News: Amazon, Freebie Freezes and Clumsy Prose

• Amazon being accused of more and more predatory tactics. Is it time to Occupy Amazon?
• Publisher William Morrow attaches provisos to review copies of books given to book bloggers. "Message is essentially: if you don't review enough of the books we send you, in the timeframe we want you to, you're out," tweets Rebecca Schinsky, a.k.a. @bookladysblog. The beginning of the end of book blogger freebies?
• Another digital self-publishing success story: Lawyer Darcie Chan's e-published novel The Mill River Recluse. On a related note, the e-reader wave draws closer.
• A group of people that's keeping the physical book alive: book designers.
• Another poet quits the TS Eliot Prize shortlist over sponsorship by hedge fund firm Aurum.
• What should be quite obvious: Why Amazon consumer book reviews cannot be trusted. Not saying that bona fide book reviews are 100 per cent all that...
• David Guterson's modern take on Oedipus wins Literary Review's Bad Sex Award for 2011, beating the likes of Haruki Murakami (1Q84), Lee Child (The Affair) and Stephen King (11/22/63).

Saving JFK

"Hot book!" they said, so I chiselled the review out of my glacial writer's block. But my speed record for reviewing David Sedaris's Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk - two days after reading - is still unbroken. And likely to remain that way.

I was initially worried that I wouldn't be able to appreciate the book due to my shallow understanding of Stephen King's body of work. The last - and only other - book of his I'd read was Pet Sematary, a terrifying tale of Indian graveyards and demon-possessed zombie pets (and people). In contrast, 11/22/63 is a different sort of animal, and it even ends... happily.

A little disappointed that no coupon was attached with it. RM87.90 is a bit steep, even if it's Stephen King.

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Saving JFK

Stephen King's tale of time travel explores the possibilities in — and perils of — changing the past 'for the better'

first published in The Star, 09 December 2011


A rule of thumb I follow regarding books: If the author's name is bigger than the title, caveat emptor.

When the author is Stephen King, however, perhaps there is some justification. Even more so when the title is the word-less 11/22/63. That's Nov 22, 1963, the day John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot. And yes, there is reason to be wary of this book – but only because it might get hold of you and never let go. The first time I opened it, I almost skipped lunch.

The much-anticipated novel about a time-travelling English teacher who inherits a dying man's quest to stop the assassination of the 35th US President pretty much lives up to the hype that has surrounded it since the publishing world first got an inkling about it.

Jake Epping is, in his own words, not a crying man. But an essay by one of his adult students, janitor Harry Dunning, manages to make him weep. It's not (just) the atrocious grammar and spelling. It was a horrific account of how, as a child, Dunning survived his father's drunken, murderous rampage that claimed the rest of his family.

Then he meets Al Templeton, the owner of a diner that has a portal to an exact time and date back in time: 11.58am, Sept 9, 1958. Who cares how the portal came to be, as long as Templeton gets to buy cheap, good-tasting, chemical- and hormone-free beef from the good old days. A sceptical Epping goes through the portal, and falls in love with the root beer he buys at a store – no preservatives, Templeton guesses. We never know if it's A&W's.

Of course there's a catch. On his shopping trips back in time, Templeton had toyed with the idea of changing American history by saving JFK. But Templeton gets cancer before he can do anything, and he's not sure when his time will be up, so he appoints Epping as the heir to his mission. But when Epping has second thoughts after his attempt to fix Dunning's future backfires, Templeton commits suicide. With the weight of a dead man's last wishes on his shoulders, our sentimental English teacher takes a seemingly permanent step into the past.

King is said to have done heaps of research for this book. Through the words of Epping, now George Amberson back in 1958, we experience the life of an ordinary American in the golden post WWII era. Much of the book really is about how Epping/Amberson adapts to and lives in the past, which he does perhaps a little too well. We look into his head, see through his eyes, hear with his ears.

The book tries to help us experience those days. Store signs, newspaper headlines and billboards are announced in capital letters and different fonts. Phonetic spelling of some words in the dialogue goad us to read them aloud. Go on, say "beer” the Maine way: "beeyah”. It's fun ... for the first two times. Yes, I heard about the Easter eggs, too. However, I could only spot references to The Shawshank Redemption and It in the pages; fans of King will undoubtedly find more.

It's quite some time to 1963, so Epping/Amberson passes the time by teaching at a school in Texas. And getting involved with its pretty, popular librarian, Sadie Dunhill. But it's only a matter of time before someone discovers the truth about him.

This is quite a good read despite the heavy American flavour, the long drawn-out build-up to the confrontation with JFK's assassin, and the shocking consequences that follow, not to mention the multi-font all-caps assault on the eyes. The boring and incredible parts where Epping/Amberson stalks Lee Harvey Oswald and the explanation of time travel physics barely register on the disbelief suspension scale. It's Stephen King, after all.

Wish I could say you can't put it down, but if you're reading the hardcover version, you'll have to or you might develop a cramp bearing the weight of this 840-page tome in your arms. Looks like King threw just about everything he'd researched into this book.

Hints at a yearning for a rose-tinted past echo throughout King's almost fairy tale-like depiction of the US half a century ago, calling to mind the Camelot myth spun around JFK not long after his death. Perhaps the question, "what if Kennedy survived?” is a yearning for a return to those days, when a charismatic young senator took the White House against all odds and, later, as president, faced up to a belligerent world power an ocean away under the shadow of a mushroom cloud – and won a desperate gamble.

Not only does today's US hardly resemble that storied Arthurian realm, its people might also be wistful about a return to Camelot. King's 11/22/63 gives us a tantalising peek at such a possibility, but also cautions us that it is perhaps better to let the past be and work on the now – and towards the future.

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11/22/63

Stephen King
Scribner (2011)
849 pages (Hardcover)
Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2

Can't Handle The Rock-Hard Truths?

Yesterday, news broke about a list of books labelled haram by the Department of Islamic Development (Jakim). Among those were Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going (Straits Times Press) and Faisal Tehrani's Sebongkah Batu di Kuala Berang (PTS Litera Utama Sdn Bhd).

Disappearing soon from bookstores and libraries everywhere?

Many would wonder why Hard Truths ended up in a list of banned "Islamic-themed books". A Malaysian Insider article suggests that it could be due to what LKY said about Muslims in Singapore.

I don't know why they need to ban the book based on this statement. Isn't it an unspoken rule that Malaysians should ignore whatever this guy says? Anyway, TMI said that he'd retracted the statement.

Though the books have been declared haram, they have not yet been officially banned by the Home Ministry. With Jakim's list, however, it might only a matter of time.

The report went on to say that Jakim has "not responded to queries ... on why the decision was made nine months after [Hard Truths] hit the shelves in Malaysia." I bet it can't. And thanks to this bit of tardiness, there are people out there who have a banned book in their hands - after how many freaking months after it was released.


10/12/2011  It was incorrectly stated that Faisal Tehrani's book, Sebongkah Batu di Kuala Berang has been banned; the corresponding line has been removed.

It's also been reported that Hard Truths is still being studied and, therefore, not banned yet.

Many thanks to the readers who took the time to inform me.

Oncologist Takes Guardian First Book Award

Several days ago, Siddhartha Mukherjee won the 2011 Guardian First Book Award for his biography of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies.

A simple request from a cancer patient - to know what she had - grew from a journal into a compelling read that combines elements of the memoir, scientific facts, history and the very human stories of several cancer patients the author knew.

Mukherjee is modest about his win. "You never write books to win awards – they are immensely gratifying but unexpected," he said to the Guardian. "In recognising The Emperor of All Maladies, the judges have also recognised the extraordinary courage and resilience of the men and women who struggle with illness, and the men and women who struggle to treat illnesses."

He says more about his win, his book and cancer in an interview after the announcement.

The prize was established in 1965 as the Guardian Fiction Award by The Guardian for British or Commonwealth writers whose works are published in the UK. It's said to be the oldest and best-established of newspaper-sponsored book awards.

In 1999 the Award became the Guardian First Book Award, to be given to the best new literary talent in fiction or non-fiction, across all genres. Today the Award is worth £10,000. Past winners include Zadie Smith for White Teeth (2000); Jonathan Safran Foer for Everything Is Illuminated (2002); and Dinaw Mengestu for Children of the Revolution (2007).

Book reviewers at the Guardian put together a longlist, which is turned loose upon members of reading groups from the Waterstone's bookstore chain. The deliberations that take place at various Waterstone's bookstores will eventually produce a shortlist, from which the winner is picked. Pretty democratic.

Among the shortlisted are Stephen Kelman, author of Booker-shortlisted Pigeon English; Mirza Waheed, Kashmiri author of The Collaborator; and Amy Waldman who wrote The Submission, a novel about what happens when a Muslim architect was picked to design a 9/11 memorial in Manhattan.

Lisa Allardice, editor of Guardian Review and chair of the judging panel, regards Mukherjee's "anthropomorphism of a disease" a "remarkable and unusual achievement". She adds that, "He has managed to balance such a vast amount of information with lively narratives, combining complicated science with moving human stories. Far from being intimidating, it's a compelling, accessible book, packed full of facts and anecdotes that you know you will remember and which you immediately want to pass on to someone else."

It is, indeed. I reviewed The Emperor of All Maladies sometime back. Mukherjee's win was well deserved.

And I let someone borrow my copy. I was so happy that somebody wanted to read it, I didn't think twice.

Like This! David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect

I pounded this out rather quickly, but because the book was old (published last year), I wasn't sure if they would use it. ...I do sound a bit "optimistic" about Facebook in the review, don't I?

I know about Facebook's attitudes towards user data privacy, and how they slip some design tweaks under our noses and slap us in the face with others - not to mention the annoyances posed by other Facebook users. How many have abandoned SS Zuckerberg because of these? Not enough, it seems, as its user count continues to grow.

Let no one deny that Facebook is big now - and set to get bigger. Rumours of Facebook getting listed on the stock exchange next year has gotten investors excited; some really optimistic estimates say the company could be worth up to US$100 billion.

On the user front, the character limit on FB posts jumped from 500 to a little over 60,000 in just four months. PCMag.com did some math and gleefully concluded that one could share a whole novel in just nine posts, a boon to long-winded oversharing emo types everywhere - and a possible threat to blogging platforms. Somebody please tell me this is a hoax.

Watching the development of a juggernaut like Facebook must feel like watching the progress of a monster hurricane. One can't help but be fascinated and frightened at the same time. I wonder if this was how David Kirkpatrick felt as he did his research.

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Like this!

This year's political upheavals, like the Arab Spring, that used social networking so effectively, prompts our reviewer to dig up and re-read a book published last year. He reckons it should be required reading for anyone who has a Facebook account.

first published in The Star, 02 December 2011


AS a Facebook user, I've wondered about the oodles of pages with titles that start with "One Million". Why this magic number?

If David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, can be believed, the number's story began in Columbia, South America, in 2008. Ticked off at a certain paramilitary group, Oscar Morales created the Facebook page, "One Million Voices Against FARC". The page morphed into a movement that eventually pushed an estimated 10 million demonstrators against FARC, a leftwing rebel group, onto Columbia's streets. FARC has since seen some of its greatest setbacks, including the rescue of former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt after six years as a FARC hostage and, recently, the death of one of its leaders, Guillermo León Sáenz, aka Alfonso Cano.

The Facebook-spurred demos against FARC is used with great effect by Kirkpatrick to showcase the social network's ability to hook up and unite like-minded people in championing a particular cause. But The Facebook Effect does not just shed light on the mechanics of the social network in general. It's a peek under the hood and a look at the history of Facebook, now considered to be the social network.

A lot of the background information – warts and all – on the rise and rise of Facebook can be found, appropriately enough, online. However, Kirkpatrick, former senior editor for tech and the Internet at Fortune magazine, has dug a bit deeper and put it all together into what I'd consider to be the only book to read about the history of Facebook, its impact on the world, and where it might be headed in the future.

As such, it's meant to be mined by tech enthusiasts, students and anyone looking for offline sources on Facebook. Not for lazy Saturday afternoons in a rattan chair with a cocktail in hand – though I'm sure there are types out there who will feel differently.

To me, it reads like a modern-day fairy tale. I mean, who'd believe that a vanity platform for rating the "hotness" of Harvard students would one day evolve into something that can mobilise regime-toppling movements (read: Arab Spring).

One could say that Facebook is merely the latest front-end interface for a social network concept, ie, the Internet. We've used real-time chat programmes (ICQ, Orkut, Yahoo!Messenger and GChat), online journals (Wordpress, Blogger, Livejournal) and Facebook's predecessors (MySpace and Friendster) before. To me, the book suggests that none of the above have come quite as close as Facebook to being the "face" of the Internet. And in a few decades, if Zuckerberg keeps getting it right, they might talk about him like that other tech icon.

In an interview about the book, Kirkpatrick suggests that part of Facebook's success can be attributed to the Google-like bare-bones interface that also, "Kept the ads to the bare minimum, and what I think that did is, not only made it look cool and clean, it made people feel that, it could be for anyone and everyone. So it didn't have the feeling of just being for kids, it was so neutral that, anyone felt that they can use it and that has been the key to its growth."

Kirkpatrick has done a great job with The Facebook Effect. However, I feel no book or research paper can adequately describe, explain or demystify the energy that is the collective goodwill or outrage contained in this gargantuan hive-mind of over 800 million Netizens and its effects on governments, businesses, and how we make friends.

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The Facebook Effect

David Kirkpatrick
Virgin Books (2010)
374 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-7535-2275-2

News: A Review, And An MPH Quill Update

So I've been talking about food places a bit more. Books may be what this blog's (mostly) about, but food has always been my number one. Some news bites before normal programming resumes:

• In the Parents Corner of The Star Online, a review of Wee Su May's Nine Little People Who Lived in a Chest. A real review, not something like my publicity piece on the book. "Dark themes"? "Unsettling for a children's book"? Really, now?
• This quarter's MPH Quill is still in production. The editorial team is also being swamped with work for the upcoming quarterly issues of several other magazines. We could be looking at a mid-December release for Quill. I find it kind of absurd, too - why not just lump it up into a single bumper issue for January 2012? That's all I know at the moment.
• I'm sure there isn't a dearth of book-related blogs in Malaysia, but when you look at the list of book blogs in this blog, you have to wonder... So why are Malaysia's bookworms not blogging? Too little time, content with sites such as, GoodReads, LibraryThing or Shelfari, or is it just simply not worth it?
• Ellen Whyte's Logomania: Fate & and Fortune and the re-issued Looking Back: Monday Musings and Memories can now (or should) be found at bookstores. Both books are, at least, at MPH@Publika, Solaris Dutamas.

Return To Joy Café

Has it been three years since I wrote about this place?

The astonishment isn't just because of the swift passage of time. What became a quiet Chinese café with a limited menu is now a restaurant with more offerings and a few home-made off-the-shelf items.

Something that tasted like meat floss is actually dehydrated shiitake mushroom. A dark mushroom sauce with a hearty, meaty flavour rivals the oyster sauce. A light-coloured sesame sauce, used in some of their dishes, is like a runnier, smoother version of the tahini.

Golden couple Dennis Ng and wife Joyce have continued with the culinary experiments that made me a regular (as I can be). Their special fried rice and their orange white coffee are still as tasty. They serve a good nasi lemak, though it's been months since I've had a plate.

Joy's mango yoghurt - sweet,
yellow and fragrant

Over a year ago, Dennis started making yoghurt. The first flavour remains my favourite: wheatgrass, with a dash of pandan for that herbal sweetness and fragrance. For a while, I was on a Joy yoghurt bender, buying from four to eight cups at a time. Joy Café has since added more flavours to its yoghurt range, including strawberry, roselle, soursop, guava and mango.

On my most recent visit, they were out of wheatgrass yoghurt. My deflated spirits were restored by the thick, sweet and florally fragrant mango yoghurt. One is advised to give it a stir before eating, presumably to smoothen the texture and activate the live cultures inside.

At RM2.90 a cup it's a little pricey, but you'll get the assurance of quality by a proud business owner who uses nothing but natural ingredients. Don't wanna eat your yoghurt? For RM6, you get a tall glass of a yoghurt drink in any of the flavours available at the place.

Joining the beef and lamb briskets, braised pork trotter and dry chicken curry on the menu is an otak-otak omelette, nice but a bit oily when I tried it months ago; a spicy, slightly sourish nyonya chicken with a curry-like sauce that had a tang of lemongrass; and batter-coated chicken or fish topped with their own sesame sauce. Most of these dishes come with a soup, a side of veggies, a sunny-side-up egg (whether the yolk is runny or cooked solid is the luck of the draw), and a choice of either rice or noodles. The special fried rice and nasi lemak are still there.

Picking dishes from such a selection can be difficult. After some time, my dinner companion settled on the nyonya chicken with rice, but I was still undecided. To my rescue was Joyce: "Want to try our new pork belly? We braise it in a sauce with Australian wine."

This surprised us. The menu is almost overflowing! Is there even room for another snack? But I loves me some pork belly, and I'm a sucker for new things. So I went for it.

Dinner Kaki's nyonya chicken had been a taste of home - as in, reminded me of my kampung in Penang. I was content to eat just the sauce with rice. Then, my dish arrived.

New at Joy Café: Pork belly in red wine sauce.
Nigella would be proud.

The slab of pork belly and its pool of red sauce dominated the dinner plate; all the sides seemed to shrink from its meaty majesty. And oh golly, it was good. Chewy tender skin, rich buttery fat and lovely meat. In a savoury sauce slightly fruity from the wine. All good with rice, a slice of bread, a mantou (plain Chinese bun), or perhaps mashed potatoes.

What started as a Father's Day special became a regular dish, at the behest of enamoured customers. A previous incarnation used spare ribs, but wasn't as successful. "It's Danish pork," Joyce said. I was sure they could recreate this dish with local pork and a RM30 wine.

Dinner Kaki ignored her dieting taboos and warned me to save her some of the leaner bits. Naturally, I chafed at that. This pork belly surprise was too good to share.

But the taste wasn't the pork belly's only bombshell. At RM13.90 it wasn't just a steal, it was plain Wall-Street-class plunder - never mind that we'd had a different pork belly dish elsewhere for the same amount. On the way home, we argued which was a better price, eventually settling for a figure between RM15.90 and RM18.90.

For once, (some) truth in advertising

Outside Joy Café, a banner proclaimed the place as having "the best food in town". I wouldn't call it a boast; from what we've eaten so far, it's probably a simple statement.


22/06/2015   "Joy Café was located at 540, Jalan Riang 11, Happy Garden, 58200 Kuala Lumpur. It finally closed its doors for good around the end of April 2015. A Meng Kee wonton noodle shop (not sure if it's related to the one in Kuchai Lama) is now in its place.