Masterclass In Session: Home Gardening With Desmond

When talking about gardens, I'd sometimes think of the KL Islamic Arts Museum. Looking out from inside the Museum's white, white restaurant and seeing the greenery outside, I'm reminded of the Mughals and their fondness for gardens.

A big Mughal(-ish) garden, designed by British architect
Edwin Lutyens. Photo from here.

Babur, the first Mughal ruler, was said to have favoured the chahar bagh, a garden of Persian design with a squarish layout. Features included trees, especially those that bear fruit; flowering plants and shrubs; birds and insects; and big water features such as pools, canals and fountains, and even tiered cascades.

Later Mughal gardens incorporated religious elements and symbols, creating a slice of Paradise on Earth. Surrounded by the fragrances and hues of flowers and fruits and lush greenery; the sound of birds, rustling foilage, and burbling of running water; and the cool breezes, it's hard not to feel otherwise. Definitely a far cry from the harsher aspects of the Mughal rulers' lives.

While the Mughal gardens were also a display of man's power to tame and alter the landscape, Desmond Ho's designs work with it and are arguably more natural-looking. Though some of the designs are relatively modest in scale, his gardens can have the same soothing effects.

Desmond Ho's Guide to Beautiful (Non-Palatial) Home Gardens will help you
dream up something more modest but doable - and just as lovely

Ho has come a long way since he decided to make a living by bringing people closer to nature. Picking things up on his own in the pre-Internet days, he started out by selling glass-enclosed greenery in terrariums and ended up founding Terra Garden, a garden design company that pioneers a Malaysian concept of outdoor living called Neo Nusantara.

After introducing this garden concept to a number of homes and public spaces, Ho aims to bring it to a wider audience. Desmond Ho's Guide to Beautiful Home Gardens, his attempt to do just that, is more of a concept guide, kind of like those lovely home garden and interior décor magazines.

The designs showcased in the company's web site are eye-catching and feels natural. But the immediate effect of this book on me was to instil the urge to buy a house. With a water feature. Maybe with a few plants around it. And a chaise longue. And...

...right, well, the latest volume in the MPH Masterclass Series is a bit different than the others. For one, it's no step-by-step handbook on DIY home-garden assembly.

Very few homeowners will do the actual work of installing lights, mixing concrete, digging ponds and so on. You'd almost want to pick up the phone and call a landscaper, which is what he recommends that you do.

But unlike the magazines, Ho provides more tips and advice on putting together the wish list for your dream garden. From lights, plants, water features and types of furniture to suggested garden layouts for a bungalow, semi-detached or terrace house, or even an apartment, you'll believe it's possible to own a slice of Paradise - even a tiny one - in your home.

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Desmond Ho's Guide to Beautiful Home Gardens

Desmond Ho
MPH Group Publishing
160 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-967-415-164-5

Buy from MPHOnline.com

News: Tash Aw At The British Council, Self-Censorship, And Doris Lessing

The British Council has a new branch at Mutiara Damansara. In conjunction with its opening and this year's George Town Literary Festival, it's holding a two-hour writing workshop and book-signing by Tash Aw on this Saturday, 23 November, from 1pm to 4:30pm at its premises:

British Council Mutiara Damansara
Lot 245A, 2nd Floor
The Curve, Mutiara Damansara
47810 Petaling Jaya

For more information, e-mail arts[at]britishcouncil[dot]org[dot]my or visit the British Council Arts Malaysia Facebook page.

Aw is also a judge for this year's Impac Dublin International Literary Award. The Impac Dublin longlist, he says in The Guardian, is "a gift for readers in search of unexpected delights" such as translated works and "quirky" stuff from all over the world, making the Impac Dublin longlist a more mixed bag than that of some other book prizes.

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NSA surveillance is apparently making writers self-censor. A report from PEN America says that, among other things, "16 percent of writers have avoided writing or speaking about a particular topic due to concerns about the NSA."

PEN America is the journal published by the PEN America Center, which was set up to defend free expression and celebrate literature. PEN has also established its International Day of the Imprisoned Writer (15 November), which highlights the works and plight of writers, editors, translators and political essayists and dissidents threatened by repressive governments.


In other news:

• RIP Doris May Lessing, British novelist, short-story writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• Non-existent fact-checking in book publishing allowed Dylan Davies aka Sgt Morgan Jones publish "a Benghazi fantasy".
• Is Amazon's Kindle Source offer to independent bookstores a "Faustian" deal?
• Nine things about listicles that make listicles like the one you're reading now sound plausible.
• Canadian artiste Bryan Adams has come up with an "unlikely, compelling" photography book on wounded war veterans. "This book is just a small example of the atrocities that happen when we bear arms against each other," said Adams in The Daily Beast.
• A US judge ruled that Google's book-scanning project is legal and considered "fair use" under copyright laws. This judgement will not go down well with the Author's Guild in the US. But sci-fi author John Scalzi, for one, is not bothered.
• Is too much being made about being nice or nasty to books? Somebody at The New Yorker thinks so. "...if authors were sages, then it really would behove the rest of us to just pipe down and accept their words from on high. Fortunately, they’re no such thing."
• London writer and bookseller Jen Campbell (Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops, More Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops) is writing The Bookshop Book and needs your input. "I want to know why you love bookshops; which bookshops you'd like to sing the praises of; if you've got a memory you want to share, whether it be happy, sad or amusing. You could even tell me about your ideal bookshop; if you could open one, where would it be? What would you stock? Anything you like!"
• Wouldn't it be nice to snuggle in bed reading your favourite blog? A guide for those using e-book readers to read blogs like books.
• A bit about the Polish city of Krakow, the latest Unesco City of Literature.
• "It's very tiring and exhausting when you try to ask for your rights and in return you get a dictatorship," says Aysha, who's part of Jordan's (mostly) female underground slam poetry scene. So she and a bunch of fellow poets are slammin' back.
• Dick Metcalf, an editor (or is it writer/editor or just writer?) who was fired for his pro-gun control article in the Guns & Ammo magazine says two major firearms makers may have played a part in his dismissal.
• Some surprises about the Malay language, and a list of Malay words with Sansrkit origins. Also: "...when a Malay speaks a sentence of ten words, probably five to seven of them will be Sanskrit words..." Considering the look of the web site, betul ke?
• What could be the best and worst 21st-century novels. The century's just started and Katie Price has two.
• "Gaming" literature: should (and would) Fear Factor-like reality shows make book-writing more exciting?

"Third Book! Third Book!"

So I was at the recent MPH Warehouse Sale 2013 and this guy was also there to autograph his books and other related merchandise.

Boey Cheeming, author of When I Was A Kid 1 and 2, at Food Foundry
(Section 17, PJ) book signing, 07 September 2013

Yes, the same guy "whose nuts I (apparently) made famous", to paraphrase a former colleague.

This guy asked me what the next step was, now that he has two books out, as well as calendars, T-shirts, and custom Sharpie marker pens.

Feeling a wee bit responsible for his rock-star status, I advised him to go slow and take a break for a bit. I felt that he'd been burning both ends, doing his book tours, talks, and media interviews and photo shoots. He'd fallen sick at least once during his latest homecoming tour.

"Oh, really?" he went, and sought a second opinion from a colleague at the distribution side.

"No, he should keep up the momentum," she said with a look that searched me for signs of mental illness.

"Exactly," said the rock star. "There'd be trouble if her boss heard what you just said."

How are sales doing, I asked.

"Very good," my colleague said. "In fact, the second book is selling better than the first."

When I saw the first book, I didn't expect it to shoot to the moon, either. I'd felt it was good enough that I'd managed to help get the book sold in Malaysia and maybe Singapore.

So my colleague's sentiments were basically, "Third book! Third book!"

Better than hot cakes: Boey's When I Was A Kid, Books 1 and 2

Then we turned to the tudunged fangirls lining up to have their books and stuff signed, and get a custom sketch for their upcoming birthdays plus a photo with Rock Star.

What next after Book Two, we asked them.

"Third book! Third book!"

Guess it was to be expected.

"He has a following," one tudunged lady said, adding that everybody reads his blog, he's so funny, and all that, so of course they will want a third book - maybe a fourth and a fifth....

And here I am, worried over whether he will burn out, like a rock star of the musical variety. Rock Star works hard for his success. He takes every opportunity he can to promote his books, himself, and the notion that you can be successful doing what you love.

And he gives his fans what they want. Custom autographs? Sure thing. Want a Diablo doodle with his signature? No problem. A sketch of a Dungeons and Dragons card-game character? No sweat.

Obliging author doodles Diablo for a fan

Some authors should take a leaf out of his book and burn the leaf that says "Who needs all that? My book sells itself." That's not true anymore - but has that ever been true?

Given that this book thing is all he's doing right now to make a buck, I suppose he is putting in the hours.

Some friends of a friend are nuts about his books as well. Relatable, they said of his childhood stories, and funny. My signed copy of Book 1 went to Turkey with a friend, who also took my signed copy of Book 2 to India - both with permission.

It's likely Friends of a Friend are also going, "Third book! Third book!" as well.

So maybe I shouldn't have rained on his parade by suggesting that he take a break - and miss all the fun of making a book and flying around meeting fans of all ages and demographics.

But I do want to see what comes out of his Sharpie for many years to come. I've read about how fame devours celebrities and it's something I wouldn't wish on anyone, even on bad days.

I'm hoping that Rock Star's crowd is much better.

MPH Quill, Issue 39, October to December 2013

...has some funny people: Douglas Lim, Harith Iskander, and Kuah Jenhan (comedian, movie critic, ice-cream flavour, etc) talking about the serious side of stand-up comedy.

Also in this issue:

• Excerpts from photographer Kenny Loh's photojournal, Born in Malaysia, which is, from what I've heard so far, getting rave reviews for the images and text. But mostly for the images.
• Also: excerpts from Jojo Struys's Guide to Wellness, from MPH Publishing's line of how-to books from well-known experts in their fields.
• Nick Vujicic was in town and Juan Margrita Gabriel, one of our marketing elves, was there to see him in action. Her piece on him appears in this issue.
• Edwin Yapp profiles several kinds of online 'demons' and how you can spot them - and avoid falling for their schtick.
• Follow Ellen Whyte over one day in Santiago di Compostela in Spain's district of Galicia.
• Yap Ming Hui seems to suggest that you should only trust your gut when you're hungry. In these uncertain times, investing by gut is not a good idea.

And more. Available soon at MPH bookstores and major newsstands at RM8 a copy.

A Storyteller's Christmas Gift

The original manuscript for this book came when we were looking for titles to publish. After editing it for I-can't-remember-exactly-how-many rounds and a chat with the author, I can conclude that while most of the stories are interesting and infused with a local flavour, the stories behind the stories in this collection are just as interesting.

"A Bird for the Journey", for instance, is based on author Paul GnanaSelvam's experiences in an Indian Christian family. Apparently, there's a fair bit of drama, particularly when a wedding is being planned: dowry negotiations, catering, church selections and the like. Why "bird for the journey"?

"I wanted something that evokes the image of a send-off," he said, citing the Citibank ad where Richard Gere buys a whole flock for a girl who wished to release a bird for her brother's ... successful exam?

"The Shadow Boy", meanwhile, gives a glimpse of life in a semi-rural setting where local beliefs are strong. In our discussion, Paul provided some background about the "shadow boy" and his father, a priest and exorcist.

The story that inspired him to write "A Journey's End" was that of his grandmother (or was it great-grandmother?) and her old metal trunk which held her few belongings from the time she set out from India and arrived on these shores. He spoke of the trunk fondly, treating it as a glittering heirloom. Sadly, the trunk was sold off as scrap metal.

What was most compelling, I feel, was the story behind "Latha's Christmas", about a mother of three who lives in a slum. Pick up this collection and Malaysians might recognise the backdrop of its titular tale. Compelling, because Paul said he was there on that day and saw and heard lots.

With all that Paul had witnessed and experienced, it's no surprise that he was inspired to write them out into stories, fictional or otherwise.

"As an Indian I believe that each of us has a destiny, charted just like the lines on our palms," he writes in the preface. "As such I believe that every individual has a story to tell. People's lives are filled with stories and it is through stories that we learn about ourselves and others.

"We tell stories in order to be heard, to be loved, to be accepted and to belong in the world. It is stories, that, for ages unknown, that keeps the human race glued together. I write stories because they must be told. And all stories are worth their while."

It would've been nice if everything from that weekend chat at Plan B, Mid Valley had gone into the book, but I wasn't sure if it would have worked. And the collection was already overdue.

So here it is: a compilation of Paul GnanaSelvam's previously published and unpublished short stories, just in time for your own Christmases. Despite the title, it has a very Indian flavour overall, from all the words in the glossary.

I've taken to using the Tamil phrase aiyo kaduvuleh (loosely translated, "oh my g*d") on occasion. A Tamil colleague seemed impressed.


Ipoh-born Paul GnanaSelvam's letters to editors and personal reflections have appeared in the Malaysian English-language daily The Star. He also has short stories and poems in e-magazines Dusun and Anaksastra, as well as short-story anthologies Write Out Loud, Urban Odysseys, Body 2 Body, the biannual literary journal ASIATIC, and the Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts from the Sacred Heart College in Kochi, India. Latha's Christmas and Other Stories is his first book.

Though his postgraduate research centres on teacher-learner communication psychology, Paul's reading interests include works of writers from the Indian diaspora, gender criticism and ethnic studies. He is currently lecturing at Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman in Kampar, Perak.

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Latha's Christmas and Other Stories

Paul GnanaSelvam
MPH Group Publishing
176 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-967-415-157-7

Buy from Kinokuniya | MPHOnline.com | Silverfish Books

News: Amazon, Book-Review Rules, And An Editor's Firing

Amazon offers independent bookstores a cut of Kindle sales through some kind of scheme. The indies, however, don't seem to be biting.

Meanwhile, somebody made a list of forty-five indie bookstores in the US (sorry, rest of the world) to visit this holiday season. For some reason, Ann Patchett's Parnassus Books leads the list.

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The editor-in-chief of Guns & Ammo magazine hoped for a "healthy exchange of ideas" in the gun control debate looks set to fall on his sword after a "mild" pro-gun control column got brickbats from readers. From some of the knuckledraggers' reactions to the "mild" column, he seems to have forgotten who comprises his core audience.

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The Washington Post responds to Buzzfeed Book's decision to only publish positive reviews (and not the "scathing" takedowns seen in "so many old media-type places"), with a list of ten 'edited' mean book reviews.

Meanwhile, this was what apparently happened when Publisher's Weekly bans the words "compelling", "poignant", and "unique" from its reviews. Wordsmiths can be such smartasses. Well, maybe PW might want to consider 'new' book review formats such as animated GIFs, memes and liveblogs.


Other interesting titbits:

• In the 18th and 19th centuries, some Indians went west - waaay west: An excerpt from Gaiutra Bahadur's new book, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture about an ancestor's journey as an indentured labourer in the Caribbean.
• Steven Poole defends the use of "basically". "...if something like 'basically' becomes a sort of reflexively used communal tic, then it can perturb those who value linguistic variety as much as any other excessively used word," he writes in The Guardian. "Too often, though, such usages – especially when they have been made popular by young people – are denounced by others who haven't thought hard enough about their semantic and social function, and who instead dismiss them as impoverished and degenerate forms of speech."
• In Newsweek, William T Vollmann's "lush life". This is the guy that Anis Shivani thought was among the 15 most overrated contemporary American writers. Read the Newsweek piece and judge for yourself.
• Why new species are being named after pop-culture figures: For hits, from the sound of it.
• Kamus Dewan to be available online via Oxford University Press next year?
• Feeling trapped by ideas of what a novel should be? It might just be you. At least that's what I got from Sam Sacks's piece in The New Yorker, which cites passages from Tim Parks's article (among others) about how unhappy Parks is over "traditional novels" where everything about it seems manufactured and how it enforces only one way of looking at the world. Maybe, Sacks suggests, Parks is too wrapped up in the novel's structure to take note of what the novel is trying to say.
• Pakistani education officials reportedly banned "tool of the west" Malala Yousafzai's memoir, I Am Malala, from private schools across the country for such things as not respecting Islam and speaking "favourably" of author Salman Rushdie and Ahmadis.
• If you're wondering why you can't seem to find copies of The Embassy House by Dylan Davies: Simon & Schuster has recalled it after it got wind of some information. Davies was the source of the flawed 60 Minutes Benghazi report that Republicans in the US have been annoying Hillary Clinton with.
• Robert Pattinson has a role in silver-screen adaptation of David Grann's Lost City of Z? It's only been a short while since I talked about this book and the city.
• Ooh, PKR's Rafizi Ramli to write a book on the National Feedlot Centre scandal to inspire people to fight graft? According to The Malay Mail, "The Pandan MP said the book would reveal what happened behind the scenes of the high-profile cattle farming project, which he had linked to former Minister Datuk Seri Shahrizat Abdul Jalil's family." Don't lah drop this right after people agree to drop a defamation suit against you....
• This Land Was Made for You and Me (but Mostly Me), David Letterman's "selfish" endeavour with Bruce McCall.
• Gene Luen Yang speaks to The New Yorker about Boxers and Saints, which looks like an interesting graphic novel.
• Some stuff from Salon about: the fish we don't eat (by "we", I'm guessing Yankees); how Michael Pollan and other foodies don't get the meat business (says Maureen Ogle, author of In Meat We Trust); and The Heart of Everything That Is, a "vibrant new biography" of Sioux chieftain Red Cloud.
• Nominees for the Bad Sex Award 2013 are here. Take cover!

Late News: Amazon, Dandy Dudes, And Food-Related Reads

Mrs Jeff Bezos trashes Brad Stone's The Everything Store in a one-star Amazon review (where else?). Amazon and Mrs Bezos are not pleased with some of the things Stone had to say about the online retail behemoth in the book.

A former Amazon employee replies with a four-star review, and Stone has since responded as well.

"No matter how hard we strive for objectivity, writers are biased toward tension—those moments in which character is forged and revealed," Stone writes. "I set out to tell the incredible story of how Amazon grew from three people in a garage to a company that employs 100,000 people around the world. It wasn't an easy journey for the company, and for many Amazon employees, it wasn't always enjoyable. It's precisely that tension—between sacrifice and success—that makes Amazon and Bezos so compelling."

Across the pond at The Guardian, someone wonders if this is becoming part of a trend.

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The etymology of "dude", revealed. Why do we call dudes "dude"?

Evidence points to "doodle," as in "Yankee Doodle Dandy." He's the fellow who, as the song has it, "stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni." "Macaroni" became a term for a dandy in the 18th century after young British men returned from their adventures on the European continent sporting exaggerated high-fashion clothes and mannerisms (along with a taste for an exotic Italian dish called "macaroni").

Duuude.


Right. What else we got?

• The current war in Syria is only the latest problem publishers in the country have to face.
• Going into self-publishing? Know the jargon. Here are some acronyms to kickstart your foray into self-publishing.
• Vice interviews Irvine Welsh. Among other things, he recommends that writers avoid being "comfortable": be more socially engaged, take public transport, and "hang out with people who are a bit of a pain in the ass and all that, but are interesting rather than comfortable." Might be NSFW.
• Loaded question from the editor-in-chief of bananawriters.com: "Is the Western publishing industry institutionally racist?" Well, it is HuffPo.
• This Land Was Made for You and Me (but Mostly Me), one-percenter David Letterman's "selfish" endeavour with Bruce McCall.
• One of the longest forewords I've read: Anthony Lane's intro to The Big New Yorker Book of Cats.
• "Fire-eaters": Lauren Collins joins the search for the hottest chilli. Sounds like growing gut-melting chillies is as much a macho sport of one-upmanship as eating them.
• The best-selling genres: self-help, kid's books, and 'romance'. Kind of explains the manuscript submissions I've been reviewing. Received only one romance novel so far, and it's only two shades of grey.
• "Unpaid writers" of Yelp sue Yelp, call themselves employees. Will letter writers to The Star, Malay Mail, and New Straits Times want EPF and Socso?
• Just what we need: a "miracle tea" that apparently wards off colds, courtesy of Robyn Eckhardt aka @EatingAsia. This might be the solution to the bugs said to be making the rounds of late. The lemongrass is optional.

Masterclass In Session: Busy People's Fitness With Lyn

Pitches such as "You only need [an impossibly short time frame] a day!" pushes a lot of buttons for people on the go, go, go. Tim Ferriss says you can be a chef in four hours in his book The 4-Hour Chef. Before that, he'd written The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body.

And we have Jamie Oliver's so-called 15-minute meals, which cannot be pulled off by average Joes because, presumably, they didn't read Ferriss first.

Seemingly impossible time frames exist in the fitness world, too. Twenty minutes a day and you'll get a six pack Michelangelo would want to replicate. Twenty minutes a day and you'll shed those extra pounds, and so on. Until the next big thing comes along with an even more impossible time frame.

"You only need ten minutes a day!" says fitness instructor Lyn Kong, in the latest MPH Masterclass Series. Besides a series of exercises, Lyn Kong's Guide to Fitness for Busy People also comes with an exercise programme, as well as recommendations for equipment, exercise gear, diet, and some healthy habits to cultivate in lieu of all those moves that will move you closer to a fitter, healthier you. She also busts some myths about fitness and nutrition.

Live lean with Lyn Kong, courtesy of MPH

To help readers set up a fitness regime, she even provides a somewhat tweakable ten-minute training programme and a 30-day challenge - complete with scoresheet - for those who want to take it up.

And all the exercises can be done without the help of a trainer or a gym. Or sets of very expensive exercise gear made of space-age fabric that "breathes" even when you can't. One by one, all your excuses to not exercise, not eat proper, not go to bed early, and skip the warm-up and cool-down and stretching steps are methodically, ruthlessly stripped away.

She's particularly firm on not skipping warm-up exercises. "Warming up is an essential part of your training programme, whether you're a serious athlete or someone who's simply exercising at home. This is non-negotiable!"

It's not all about sweat, sweat, sweat (like Richard Simmons, OMG). Diet plays a huge role. With some old food myths being debunked left and right (butter, cheese, yoghurt and eggs may be good for you), Kong's endorsement of the Paleo diet, which is basically economy rice sans rice for some of us, seems timely.

We get a list of foods to eat and foods to avoid - most of the usual suspects, really. And lest we get carried away with the fried sweet-and-sour pork and sunny-side-up eggs, there's also a handy chart for estimating recommended portions of each food group in the Paleo diet.

To further motivate you, Kong also shares her personal story of how she got into the fitness industry, one she's been in for over 15 years.

"I've learned so much about fitness over the years, and just as I've shared this wealth of information with my clients, I'd now like to share them with you through this book," she writes. "Unless you're an elite athlete, it's unlikely that you are able to train full time or even have much time to train at all. That’s why I've specifically designed this book for busy people like you."

In the end, Kong's energy and sincerity win you over. Maybe ten minutes, three times a week is all you need.

But, uh ... do I have to do the warm-ups?

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Lyn Kong's Guide to Fitness for Busy People

Lyn Kong
MPH Group Publishing
175 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-967-415-155-3

Buy from MPHOnline.com

News: Writing, Publishing, And ... Internet Slavery?

Working for 'exposure' (not money) is only cool when you're young. As Tim Kreider puts it: "Not getting paid for things in your 20s is glumly expected, even sort of cool; not getting paid in your 40s, when your back is starting to hurt and you are still sleeping on a futon, considerably less so. Let's call the first 20 years of my career a gift. Now I am 46, and would like a bed."

When points like that are preceded by something like, "Slaves of the Internet, unite!", there are bound to be dissenters (such as people who want to write for free, for instance). At PaidContent, it's pointed out that "it's not slavery" and freebies have helped the writing multitudes break into the arena in a market where supply seems to have overtaken demand. "Writing hasn’t become free or cheap because no one wants it any more, it has become free or cheap because there is so much of it that its intrinsic value has eroded — and the advertising content that used to help pay the freight for that writing has eroded just as quickly."

Hookay, what else?

• The number of allowed submissions for the Man Booker Prize will be trimmed. Apparently, the growing number of published books is making things difficult for the judges. Also: "...this year's judges had complained that around two-thirds of the 151 entries for the prize were not up to standard, with only 40-50 worth reading for consideration and the others 'junk'." Booker non-winners should feel better.
• The authors of Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler, published in 2011, have been accused of plagiarism by Argentine journalist and historian Abel Basti.
• Last year, Businessweek published an article on Larry Kirshbaum, picked to lead Amazon's charge into the book-publishing industry (which I bookmarked). Now, it seems Kirshbaum is leaving Amazon.
• An author wanted a suit done, but the tailor kept him waiting. So he wrote a bad review of the place on Yelp, a move which backfired when the tailor threatened to tsunami his upcoming book with negative reviews. Sounds like a cautionary tale against Yelp vengeance, but I can't help thinking that it's also about how online bullying (by said tailor) pays. No winners here.
• We need to talk about 21st-century publishing success: For Lionel Shriver, literary success isn't what it used to be. For one, looks like authors have to sell themselves more these days, leaving less time to, well, write. "Now that every village in the United Kingdom has its own literary festival, I could credibly spend my entire year, every year, flitting from Swindon to Peterborough to Aberdeen, jawing interminably about what I’ve already written—at the modest price of scalding self-disgust."
• Some of the Latino-related books that were banned by the administrators of the Tucson school district are now back in classrooms. What about the rest?
• Indian publishers who engaged the Chemical and Allied Export Promotion Council of India to help them set up booths at the Frankfurt Book Fair reportedly got a raw deal, no thanks in part to what sounds like a shady contractor.
• So you think you know King David, giant-slayer? Meet the historical David in a new book.
• Germaine Greer sells her lifetime archive to the University of Melbourne, the proceeds of which will go to rehabilitating Australia's rainforests.
• The New York Times's style guide says it's "e-book". And looks like style guides are more fluid than I thought.
• It seems that diet books lie. You think?

Seven Sleepless Nights To Tunku Halim's Midnight

One hazard in editing manuscripts is (proof)reading stuff you don't like: stuff that ticks you off, stuff that melts your brain, and stuff that keeps you awake at night.

I'd proofed a set of short horror stories and didn't want to do stuff like that again for the next five years. Then a new set came along, which is now this:

Open the pages and kiss your bedtimes goodbye

I believe this was meant to be only for digital publication in the beginning, but we decided to come up with a print edition as well.

Though not as meaty as his previous collections of sleep-robbing tales from the shadows, Tunku Halim's 7 Days to Midnight contains the same gory, bloody and scary material horror fans and readers have come to expect from our own Prince of Darkness. As the title suggests, the collection has seven short spine-chilling stories.

Among stories of lore and legend is one tale of the terrors of modern technology. Think those apps on your smartphone give you real nightmares? Think your gadgets are taking over your life? Tunku Halim's You Lite will literally do that - and more. Another reason not to upgrade to a smartphone.

Readers are also taken to a shrine deep in an abandoned plantation and taught that there are some shrines you do not ask favours from, because you never know what resides within. In a city, a man is haunted to the point of madness by visions of an employee who betrays his trust - or are they merely visions?

A maid encounters a were-tiger in the middle of the night and becomes the target of its hungers. What other secrets will she find out once she learns of the beast's true identity? And in another place, a son, puzzled over his mother's seemingly ageless looks, will learn why in the most shocking way possible.

All this and several more in 7 Days to Midnight, which rolled off the presses early this week and will soon be available at all major bookstores.

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7 Days to Midnight

Tunku Halim
MPH Group Publishing
153 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-967-415-136-2

Buy from MPHOnline.com

News: Banned Books, Naughty Books, And A Winning Book

A furore erupted over the presence of really disturbing e-books from Kobo being sold alongside children's books on the web site of UK books and stationery retailer WH Smith, which was blamed on "a select group of publishers and authors violating the self-publishing policies of our platform".

Kobo has stopped selling self-published books, while WH Smith temporarily suspended their web site while it was being scrubbed.

With reports of disruptions to bookselling in the wake of what Writer Beware calls "The Great Erotica Panic of 2013", independents and the self-publishing sector are crying foul over how their books were affected, even though they're not 'naughty'.

Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware, however, notes that the incident seems to have revealed how dependent these 'independent authors' are on the platforms they're published on. "Like it or not, your access to the tools of self-publishing--and, more crucially, to your published books--are controlled by your publishing platform's Terms and Conditions," she writes. "These typically allow the platform to yank books, close accounts, and enforce content policies at will, often without notification or explanation. When the platforms choose to exercise this power--appropriately or inappropriately--authors often have little recourse."

---

On a related note: Not long after (or about the same time) Neil Gaiman's speech on "why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming", his novel Neverwhere was banned over a tiny bit where the protagonist witnesses a couple getting frisky, and the F-word. Guess this means you can't dream some dreams, either.

Media outrage ensued. "'Burn down the forest!' you shout. 'There is a naked tree!" thundered someone at The Washington Post, who thinks all classics should likewise be banned over 'inappropriate content'. Gaiman himself helpfully points out the 'offending bit'.

In case you're interested, American Mensa made a list of top ten banned books. You might have seen some, if not all of the books in other similar lists.

Elsewhere:

• "In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime." Eleanor Catton, youngest winner of the Man Booker Prize so far, on how female writers are treated and why her book, The Luminaries, riled certain male critics.
• Nik Raina Nik Abdul Aziz, the Borders store manager who's being charged by the Syariah court for 'selling' a book someone else wrote and someone else neglected to ban until later.
• The future of digital publishing in Kenya.
• What goes on inside a book publishing house - not often talked about, I think.
• Forget "e-book" - call it a "codex". Because "e-books are so different from traditional reading that they need a new word."
• "Words are like little kids; you don't want to send them out of the house until they're dressed and have brushed their teeth." Words with Dwight Garner, New York Times book critic. By the end of it you'll know the difference between "book reviewers" and "book critics".
• To sell in China, some authors are letting Chinese censors have a go at their books. This includes Harvard professor Ezra F Vogel, whose book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, "sold 30,000 copies in the United States and 650,000 in China," according to The New York Times.
• Book publishing's doomsayers are wrong, and here's why.
• Is Simon & Schuster editor Jeremie Ruby-Strauss "The New King of Trash Publishing"? And do other editors have to walk his path to be commercially viable? Eww.
• Wanna write a business book? Some advice to ponder before putting pen to paper.
• The "little-known" history of Sriracha sauce, which was modified from the original Thai version by a Vietnamese immigrant to the US who had hot sauce withdrawal.

Another MPH Warehouse Sale 2013

It's back, from 31 October to 6 November, at this address:


MPH Distributors @ Bangunan TH,
No 5, Jalan Bersatu,
Section 13/4, Petaling Jaya
Call 03-7958 1688 for directions

Hours: 8am to 6pm

And here's a map:

If I remember correctly, there was another warehouse sale earlier this year. More books to dispose of this time? They already put up banners advertising the sale, so it should be happening.

And it'll be a bit different. For one, there's an Artisan Roast café nearby, in case you can't wait to get home and read your purchases.

Some Afterthoughts

The fevers are gone, but my blood pressure is lower than usual, leaving me with low energy levels. Still filling up on supplements, probiotics, herbal teas (mostly chrysanthemum, with or without ginseng strands), and Brand's Essence of Chicken, in lieu of adding more fruits and veggies to my diet.

And, a couple of days from now, I'll be coffee-free for a whole month. I don't miss the taste and aroma, which feel alien to by partially detoxified body.

I miss my old, more energetic self, though.

---

Reviewing this book was a challenge, given how much exposure the press gave the author. It's not as if she won. And now some have started taking about burying hatchets (damn good time to forget where the links are) and how maybe, just maybe, critics shouldn't be too harsh with authors these days.

All things considered, I don't see myself as a 'serious' reviewer - not yet. There's still more of me rather than the book or author(s) in a review, mostly because it's easier to riff on one's emotions - did I like or dislike the book and why - rather than drilling down to the author's history, body of work and going off on possibly unrelated tangents.

One thing I believe some reviewers miss is - even though one may not be enough of an expert to critique instead of 'review' - asking why the author does what he does in a book or body of work. Apart from hitting the right spots with the hatchet and justifying that violence, anybody who reviews something should be curious enough to explore an author's motives where his work is concerned - and not inventing targets to attack.

At times, when I want to get a review out of the way, this becomes a blind spot. As it was when reviewing this book and several others.

"It's literature," I was told. "You can't simply judge it with your emotions."

Until I've read more books, my emotions are all I can go with.

So, no, I don't believe in burying the hatchet. There's still room for professional hatchet jobs, which can be fun to read.

I don't think I'll be writing those, however.

News: Chabris vs Gladwell, Munro, And The Everything Store

Christopher Chabris has issues with Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath. Gladwell tells Chabris to chill the heck out.

"I was simply saying that all writing about social science need not be presented with the formality and precision of the academic world," Gladwell writes. "There is a place for storytelling, in all of its messiness."

---

Munro, Munro, Munro. Was her Nobel Literature win unexpected? Seems that way, judging from the sudden outpouring of affection after the announcement was made.

Meanwhile, Someone thinks that "No American author should win the Nobel Prize" ... and explains why that may be a good thing. I don't think so - why set limits? But yeah, why don't more Americans win the Nobel Prize in Literature?


Happening elsewhere:

• Writer and inveterate wanderer Adrianna Tan is writing a book about travelling solo in India, especially for single female travellers, and she's crowdsourcing the funds for it. Help her out, please?
  
• RIP Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuban-American writer Oscar Hijuelos.
• Behold: Outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's buzzword-packed letter. Do not write like this.
• A very brief history of @#$%&! How did the grawlix become a stand-in for swearing in comics?
• The endearingly crabbit Nicola Morgan's guidelines on working for nothing. "...do it when it's right, but understand when it isn't."
• I suppose if you're Andrew Wylie, who's published the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Phillip Roth and Saul Bellow, you could get away with spouting one-liners in interviews.
• From The Horologicon, some lost words that might be useful today.
• The hidden library of Dunhuang, discovered about a century ago, and the effort to preserve what's left of its contents.
• At the Frankfurt Book Fair: What is a publisher now?
• OMG. Joseph Stalin was also an EDITOR? Explains a lot about him - and the profession.
• Here's the incredible story of how Amazon became "the everything store", which can be found in this book . Not sure if I'd want to work there, considering how Amazon chief Bezos reportedly rebukes employees who annoy him: "I'm sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?" "Do I need to go down and get the certificate that says I'm CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?" "Why are you wasting my life?" Stomp, stomp roar, JB.
• A new book suggests that the man who became Pope Francis secretly helped people during Argentina's "Dirty War".
• How France is protecting independent bookstores. But is something missing from this 'protection'?
• So, many of history's first artists were women? Cool.
• Are TED talks overrated?
• The Delhi University copy shop in the centre of a fight against custom-made "course packs" - "de facto 'textbooks' made of photocopied portions of various books" - by several publishers.
• Former Granta editor John Freeman's five favourite books of criticism.
• Do unsuccessful writers give better advice than the big names?
• In this review of James Franco's Actors Anonymous, somebody asks, "Why does James Franco make people so angry?" Maybe the question should be, "Why are people having issues with James Franco?"
• Some people weren't thrilled that Helen Fielding killed off Mark Darcy in her latest Bridget Jones novel. Several Bridget Jones fans in the UK tell us why that had to happen. In The Guardian, Rachel Cooke looks at the long literary tradition that states all single women must want to - gaaah! - get hitched.
• Author-reviewer feuds on Goodreads force changes to moderation policy ... and confirms that human beings can and will convert any place into a battlefield.

Hard To Like

This novel was, like the title says, hard to like.

Once The Lowland was released, Jhumpa Lahiri was everywhere. It's like she already won the Booker. To not like the book seemed like a bad thing.

Then she says something like, yes, The Lowland is not easy to like.

But for some reason, I don't feel better.

Though there was, perhaps, a good reason why Gauri left her child and husband - which kind of makes sense once you piece the whole story together - I don't think it would've made me appreciate the book more.

---

Hard to like

first published in The Star, 13 October 2013


Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland is a multi-generational tale that tells of two brothers and what follows after the death of one.

Subhash, the older of the two, is the reserved, dutiful son – the opposite of the impressionable, adventurous Udayan. Yet the brothers grow up as part of a close-knit family in Tollygunge, Calcutta, during the tumultuous era following India's independence.

Then comes news of the Naxalbari incident in 1967 (police opened fire on a group of villagers demanding their right to farm a particular piece of land). The idealistic Udayan becomes a Communist Party supporter while Subhash, who wants no part in his brother's politics, eventually moves to the United States and becomes a scientist there.

The elder sibling receives updates from home on occasion. A picture arrives in the mail one day, that of his sister-in-law Gauri. Not too long after that, news of Udayan's death follows; the lowland near the family home is where he hid in vain from his fate.

Subhash returns home to Tollygunge for the funeral and learns that his brother was killed because of his involvement with the Naxalites. But was it his attraction to Gauri or the duty to his late brother's unborn child that drove him to marry his sister-in-law and take her to the United States?

Of course the union is ill-fated, otherwise this would be a very short book. In America, Gauri eventually abandons Subhash and her young daughter Bela. But, as they say, life goes on. And it really goes on and on....

This book is probably not a good introduction to Ms Lahiri's body of work, which includes two short-story collections praised by a colleague and numerous others. I wanted to enjoy this book but couldn't.

Earlier, I'd read a novel about displaced characters and felt comfortable with it, probably because they were created by a fellow countryman and, therefore, felt familiar and more relatable.

Lahiri's vivid depiction of the life of Bengalis in India and the United States is greatly helped by what she and her family had witnessed and been a part of – and is an exemplary showcase of her writing talent.

But I feel her kind of polished, flourish- and gimmick-free prose is better sampled in small doses. This is not a novel you'd want to relax with.

And, for me, Tollygunge is too far away in terms of history and geography – except perhaps for the Communist violence. Closer to home are the struggles of one who has to pick up the pieces after a loved one's untimely demise. Nearly all the main characters seem be struggling to fill the void carved out by the death of Gauri's husband.

The slow decline and passing of her parents-in-law is particularly poignant, a powerful admonishment to children who embark upon violent careers that might work for places such as India, where Naxalite insurgents are still active.

Most notable is Gauri who tries just about everything but can't seem to patch that Udayan-shaped hole. Her attempts to do so, culminating in her ditching Subhash and Bela, is responsible for dragging the melancholy across two generations and over 200 pages.

For me, the book's atmosphere finally lifted when, after a grown-up Bela tells a suitor about her past and why she can't be with someone, the dude says, "I'm not going anywhere".

A strong art-house-film vibe comes off this book, and it might find a second wind in the form of a silver screen adaptation (hello, Mira Nair!). The way The Lowland drags on, though, begs me to concur with another critic (I forget who) who wondered if Lahiri is only good at short stories. That would be unfortunate, considering her way with words.

---

The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri
Bloomsbury Publishing
352 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 9781408828113

Boey's Back

Something told me I shouldn't be reviewing this book, even as I thought, "Well, why not? I was honest about the first."

Yes, you can believe that

It's the first time this has happened to me, so I'm not sure if being blurbed in a previous book by the same author disqualifies me from reviewing his future book(s).

Most would say it does. If I like the latest book, it would look like I'm trying to help him sell it; if I don't I might sound 'inconsistent'.

By now, he's pretty much a celebrity. He doesn't really need a lot of help, not like when he published his first book. What I want to see now, more than his next book, is what he's going to do with his celebrity.

---

Boey's back

first published in The Malay Mail Online, 10 October 2013


I had waited weeks for this to arrive — and now it's here.

I turned a page. Hmm.

I turned another page. This is funny.

And another. Ha ha.

And another. Whoa.

And another. How did he get away with that?

And ... another. Oh my G*d.

I stopped myself from planting my oily face onto the page.

If I thought his hijinks in the first book were outrageous, the ones in this follow-up are more so.


Return of the kid
About a year has passed since Boey Cheeming first released his autobiographical compilation of comics When I Was A Kid — and his personality — upon an unsuspecting Malaysian public.

In the wake of the unexpected success of this book comes When I Was A Kid 2. The ending of his previous book suggested that the next one would be a sequel that explores his college years and adult life in the US. Instead, we get another collection of his childhood stories, an add-on to the first book.

Fans of his work will welcome this latest collection. We can expect the same style of art and storytelling, but the stories all look new. The tone, however, appears more sombre as the author leans more towards tugging our heartstrings instead of tickling our funny bones.

We smile, laugh, cringe, and shudder in horror at his childhood antics and, by proxy, at our own. While we still get some of a kid's wide-eyed wonder at the strange and new around him, like the time the author "touched a rainbow", we also see that the cracks around that innocent worldview are starting to show. In this book, "The Kid" that is Boey is beginning to grow up.

His remembrances of his grandmother brought me back to my own, as did his wonder over a simple bicycle ride with his dad, a prominent figure in this collection. I found his thoughts on toys profound and his memories of the slides at his childhood playground poignant. I think there's also some criticism about how kids these days are spoiled...

...and damn spoiled some of them are, too...

...which I'm hard-pressed to disagree with.


Hazy memories
However, the collection has some amusing moments to keep it from getting too maudlin; this is Boey we're talking about.

So I turn a page. I used to play with fire, too. Don't tell anyone.

And another. Ew. Good thing I didn't see anything like that.

And another. Yeah, I hated maths and physics.

And another. Crank-calling people? Duuude.

And another — OMG I WILL NEVER UNSEE THAT AGAIN DAMN YOU BOEY.

When one revisits the past, some things appear hazy. In WIWAK 1 some of the recollections were so outrageous you wonder if Boey made it up or remembered it wrong.

This time, we have notes from his parents at the end of the book that contain clarifications on some chapters such as "Terrarium" ("...mom and dad NEVER eat all these bird in wine.") and comments ("ADD & SUBTRACT - Not so interesting" and "Onion - Already on your face book [sic] last month").

Of course, she's also in the "testimonials"...

Boey's mom sets something straight

Still, this doesn't dent the impact this book has on one's own memories. While the notes were a nice touch, making this book feel more like a family affair, it could've benefitted from some editing.

I said some things about the previous book, much of which still stands. But I'm not sure if I find Boey's growing-up years "mundane" anymore.


07/10/2014  Forgot that I got pimped a few months back but couldn't find the online version. One thing: I did say I like it, but it was MPH Distributors (a sister company) who agreed to ship the book around Malaysia and Singapore if he self-published.

A couple of years later, there are also T-shirts, calendars and - yes - notebooks, with caricatures of him instead of cats. Plus, livery on an airplane. And his books are still selling. Nobody expected just how big Boey would become, not even me.

Good thing he didn't quit.

---

When I Was A Kid 2

Boey Cheeming
199 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-9849786-1-8

News: Tom Clancy, Dave Eggers's Circle, And Malcolm And Goliath

So I was sick for a total of two weeks due to a low-grade infection, according to the doctor. Though the fevers have subsided, my energy levels are about that of a newborn goat's. I'd shed about 4kgs, my appetite shrank, and had no coffee of spicy stuff for nearly three weeks. But enough about me.

• Big news of last week: the unexpected passing of Tom Clancy, who was 66 years young.
• Some things you shouldn't do in a bookstore.
• Boston-based author and independent bookstore owner Jaime Clarke begs readers not to buy his book from Amazon.
• Did Ian Fleming write Casino Royale to fit into his wife's social circle?
• Dave Eggers says he has never read the book he’s accused of plagiarising: Kate Losse's Facebook memoir, The Boy Kings. Losse alleged that parts of her book were used for Eggers's The Circle. Meanwhile, someone wonders why Eggers, who is said to have "zero interest in the tech world", wrote a 500-page satire about it.
• Literary rogue Andrew Shaffer 'reviews' the so-called fake review service Fiverr.
• Subeditors are not just spellcheckers. The real work begins after all the typos are fixed.
• E-books price people out of reading, says Art Brodsky.
• Speed-read: Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath. For an edgier summary, there's the digested version.
• We're not the only country with leaks... up to 10,000 books for 100 students?
• Reading literary fiction helps us read people better, it seems.
• So yeah, why do we eat popcorn at the movies?

Was Sick As Heck

...so I went offline for a bit. The fever began around early Tuesday morning and came and went like a ninja until this morning. Felt better enough to put real food in my belly: something soupy, with meat. I heard it helps. Soupy things with meat also helps because they are tasty.

So here I am, halfway to recovery (one hopes), with a bunch of bills, an MC, a DVD of Inside the Colon (and maybe Stomach) of Alan KW Wong and enough pharmaceuticals to start my own shop - that's private healthcare for ya. Fortunately, most of that was covered by the company's insurance provider (there are reasons you shouldn't run down your employers wherever).

This March I had to fix my 'congenital' a.k.a. 'pre-existing' sinus condition; I'm still clearing the bill which I paid via credit card.

Don't be uninsured medically. Better yet, don't get sick. Ever.

Excuse me, need to lie down a bit...

Book on the left, reviewed; book on the right, considering review

Much earlier, I received those two books. I didn't find The Lowland that stimulating, and I'll be talking more about it in lieu of the review slated to come out by the end of this month.

Crazy Rich Asians? Sounds like a code phrase for "yellow skin, bulging pockets, zero soul". But not after I get well.

Now excuse me while I lie down again.

News: Local Book News, Open Book(er), Life After Potter

Some local book news:

• "Malaysian books boleh!" And the chief's in there, along with Silverfish Books' Raman and Amir Muhammad of Fixi. But I'm sure they could've come up with a better title.
• Here are the brave people at Borders asking for justice on behalf of a colleague.
• Meet Ridzuan Mohd Ghazali, a.k.a Iwan Reaz or Iwan Ghazali, local author.
• Did you know that Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, the Malaysian Institute of Language and Literature, has guidelines for abbreviating words and terms in text messages?

And here are some other book news:

• Lit journal Ploughshares' People of the Book features Leah Price, "professor of English at Harvard University and frequent writer on books, old and new media."
• Are they opening the Commonwealth-focused Man Booker Prize to American participation? Zounds!
  
  Scott Pack, for one, thinks it might be a good thing. Point number five: "Some people are up in arms about the move, suggesting that this will result in British writers ending up as the poor relations in the new set up. If British, Australian, Canadian, Irish etc. writers carry on writing great books I am not sure what they have to worry about."
• Not just a suitcase of old papers: Class project reveals a Boston man's amazing life.
• No, Lance Armstrong did not lie in his autobiographies; it really was "not about the bike".
• "The juice ain't worth the squeeze." Chuck Wendig's take on why authors probably shouldn't critically review (read: bulldoze) other authors' books - and why the reviewed probably shouldn't respond to negative reviews.
• MSN shuts its Page-turner book blog. A darker future for books coverage?
• Jon Krakauer, who wrote about the brief life of Chris McCandless in Into the Wild, posts the latest findings on how McCandless may have died.
• Translating Holden Caulfield in Russia. Catcher in the Rye's apparently big in Russia because, well, "who knew phony better than these daily consumers of official Soviet language?" But damn, DAT COVER. Is that supposed to be Caulfield?
• "... the argument that some books transcend genre is incoherent: Genres aren't conceptually solid enough to be transcended. Any genre is going to be made up of things that both fit and don't, and over time those things will change and shift. Frankenstein, as John Rieder argues, was Gothic romance first, but now it's science fiction. Jimmie Rodgers was hillbilly music, now he's country." Why the notion that novels can transcend genres is flawed.
• Does anybody care what Jonathan Franzen thinks is wrong with the modern world? Me neither (at least, not right now), but some of you do.
• Lit-journal editor shares some tips on how to get published in lit mags and journals.
• Ben Yagoda highlights some comma mistakes.
• Looks like Vikram Seth's A Suitable Girl has found a suitable publisher. But will the 2016 scheduled release be a suitable timeframe for Seth-starved readers?
• "...we've managed to take the 15 years of children's lives that should be the most carefree, inquisitive, and memorable and fill them with a motley collection of stress and a neurotic fear of failure." AA Gill makes a good (and funny) case against the "education-industrial complex" (school system).
• Fantasy author Terri Bruce stops selling her book, Thereafter, because 'errors' introduced into it including "grammatical mistakes and changes to the style and meaning of sentences" made her "sound like an illiterate git."
• Now that the fever has subsided, charity shops are stuck with thousands of unwanted copies of Fifty Shades of Grey.
• No idea if those teenage exorcists are actually for real (the UK is a "hotbed of witchcraft"? Not Salem, Massachusetts?) Meanwhile, more heresy is coming our way as JK Rowling announces the continuation of the Potterverse. Who d'you think will win?
So, hell yes, there is life after Harry Potter.

News: Local Lit, Libraries, And Linguistics

"Whatever has happened to Malay literature?" Someone at Silverfish Books asked. Here's one thing:

National laureate Datuk A. Samad Said was detained from his home in Bangsar early this morning for his alleged involvement in the flying of the Sang Saka Malaya flag on the eve of Merdeka celebrations at Dataran Merdeka.

He was picked up by three police officers at 12.40am and taken to the Dang Wangi district police headquarters where he was interrogated for more than an hour.

Pak Samad, as he is popularly known, is being investigated under the Sedition Act for the incident.

The flag in question was said to have been a proposed version of the Malayan national flag. The authorities' treatment of Pak Samad has been widely criticised.

---

The Malaysian High Court liberated ZI Publications' Malay translation of Irshad Manji's Allah, Liberty and Love", making it okay to sell it. The next step: freeing the Borders store manager arrested for the 'crime' of selling the book. The arrest was already ruled unlawful.

Though I'm glad this issue is being resolved, I'm not sure if it's going away. So far the Federal Territories Religious Department, responsible for the store manager's arrest, seems to be dragging its feet in resolving this issue.

---

Some may be excited over Sophie Hannah's 'resurrection' of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, but one person sounds ... ambivalent about it.

"The reason I hate the idea of this boiled-over Agatha Christie is that the story of the "last Poirot" is so moving, and such a credit to the queen of crime as a person," writes John Sutherland in the Guardian. "The new book (and let's face it, money is the driving motive) will muddy one's sense of the dignified way she wrapped up the life of Hercule Poirot." Having said that, though, "...of course I'll download it 30 seconds after it comes out in 2014."

---

"...the true mark of a grammar snob is she doesn't like to be told how to use grammar herself; she just likes to tell other people that they're wrong." Why Mary Rolf stopped being a grammar snob.

This was after attending a linguistics class, where she learned, among other things, that: "there is no such thing as 'standard English' with a capital E. Instead there are many 'englishes' with a lower case E. There is the english of the Caribbean and the english of the southern United States and the english of Oxbridge and the english rappers use in their music. Traditionally we're taught that one of these is better than the rest, but in this class I learned that that's an arbitrary distinction and not necessarily the case."

---

How not to sell books online, specifically those 'ambitious' self-help books. Maybe they shouldn't even. But why do they even bother?

Adam Plunkett thinks "the writers are drawn to the marketers because they speak the same language of personal ambition and vague, vaguely Soviet optimism, and because the writers, as good businesspersons, want to delegate their marketing to someone who can achieve real success in the Internet book world. In turn, the marketers are happy to churn out the writers' vision of successful PR."

Does it work? He doesn't think so: "No one is fooled."


Moving on:

• Haslina Usman, daughter of the late Tongkat Warrant, on her father's work, our culture, and those syiok sendiri (self-congratulating) writers.
• My Malay is rubbish, so I can't really comprehend the entirety of this article in Malay by Uthaya Sankar SB. I think it talks about a local Malay author's latest novel, and how she was allegedly cheated of royalties due to her, on account of her works being used in schools to teach the Malay language via literature.
• RIP Ann C Crispin, author and co-founder of scam-fighting blog Writer Beware, the bane of dodgy (mostly US) publishers. I often check on what's new on the blog. It'll feel weird, bringing up the URL (that still bears her name) from now on.
• In the New York Times' new Bookends section: "Are novelists too wary of criticizing other novelists?"
• In Japan, local e-reader industry struggles as Amazon's Kindle dominates.
• Writer's block, we know. But "reader's block"?
• Found: Book that went missing from library in St Paul's Cathedral.
• "Is what is essentially a public vote rather than peer-judgment necessarily a bad thing?" Why the Hugos are good.
• The ancient roots of several punctuation marks. The hashtag (#) was once called the octothorpe.
• Malala Yousafzai opens the new Birmingham library: "one book, one pen, one child and one teacher can change the world".
• The Mattituck-Laurel Library in New York has a virtual clone in the world of Minecraft.
• They're making a movie out of Markus Zusak's The Book Thief?!

Masterclass In Session: Wellness with Jojo

Too much coffee plus too little sleep the previous night equals one cranky, tired editor. Resuming work, I pored over this unusual manuscript.

The path to balance: Jojo Struys's Guide to Wellness (that's a heavy necklace)

"...imagine you are in a place that could be real or imagined that makes you feel totally relaxed ... a beautiful island, a sandy beach, mountaintop, or green forest. Choose a location you will find therapeutic.

"...imagine your eyelids starting to grow heavier. As you feel more and more relaxed, your mind starts to drift into a state of total relaxation ... imagine sinking deeper and deeper into complete relaxation. Imagine the back of your calves growing heavier as your body starts to sink into the mattress.

"As your body grows heavier, you are becoming more relaxed and tired by every count. As you start sinking deeper and deeper into total relaxation, you can positively affirm something to yourself that will promote deep uninterrupted...."

Then I lost consciousness. For about three seconds.

Who needs to follow the instructions when reading them is just as effective?

I've always imagined celebrity Jojo Struys as a bundle of energy, so it's hard to reconcile that with one of her other hobbies: getting people to relax. Or that a caffeine-peddling franchise is selling her relaxation CDs.

I believe it's called "balance".

Which is lacking in many of our lives.

What a coincidence that the latest volume in the MPH Masterclass series will be launched around a time when the air is thick with the haze and people's outrage of things reported in the media: crime, prayer rooms, 'historical' films...

Time to chill. And Struys is going to show us how.

Struys doesn't talk much about herself (the wealth of photos of her compensate for that), except for her love of helping people and how she seems to be the agony aunt of her circle. "There was a time I thought I would become a counselor or psychologist because I seemed to have a constantly flashing neon sign pasted on my forehead that read: 'Please come to me if you have problems. I’m here to listen.'"

Personal anecdotes are weaved in to frame the problems and issues she addresses in the book: anger, insomnia, weight management, depression, stress, fear, self-esteem, and love and relationships, and what may happen if they are not addressed.

I was surprised when she described what I believe is the practice of tummo, a form of yoga practiced by Tibetan monks, and that she tried something similar herself. So she's not exactly peddling typical personality-driven feel-good tips.

There's not enough space to cover every topic, so it looks like Struys is focusing on the areas she's most familiar with - areas where one's state of mind is a crucial factor.

You get checklists and, where applicable, tips and exercises to focus your mind to align it towards solving whatever it is that ails you.

"Thoughts have so much power, so we must be careful what we think about," Struys writes. "I am hoping that by writing this book, it may help to shift your thoughts into positive gear because if you can change the way you think, you can change your life."


Now that MPH Group Publishing's 'official' Facebook page is up, I'll probably be announcing less new stuff here. The marketing elves are doing a fine job with updates and they have access to more exclusive material I can't get my hands on.

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Jojo Struys's Guide to Wellness

Jojo Struys
MPH Group Publishing
204 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-967-415-131-7

Buy from MPHOnline.com