or barge) in, that gets harder.

During Japan's Meiji era, the country adopted the best of the West: banking, industry, defence and so on, a practice that continued well into the present day and made them a world economic power.

The case for borrowing and incorporating foreign words to speed up the enrichment of a language to make it more global, therefore, seems solid, especially when a bureaucracy is stretched beyond its limits by other needs to invent new words in a "native" language that convey exactly what an object, idea or concept is ― or come close to doing so.

Some nationalistic elements, however, claim this type of borrowing dilutes rather than enriches the "native: culture and identity. In Malaysia, for instance, these elements appear wilfully ignorant that certain words in the vocabulary have origins in Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese and Sanskrit, among others.

From the photo, it's tempting to assume that Gustave Flaubert's
(1821-1880) receding hairline is due to the pressures of finding
le mots justes. How stressful was it to write books such as
Madame Bovary?

To some extent, language is malleable, and the way some societies shape words and ideas to communicate better and more concisely is not too different from how our ancestors shaped stone and bone to hunt and fish. But there's always the urge to brand the tools and tool-making technique as one's own, fuelled by the need to forge a unique identity.

What got me thinking ― not too deeply, though ― about this was, for one, the complexity in editing several cookbooks. Some ingredients, such as "asam Gelugor", lack what I feel are more concise English translations or equivalents and, as such, one can only fall back on the Latin-based (ha) naming conventions invented by Carl Linnaeus.

I had a harder time when I wrote a piece on herbal teas. For instance, some sources can't agree on whether "beizicao" ― or "bukcheechou" in Cantonese ― should be written as 北子草 ("northerner grass" ― kinda) or 北紫草 ("northern purple grass"), or if the herb is known as such in mainland China.

More recently, a colleague had some trouble translating "tingle" into Malay. The given Malay equivalent in a bilingual dictionary is "(rasa) gelenyar", though I have no idea when it got in there. We settled on "gelenyar", more because there doesn't seem to be anything else.

While some may argue or lament that certain quarters are unnecessarily borrowing foreign words or substituting local words with imports, those processes shouldn't be seriously curtailed or stopped entirely for the sake of protecting the purity of one's mother tongue or national language.

As the feisty Erna Mahyuni stated in The Malaysian Insider, "You don't "protect" [the national language] by discouraging the mastery of other languages." She was commenting mainly on the state of Malay-to-English translation, but I feel that mastery of languages is also crucial in developing one's lexicon.

Many of us may not be as anal-retentive as Gustave Flaubert when it comes to the quest for the right word. However, a wordsmith's bag of tricks can never have too many items.

If the word fits, use it.

News: Endings, Man Overboard, And Timing Is Everything

At last, Newsweek ends its print edition. Andrew Sullivan isn't all that crushed about it, comparing print mags to "horses and carriages" that exist "as lingering objects of nostalgia." Someone wrote a rebuttal of sorts but I forgot the link. Also going out of style: cookbooks.

What else has been going on?

• The Man Group stops sponsorship of the Man Asian Literary Prize. They'll keep the Booker Prize running, though.
• How to write a letter that sells your book. Of all the queries that have come my way, few had good cover letters. Before you do that, check out some things you may want to do before self-publishing.
• In publishing, timing can be everything. Several cases of both good and bad timing are highlighted, including one author's very unfortunate novel.
• Stephen King nearly busted for vandalising books - his books - with his signature.
• The V-word keeps Rachel Held Evans's A Year of Biblical Womanhood out of a Christian bookshop. From the looks of it, they probably don't sell dictionaries, either.
• Hay in the Parc, a lit-fest in a lockup that's contributing to rehab of young prisoners.
• A "short" defense of verbosity in literature. Because, why not?
• In Wales, the publishing industry is under a cloud.
• Do e-reader manufacturers and publishers need to do more for the blind? Eventually, yes.
• 21 authors attempt to write 140-character novels. The results are ... interesting.

Mostly Melancholy

This is no spicy literary pick-me-up perfumed by the kind of exoticism generally associated with the Indian subcontinent

first published in The Star, 21 October 2012


When buying books, warning flags to observe include author names that are bigger than the titles, "Winner of the Booker/Man Asian/Nobel/Whatever Prize" - "... brings a cool eye to friendship, love and the idea of belonging in its movements through old and new worlds..." - and abstract-sounding back cover blurbs.

The adult life of Leela Ghosh, the protagonist in Anjali Joseph's Another Country, begins in Paris, where she teaches English and goes about the business of negotiating "the world, work, relationships and sex" to find "some measure of authenticity".

The author once stated that Leela's migratory path mirrors her own: Joseph moved to Britain when she was seven because of her father's job; she lived in France for a year after graduating from Cambridge, teaching English at the famous Sorbonne; and she moved back to India, "a little accidentally", when she was 25.

It's hard to believe that Joseph's second novel is a complete work. Stretched across 31 short chapters, the collage of snapshots of Leela's largely uninteresting early 20s feels like an avant-garde art film in which details trickle in but never form a whole picture, even at the end.

Characters and places abruptly come and go, leaving nary a trace on the reader's mind or heart. Nothing strikes a chord with me. You can put the book down for a break and pick up where you left off easily.

As for the overall tone: "Sharp, funny and melancholy" says the back cover blurb? Mostly melancholy, methinks.

Leela's presence is almost as ephemeral as the rest of the supporting cast, an odd trait for a lead character. She strikes me as aloof, self-absorbed and a little mordant, radiating little warmth with her cloudy disposition and sterile, clinical observations of people and places as she flits from one chapter to another. One is hard-pressed to sympathise with her when, for instance, she gets thrown out of her boyfriend's flat at three in the morning.

But maybe we're not supposed to care too much.

In an interview, Joseph spoke of a kind of "unsettledness" which is probably felt by "a lot of people who live in many places and without a clear sense of how their own sense of self fits within national or regional boundaries". People such as Leela Ghosh and, perhaps, the author herself.

The displaced tend to feel disoriented; far away from home, comfort and stability are sought within the familiar while adjusting, during which some sights, sounds and such feel more important than the rest.

What's not important is blocked out, numbed down and closeted somewhere in the mind to fade away like a traveller's footprints on a beach.

The apparent gaps in the narrative seem to illustrate this but, overall, one feels rushed through a series of half-done dioramas in a museum exhibit put together by an impatient curator.

So the dry, barebones depiction of a young person's life in Another Country feels quotidian. Maybe that's the point – this is no spicy literary pick-me-up perfumed by the kind of exoticism generally associated with the Indian subcontinent. Real life for many of us already has enough drama, so why ramp it up into a full-budget Bollywood song-and-dance?

Joseph's open-ended tale of a migrant's journey would, perhaps, click better with other fellow wanderers: displaced, unsettled individuals seeking stability beyond their beginnings. However little one feels about this book, it's hard not to wish its protagonist all the best in her search for home and self.

For the world-weary wayfarer, there is no greater release than the feeling of coming home.


This review was based on an advance reading copy.

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Another Country

Anjali Joseph
Fourth Estate (2012)
265 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-00-746278-0

Late, Late News: Bring Up The Bodies And All That

I was holding out for the results of this year's Man Booker Prize before posting but, in the end, a Malaysian favourite lost out to a foreign heavyweight. Oh well....

Hilary Mantel's second Booker win for the sequel to her first, Wolf Hall, was apparently expected. Was the choice too obvious?

"I merely wanted novels that they would not leave behind on a beach," said Sir Peter Stothard, who led the judging panel and may have ticked off a bunch of book bloggers for what he reportedly said about them.

Leave a novel behind on a beach? La sir! Do you know how much they cost these days?

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The digital revolution in publishing was expected to be a hot topic at Frankfurt Book Fair, where the mood appears clouded by economic woes in the Eurozone.

More clouds forecasted for writers, in light of the concerns raised over Google's deal with publishers regarding book digitisation. Related to this is a judgement in the US favouring a "digital preservation effort" by a bunch of research libraries based on material scanned by Google. Getting harder to not be evil each year, hmm?

Meanwhile, a Jewish reading site complains about Saudi and Iranian presence at European book fairs. Uhm... yeah.

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Chinese, but different fates: Nobel Literature prize winner's books, predictably, fly off the shelves after announcement. A Chinese forestry official turned environmental activist, meanwhile, may be jailed over book on environmental protection.

The Guardian offers some visuals on, among other things, how getting shortlisted for a major literary award is enough to boost sales. Everyone's a winner!

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Somebody at Forbes begs to differ (a little) on a listicle on the already stale topic of ten ways to save the publishing industry in the Guardian. Will the debate never end?


In other news

• Rich Dad author Robert Kiyosaki may be US$24 million poorer for allegedly reneging on a deal. Those who were helping themselves to some sweet, sweet schadenfreude jumped the gun.
• "Forget the money and write." Good advice that may apply even if there is money involved.
• Those who bought Kindle books (between April 2010 and May 2012) to get refunds.
• Hay in the Parc, a lit-fest in a lockup that's contributing to rehab of young prisoners.
• Johnny Depp to launch his own book imprint with HarperCollins? Is HarperC cultivating a stable of celebrity publishers?
• Famous authors and their favourite foods. Agatha Christie sipped Devonshire cream? And how the heck does one make a "tomato soup cake"? No prob - recipes included.
• A "short" defense of verbosity in literature. Because, why not?

Last but not least: Can't get enough of Boey Cheeming? The author, styrofoam cup beautifier and former animator will be meeting fans this Saturday, 20 October, at Popular Bookfairs at 1Utama (2pm - 3.30pm) and Paradigm Mall (5.30pm - 6.30pm); and Sunday, 21 October, at Popular Bookstore, Sunway Pyramid (3pm - 4pm). These may be his last appearances in Malaysia for a while, so don't miss it.

Late News: Coffee, Cookbooks and Controversy

Seems there's a bug creeping around; several colleagues came down with symptoms like mine: hangover-ish headache, listlessness and a touch of fever and the sniffles. Hoping it blows over soon.


Coffee...
A publisher's coffee-and-books initiative has the whiff of a good cuppa. The Bee @ Jaya One, PJ sells music CDs and one or two book titles on occasion, but why is this model not being adopted elsewhere? Sounds like a good idea. "Coffice romance"? COFF.

Seems a study lists fifteen of the most caffeinated professions, with added trivia. Mine's ranked fourth and yes, I do tend to add flavours to my coffee.

And the most caffeinated profession, according to these scientists? Scientists. Maybe research's more fun with caffeine.


...cookbooks...
Some genuine Italian mammas are, to say the least, not impressed with Nigellissima. Nor is John Crace, from the looks of it. I think handing this book to these critics was a practical joke.

Meanwhile, the myth of Jamie's 15-minute meals seems to have been ... busted. But Jamie doesn't seem to be perturbed. With regards to complaints that his "30-minute meals" took longer than that to make: "I could give you a lot of defensive sh** and say they didn't do the recipes exactly from the book or didn't use a food processor for chopping – which is an absolute must, unless you have knife skills like me. ... I look on Twitter and somebody says it took them 45 minutes and I think, 'God bless you, keep trying and you'll speed up next time.'"

Okayyy....


...and a bit of controversy
As last week was Banned Books Week, here are some 'funny' author responses to their books being banned.

Sikhs were up in arms over the self-harming Sikh character Sukhvinder Jawanda in JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy. Did they finish reading it?

Haruki Murakami tells Japan and China to chill the heck out over the island spat, which has appeared to spill over to China banning or blocking books (including Murakami-san's), articles, racers, etc that have anything to do with the Land of the Rising Sun.


In other news

• Google and US publishers reach a settlement in the former's ambition to digitise books. But, somebody asks, what about the authors?
• Scott Pack shares some numbers and suggests how e-publishing can help raise the sales of 'dead' books.
• RIP Eric Hobsbawm, historian. His posthumous collection, Fractured Spring, is scheduled for release next March.
• Jason Kottke unpacks the rants of Obama-hating ultra-rich in The New Yorker. Probably too pissed off to continue.
• How to self-publish on Amazon Kindle. Go on, you know you want to.
• Manufactured: the making of K-pop.
• Eleven things to avoid before launching your book.

Not So Casual, Actually

While I'm relieved that it's finally published, I'm still averse to reading the many other reviews out there. Can any more be said about it?

The only other Rowling book I read was Tales of Beedle the Bard, which may have narrowed the scope of my review. I took only two days to read it and I didn't take notes and ... oh tidak, I spelled the name of the killing curse wrong!

That's why I'm jittery about sending pieces to other media outlets.

But what's this? Oh look, the Zagat 2013 guide for San Francsico and Bay Area restaurants is out.

I know I shouldn't, but ... I feel better.

---

Not so casual, actually

Nothing supernatural in JK Rowling's latest, but expect skeletons in closets, ghosts from the past and voices from beyond the grave

first published in The Malaysian Insider, 03 October 2012


Just as in "Desperate Housewives", JK Rowling's first adult novel The Casual Vacancy, begins with a death.

In the case of the book, it is the death of Barry Fairbrother, the parish councillor of the fictional small town of Pagford. Thus begins the rush for the plum position in the town's administrative body left by the "casual vacancy".

A character in a famous video game once likened people to rugs: shake them a few times and marvel at the amount of dirt that comes out. In this case, the whole town is the rug and, good grief, the kinds of dirt that gets shaken out by the race for the councillor's seat.

With the mystique attached to Rowling's blockbusting Harry Potter series, many wondered if she could weave another similarly successful spell with more mundane items: small-town politics, class wars, and a tangled web of intrigue and deceit among the residents that comes to light in the wake of a councillor's sudden departure.

The novel was said to be partly based on Rowling's childhood in Gloucestershire, so there is, of course, no magic in this novel. But do expect skeletons in closets, ghosts from the past, and a voice from beyond the grave enabled by technology.

For someone who has completed the decade-long Homeric multi-volume epic about a boy wizard, it can be a Herculean effort to wrap up a story in one book. Though Rowling somehow manages to do so, it still feels overwritten.

The novel starts off painfully slow as the stage is set and some background is established. The Pagford council is currently saddled with the Fields, a high-maintenance (costly) adjacent housing area plagued by a host of social ills.

The council's snooty faction wants nothing to do with the Fields, while the altruists aligned with the deceased councillor want to preserve the status quo.

Free from child-safe restraints that held her back for over 10 years, Rowling lets it rip. She annoys the hell out of readers with the grim, distressing portrayal of a town's fraying social fabric. Still, the level of estrangement in some of the families is extreme.

The grown-ups and kids appear terribly self-absorbed in the beginning, lost in their own worries and pursuits.

It gets worse as the story ponderously rolls on, no thanks to Rowling's over-characterisation of the people and places. Bits of bracket-encased backstory and flashbacks are inserted between present dialogue and narrative, making for a really tedious and choppy read. Secret thoughts and schemes are laid bare for all to gawp at. And many characters swear a lot.

That one still finds it all believable is perhaps a sign of the times.

By the time you get close to page 400 you decide that the whole town and the novel are beyond salvation. But just when you're ready to hurl your Avada Kedavras, a tragedy occurs, followed by a miracle.

Bhai Kanhaiya, a guru admired by the mother of the town's Sikh family, once served water to wounded soldiers from both sides of a conflict because "the light of God shines from every soul".

Like the spirit of hope at the bottom of Pandora's box, the guru's compassion appears from within an unexpected source during the novel's darkest phase, initiating an incredible transformation.

No magic? The speed at which this happens, after about 460 pages of misery, gloom, racism, misogyny, drugs, domestic abuse and other choice examples of despicable human behaviour, is nothing short of magical. Some may find this incredulous, even with some suspension of disbelief. Kinder hearts, however, may feel differently.

So maybe Rowling did work a tiny bit of her familiar alchemy into a realistic Muggleland fable about the worst and best in people, albeit one hobbled by a large cast, too much detail, a glacial build-up to an abrupt finale (with Rihanna and Jay-Z? Seriously?) and, perhaps, by the pressure to repeat her multi-book success with a single-book one.

Whether that little bit of magic can cut through the hype and criticism remains to be seen; it's barely a week since its release, after all.

Disappointed fans, meanwhile, can take heart in the news that she's pondering a release a "director's cut" of several Harry Potter books and a possible return to the Potterverse.


A spelling error was corrected in this version.

---

The Casual Vacancy

JK Rowling
Little, Brown (2012)
503 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-316-22853-4

News: This Earth Of Mankind And All That

Banned Books Week 2012 kicks off in the US. The New York Times volunteered some ideas on how to 'celebrate' the Week. Gosh, has it been a year already?

Though Banned Books Week is a US-only thing, many of us can emphatise with the notion. This year's biggest banned book is arguably Irshad Manji's Allah, Liberty and Love. A local publisher and a bookstore manager were visited by religious authorities in relation to the book. One issue with the 'visit' seems to be more about conflicts between federal and religious laws with regards to print material that's deemed objectionable, not the ban itself, though some may argue that there's no point banning the book anyway.

Another more recent casualty - in China, at least - is Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. The novel became collateral damage in the Sino-Japanese spat over a bunch of rocks northeast of Taiwan, which got China banning or closing everything Japanese. An article on fossils in Japan's Gifu Prefecture was deleted minutes after it was posted on a Chinese web host. And a Japanese-backed cycling team pulled out of the Tour of Beijing event.

A cheerier celebratory occasion this week is this year's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, happening from 03 to 07 October. Themed Bumi Manusia ("This Earth of Mankind"), after a title from Pramoedya Ananta Toer's first book in the once-banned historical fiction series The Buru Quartet, this year's Ubud Fest is held in honour of the enduring power of storytelling.

Author Michael Ruhlman also had something to say about storytelling, the importance of food writing, in particular. "...telling stories about food and cooking is not only natural, it's necessary for our survival. It's important to understand how something that is essential to our humanity and our well-being affects all other aspects of our lives and our humanity."

Hear, hear.

In other news:

• Penguin seeks repayment of big advances from writers who didn't deliver. Among those being pursued are Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation), Wonkette's founding editor Ana Marie Cox, and Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat.
• John Scalzi's readers recommend some books in what is probably among the longest comments thread on the Whatever. Multiple nominations include Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, Jenny "The Bloggess" Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Libriomancer by Jim C Hines, The Map of the Sky by Felix Palma and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus.
• Shades of virtual book-burning in the disappearance of Jonah Lehrer's book from various retail outlets and portals? Don't worry about it, says some readers of Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. At least, I think, for now.
• US retail chain Wal-Mart is said to have stopped selling Kindles. Another US retail chain, Target, pledged to take the Amazon e-reader off its shelves this May, seemingly because of the latter's aggressive expansion tactics.
• A fiction writer's heartening open letter to her ... should it be "colleagues" or "comrades"? In short, she says, "Keep writing."
• Things from Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" that are still burning. Will the Middle East 'burn' forever?
• The origin of a "hackademic" book publishing initiative, and how it can help students and journalists.
• From the author of The Lizard King: a sad tale about the role of religion in the ivory trade.
• Punjab's own Interlok kerfuffle was raised when words regarding caste land publishers in jail. The report could've been written better, though.
• The New Yorker commemorates the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the book said to have kicked off the modern environmental movement.
• England's government announces a review on e-book lending in libraries.

News: Price Wars, And A Mallet

I don't think last week was a slow one for books and publishing; I just so happened to be back in my hometown during the weekend, so I wasn't paying too much attention to assorted goings-on.

But I managed to finish a book for review. And I was amazed and a little dismayed at the 1Malaysia bike by Orange County Choppers - when did THAT happen? - which looked a lot less remarkable compared to previous models.

Anyway...


Last week, the much-maligned Apple agency model for e-books (in Europe) started crumbling under pressure from European Commission. In the aftermath, the e-book price war seemingly flared anew, with some discounts going as high as ... 97 per cent? But it seems not all e-books are considered 'cheap'.

The price war may have started hitting the e-reading public in China, as one of the country's main e-retailers announced a 'deal' where customers can, for three months, lend a thousand books for less than US$5. Why? Because "Chinese readers, long used to free content", apparently need time to adjust to the idea of paying more than five yuan (about US$0.80) for an e-book.

No word, however, on the e-fate of Haruki Murakami and other Japan-related books, physical copies of which have reportedly gone missing from Beijing bookshelves as China and Japan fight over a pile of rocks northeast of Taiwan.

In other news:

• Five questions for a literary agent. The usual 'indie/small press thrives among bones of traditional publishing' thing.
• "Shelf preservation": Why it's better to read 3-D editions of certain genres.
• Are books the "ultimate new business card"?
• A papyrus scrap refers to "Jesus's wife", but too early to say Dan Brown was right.
• Ten questions to ask yourself before commenting on a blog. Good advice from the author of what could be one of the best-policed blogs around - I mean, who doesn't want a Mallet of Loving Correction?

News: Privates, Padlocks, and Price Reductions

Private matters
Everybody seems to be all abuzz over Naomi Wolf's, uh ... privates. From the news portals I've been surfing, Wolf's Vagina (snrk) got more brickbats than bouquets since it was released. Critics cited bad science, Orientalism, unintentional self-parody, betrayal of feminism, etc.

And, of course, there's the title, which opens up plenty of opportunities for punsters, as Jessa Crispin suggests. "Although from reading the excerpts and the horrified reviews, it seems like the publishing company just kind of let Wolf run herself into a tree in all kinds of ways with this one."

Maybe because the publishers knew the kind of buzz it would create?

Even those who question the criticism Wolf's been getting can't help slipping in a crack or two. "And I can't help wondering if this isn't just a little bit problematic, and if it doesn't, just a little bit, make Wolf's point for her?"

Wolf has responded to these criticisms, and I think her arguments are sound. I'm once again reminded of Howard Jacobson's assertion that readers these days - as well as critics - can't seem to handle certain books.

At the time of posting, Zoë Heller's article has an NSFW picture. Do not click at work.


A bridge too far
Know that old chestnut where, in Rome, lovers can seal their relationship by writing their names on a padlock, clamping it to a lamp post of the Milvio bridge and throwing the key into the Tiber River? That little tradition, inspired by Federico Moccia's 2006 novel I Want You, has been banned by officials in Rome.

The bridge's popularity led to posts being installed on the bridge so that others can have a shot at happiness, but officials are concerned that the weight of all those padlocks will collapse the ancient bridge.

Moccia is apparently "nonplussed". "The removal of the locks is inconsiderate," he said. "Rome is handing Paris the 'bridge of love' tradition, which was born here and should stay here."

Even at the expense of a piece of history? Pompeii and Herculaneum, arguably two of Italy's most famous archaeological sites, are in danger of disappearing, thanks in part to tourists. Some traditions shouldn't be preserved.


Well, that was fast
In the aftermath of a settlement with the US Department of Justice over allegations of e-book price-fixing with Apple, publisher HarperCollins inked new deals with Amazon and other retailers. Days later, HarperCollins titles were said to be selling at Amazon at discounted prices.

HarperCollins, along with publishers Hachette and Simon & Schuster, settled with the DoJ days ago. It's possible that e-book retailers will soon be lowering prices of books from the other two publishers. And them fingers keep a-pointin', mostly towards traditional publishers.

In somewhat related news: A Waterstones staff reportedly trolled an author who self-published with Amazon for leaving promotional material for said book at the Waterstones outlet. Bezos's jungle may have emerged the victor in the latest dust-up over e-book prices, but it looks like pockets of resistance can still be expected.

Also: Would writers have to keep telling stories a la Scheherazade to survive in the Kindle era?


Other news

• Is it ever okay to pirate books? Even if the copies are from books you already own and for private use?
• Is Village Voice critic Robert Sietsema the acerbic non-person Ruth Bourdain? Sietsema says no but, for all we know, he could be muddying the waters a bit, possibly abashed at how it came out so quickly. We probably wouldn't have known that Waiter Rant is Steve Dublanica if he didn't shed his anonymity to promote his book. Both these guys seem to be good writers, but I feel Dublanica's warmer, more open.
• "Radioactive" online comments are poisoning civil discourse in cyberspace. So here are some tips on how to argue online and avoid becoming a cyberspace-polluting troll.
• A literary agent was attacked in her car, possibly over a rejected manuscript. The Huffpost entry suggests she was tracked down via a social media app. Getting rejected isn't the end of the world. Now, violently rejecting a rejection, however...
• "Is this book bad, or is it just me?" The book review is dissected.
• Art of War meets Mad Men? China's popular "workplace novels" weave career advice into soap opera plots.
• Plan to burn "Fifty Shades" conjures fears of censorship and totalitarianism.
• For Wikipedia, Phillip Roth, it seems, is not a credible enough source on a Phillip Roth novel.

Enthrallingly English

An enchanting Sunday afternoon roast at Albion KL

first published in The Star, 15 September 2012


Melody leads a charmed life. She gets to travel to exotic places and eat at fabulous places for work, like this modern English bistro in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.

From this establishment, she smuggled a bit of macaroni and cheese home in a microwaveable container, presumably to taunt me – again. The M&C was cold and had congealed into a lumpy mass, but it was glorious. I suspect the added bacon had enough time to infuse the leftovers with its savoury, smoky flavour on the way home.

We agreed we had to go back there. If their mac-and-cheese is this good, what else can they do?

Melody wanted the Sunday roast, so she e-mailed ahead for details. Yes, they had roast beef or lamb on the Sunday we'd planned to drop by. I wanted the lamb, a meat with more character. Her e-mail response was a heart-rending, "But I want beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeffffffffffffff and it is my birthdayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy."

When she's like this, there's no point arguing. So "beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeffffffffffff" it is, even though her actual birthday had passed a while back.

Tucked inside the Changkat Bukit Bintang area, the red-painted façade of Albion is a beacon for visitors with a poor sense of direction. One is embraced by a palpable kind of Englishness upon entry. On a wall is an arty portrait of Sir Winston Churchill chomping on a cigar. Classical English court music wafted through the air as we pored over the menu, a subtle reminder to always, among other things, mind your P's and Q's and sipping (not gulping) your tea within the premises.

Manager James Grierson guided us through the selections and portion size (typically Malaysian, he suggests). We decided to go with Albion's Greek-style Salad and a serving of roast beef to share, with mini Yorkshire puddings. Dessert remained a question mark for a while.

Several warm buns were brought to our table in a tiny basket, with slices of softened butter and what I assumed was the “spiced tomato jam”, while our orders were seen to. The appetising tomato jam, a mixture that included anchovies and olive oil, was surprisingly delicious when eaten with buttered buns but it left us hungrier than before we walked in the door.

Then the salad came.

We felt the price of the Greek-style salad didn't compensate for the abundance of feta cheese in it. The sharp-tasting tangy and salty cheese, together with the olives, mushrooms and various greens, made for a rich, satisfying appetiser.

Definitely more than six cubes of feta in that lush Greek-style salad

Albion's chef, Colin Yap, explained that they came up with this version after trying another one that had "about six or so tiny cubes" of feta, but Albion's had all the ingredients that made it a winner. The flavours came together really well.

Despite assurances that the portions were manageable, we still gaped at the roast when it arrived. Some slices of medium-done roast beef, greens, roast potatoes and a pair of mini Yorkshire puddings. The Yorkshire pudding was a light, crispy pastry that's best eaten warm and useful for wiping up the leftover gravy, spilled meat juice and fat. It was the first time I'd ever seen or eaten one.

Melody tried to wheedle some secrets about making Yorkshire pudding out of the chef. The whole business is tricky, the chef said, like making soufflé.

"It's a temperamental thing," he added.

No fluffy, light and buttery pastries coming out of my little oven, then.

The Sunday Roast may look standard, but it's lovely

The roast was lovely. We tried slices of beef with the light and subtle horseradish sauce and the assertively pungent, sinus-clearing English mustard.

"Laave-leh," I drawled in an exaggerated Englishman's accent when I could breathe through my nose again. "Simply brilliant."

Some may feel differently – it's just roast beef, they might say – but in this cosy nook in the middle of the city, it's also where you eat it and who made it ... and maybe what they're playing on the sound system.

Still, the meal didn't feel complete, like a story without an ending. After sitting around for a while and sipping the rather good coffee (gasp!), we settled on the English-sounding Trinity Burned Cream with Raspberries to round up a lovely lunch.

The dessert, essentially a crème brûlée, turned out to be a good choice. Under the slightly burnt layer of sugar was a bed of rich (unburned) custard cream covering what looked like raspberry compote. One serving was just right for two waistline-watching Malaysians to share and still come away fully satisfied.

We stayed long enough to wait for teatime, but we didn't want to ruin the experience by taking in too much of this delightful place at one go. Reluctantly, we peeled ourselves off our chairs. We'd be back.

And we are having laaaaaaaaamb the next time around.

---

Albion

31 Jalan Berangan
50200 Kuala Lumpur

CLOSED FOR GOOD

Betrayed

One of the first books I've read this year kind of surprised me, even though it wasn't light reading. Great début by Wiley Cash.

---

Hope in faith

When those we trust fail us

first published in The Star, 14 September 2012


I remember being aghast at stories of child abuse at the hands of religious figures. So it's no surprise that I found the premise of Wiley Cash's debut novel compelling: what happens when religious figures fail to live up to their ideals?

The novel was inspired by the tragic story of an autistic African American boy who'd been smothered during a healing service in Chicago in the United States. "I was bothered that a group of people, including the boy's mother, could stand by while something like that took place," said Cash in an interview.

A Land More Kind Than Home takes place in a small North Carolinian town populated by generally God-fearing townsfolk. Some of them, however, fear something else, too.

Elderly midwife Adelaide Lyle is haunted by the death and subsequent cover-up of the time a churchgoer dies during a snake-handling ritual presided over by the church's newest pastor, Carson Chambliss. The incident prompts her to take the children out of the church.

Despite her efforts, young Jess Hall's autistic older brother, Christopher, lovingly nicknamed "Stump" by his father, becomes the church's next victim as his mother stands by and does nothing. As the case unravels, this story of family, faith and secrets unfolds through the perspectives of three people.

There's Lyle who, as a young girl, survived what sounds like the 1918-19 global Spanish flu outbreak and helped bury a long-deceased relative. This fortitude helps her bear the secrets she has to hide but the weight would eventually prove too much. Too old to actively resist Chambliss's corruption of the church, she mostly watches from the sidelines.

Jess Hall, meanwhile, has to deal with his brother's death, which he feels somehow responsible for. The return of his grandfather Jimmy doesn't help. Instead, Jess retreats into the safety and comfort of memories of him and his brother, despite the adults' efforts to help him cope.

And we have Sheriff Clem Barefield, a survivor of his own family tragedy who has the unenviable task of battling small-town reticence and the church's code of silence to solve Stump's case. There's also a bit of unfinished business between him and Jimmy Hall.

Cash wanted to write the story of the failed Chicago faith healing, but he wasn't familiar with the city or the community. So the North Carolinian set the story in Madison County in his home state. "Once I did that, the story came alive; it became real."

And it did. Cash has done his research well, judging from how one is deeply immersed in the atmosphere of the town, with the sweet aroma from drying tobacco leaves at the Halls' farm and the "ain'ts" and double negatives in the locals' speech. In this day and age, such a stereotypical portrayal of a small American town may be frowned upon, even as one believes that such places still exist in that country, rotary dial phones and all.

We are shown how the decay of religion in a slice of the American heartland can affect its people. We feel the characters' pain, caused by alcoholism, domestic abuse and betrayal by those they trusted, as well as the plight of the lost searching for meaning or something to fill the void in their hearts.

We seethe at the seemingly aloof wickedness of those who prey upon the insecure and desperate to achieve power and influence. We are crushed, slowly, as we watch a family come apart. Even before the conclusion of this well-written novel, the slimy preacher will leave one more scar upon the lives of the protagonists.

Yet, the novel offers hope. Lyle still believes the church is the town's pivotal institution and that it will again be the beacon and safe haven it's meant to be.

"The living church is made of people," she says, "and it can grow sick and break just like people can, and sometimes churches can die just like people die. ... A church can be healed, and it can be saved like people can be saved."

We somehow find comfort in these words, even as we cringe at the on-air antics of today's Carson Chamblisses. And we hope that our religious institutions will eventually become a place more like home where those we trust with our lives – and souls – will never let us down.

---

A Land More Kind Than Home

Wiley Cash
Doubleday (2012)
306 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-857-52070-8

Well Done

Though he's left the kitchen, everyone's favourite trash-talking chef is still dishing out food for thought


A bitter and angry chef, resigned to remain rooted behind a stove until he dies, lets it rip in an over-testosteroned rant-fest of a memoir dedicated to his ilk and pokes fun at TV chefs, vegans, and the like. He's confident that the book will never get him on TV, take him to exotic foreign locales, or hook him up with more famous, qualified chefs.

Anthony Bourdain has eaten a lot of things since then, including his own words; check out his other books: A Cook's Tour and The Nasty Bits.

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook is the book fans have been waiting for since That Book, Kitchen Confidential. Profane and profound, his take on all things close to his heart are a joy to read, especially in countries where freedom of expression also comes with a hefty rulebook to safeguard presumably fragile egos.

Hunter S Thompson may be the father of gonzo journalism, but it's this chef-turned-author and travel show host that many of us with an opinion and a shtick to bandy about want to be one day.

From Medium Raw, we learn a bit more about what happened to Bourdain since That Book came out. Why he became a father at fifty. The new targets of his ire. The Top Chef contestant anonymously featured in That Book. The deal behind David Chang, who could be the next Angry Writing Chef. More tantalising are the latest updates about the prominent personalities featured in That Book, and why Bourdain called that restaurant reviewer a dirty name.


Burning bridges
We also learn, in spite of all he has now, why Bourdain doesn't seem happy. In his jottings one still senses the jitteriness of someone who had lost something good when he least expected it - and constantly looks out for the next such catastrophe. If he's not burning bridges, one suspects he's checking to see if someone else will burn them, or if the bridges spontaneously combust.

Probably explains his apparent gusto for the life he's leading now; if he concentrates on going forward, he can forget about looking over his shoulder.

In the prologue, we get a sense of how different things have been for Bourdain since Kitchen Confidential, published over a decade ago. The clandestine gathering of world-class chefs at a secret dinner capped by a taste of the controversial ortolan dish is worlds apart from his old life. He not sure why he's here, other than being a guest of his best pal, who sounds suspiciously like the Michelin-starred chef of Le Bernadin, Eric Ripert.

UK edition of Medium Raw from Bloomsbury with new
cover (left) and US edition from HarperCollins/Ecco

Sure it's fun, exciting. But he also sounds unsure, lost, out of place. Maybe a little guilty. I shouldn't be having this much fun, he seems to be thinking. This is not my circle, which I left - or rather, abandoned - for a more cushier gig.

Is that why he flagellates himself so ruthlessly in the first few chapters of Medium Raw? "Heretic", "sell-out", he calls himself. He compares himself to a prostitute, drops names of chefs who've taken similar paths and explains why they did it, as if it's something needing justification. The calamitous Caribbean island getaway with a crazy rich chick, after the end of his first marriage, must've been very painful to recall.


Paid his dues
He gets over it, though. He's paid his dues, I think, and his new jet-setting life now is much better suited for his age. "If I go back to the kitchen now, it would break me," he confesses in The Nasty Bits.

Besides being less angry, he's also more neutral, finding silver linings in the same subjects he used to run down. Such performances, however, feel forced, like in the chapter on US chef and food activist Alice Waters, the "Pol Pot in a muumuu". And he's still shining the shoes of British chef and Parkinson's disease sufferer Fergus Henderson. It made sad reading.

Similarly forced is the chapter devoted to food porn. Though formulaic, it still had enough mojo to drive one into night markets, looking for placebos to lush descriptions of chicken butt yakitori.

Foreign audiences outside the US, however, may have problems with his references to obscure pop and food culture. He doesn't explain, in one chapter, why he considers Mario Batali and Eric Ripert heroes. When this book was first published, Ripert chaired a New York-based charity that rescues unused food to feed hungry people, and Batali was active in charities for children.

...Well, it is said that he says a lot – and says it damn well, too – about the things he feels strongly for.

In the ten years between Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw, he never really left us at all. He's still slinging it, commenting on more than just food: in the news, online, in the airwaves, on TV - seemingly one of the last honest people out there who speaks his mind with little thought of the repercussions, because some things have to be said.

Keep talking, Tony. We're all ears.


Another version of this review was first published in the July - September 2012 issue of MPH Quill. This review was based on the 2010 Bloomsbury (UK) edition of the book.

---

Medium Raw

A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Anthony Bourdain
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (2010)
281 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-1-4088-0934-1

MPH Quill, July - September 2012 Issue

...is very damn late. I know. But it's out.

I've heard talk about changes in direction for Quill, but no clues about that so far.

Okay, let's see what's inside.

...Luke Clark, editor of Discovery Channel Magazine, on the mag's
relaunch (right)...

...Adam Jacot de Boinod speaks about weird words and his books
about them...

...profile of Dina Zaman and her short story collection, King of the Sea...

...Ellen Whyte spends a night at the Szechwan Opera in Chengdu...

...and more. Of course there's always more.

News: Sockpuppets, Book Raids, and Scalzi's Goat(s)

Criticism ventriloquism
Sock-puppetry: Why do they do it? From these tales of two sock-puppeteers, they might be more the norm than anyone thinks. Well, Sock-puppetry in book reviewing may not be new, but that doesn't necessarily make it right. Scott Adams, however, suggests that (fake) positive reviews can balance out the (fake) negative ones in an ecosystem where 'everybody cheats'.

I might have my own take on this later, but maybe not.


Book raid bulletins
The Federal Territories Religious Affairs Department (JAWI) admitted to raiding the Borders bookstore in The Gardens, Mid Valley City before an edict or ban was declared against the book that prompted the raid. In West Bengal, a publisher was also raided over book critical of the state government. Said book then sold out after news of the raid broke.


Getting Scalzi's goat
After John Scalzi announced a book project, the Internet gave him another after he joked about writing a book called 101 Uses for a Spare Goat on Twitter. So now, we can expect said book to be out in the future, barring any unforeseen circumstances.

A cautionary tale of why it's dangerous to coin absurd phrases online, but that's how the Internet works these days. What would make this even more amazeballs? Paying for the book with goats.


Censorship, China, and coffee
State censorship, conservative publishing choices and lack of good translations appear to be some of the factors narrowing outsiders' views of modern China. But China's bookworms are said to offer hope for traditional publishing. But how can the mood be buoyant without good coffee? Oh, and here's why coffee will never taste as good as it smells.


Other news

• The economics of an indie bookstore ... can be pretty dismal.
• Outside the literary world, bad reviews breed more bad blood. A restaurateur in Canada apparently spent months trying to ruin the reputation of someone who gave her restaurant a bad review. She was found guilty of criminal libel and will soon be sentenced.
• Did this writer see Pakistan's bleak future?
• A book that Scott Pack hates this much? Can't be all bad. For one, Wong Kar Wai gets killed in it.
• Apple, publishers offer pricing concessions to avoid hefty European Commission fine.

MPH Warehouse Sale 2012, Mooncakes, Etc

The MPH Distributors Warehouse Sale will be held from 08 to 17 September (8am to 6pm) at:

The Crest, 3 Two Square
Block F, Ground Floor
No. 2 Jalan 19/1
46300 Petaling Jaya

For inquiries, call 03-7958 1688 or visit www.facebook.com/MPHDistributors

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Yvonne Foong is selling low-sugar mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival. Some of the proceeds, as I understand it, will be going towards her medical fund. Head over here for more details.

...So, yeah.