News: New Village, (Maybe A) New Book, Peter Mayle and Libraries

After weeks of trawling the web, finally! Some big book news from home.

Headman of New Village
Feeling upbeat for See Tshiung Han (is that how it should be written?) and his New Village project. Check out their web site here.

Masthead for the New Village zine (Issue 0, July 2011), and one of the pages

It's definitely not your... usual kind of fiction. Given the risk-averse nature of the mainstream publishing industry, maybe it's a good idea to strike it out on your own. Self-publishing is becoming the rage, after all.

Congratulations to the New Village team and all the best with the project. ...Wonder if they're taking (literary) contributions?


Coming soon?
The distributors have informed me that they'll be distributing a book by artist Boey Cheeming. He'd e-mailed us sometime back to see if we can help him get what appears to be his illustrated childhood memoir into the local market. Would be thrilling if this comes to pass. In the meantime, read Ah Boey's (sorry, couldn't resist) graphic-heavy journal.


So-called "sex book" banned
One not-so-great news is the ban on Peter Mayle's Where Did I Come From?, a book that's been around when my age was still single digits. I remember reading an ex-neighbour's copy and... well, if the book makes you horny, I think you have some serious issues.

Sex sells, but put sex and Malaysia in the same sentence and you have a legion of news agencies who I presume want to bump up page hits by reporting on the same ban.

When will we ever get into the news for all the right reasons?


Other news

• Meanwhile, Kenny Mah sussses out some book cafés in Japan. Reminded me of Hoxes at Damansara Perdana, a little hideaway that eventually closed just as soon as I got comfortable.
• The Librotraficante (Spanish for "Booktrafficker") Movement is opening "underground libraries" in the face of an alleged ban on books on Mexican-American culture.
  
  Some time ago, the city of Tucson, Arizona banned the teaching of allegedly divisive, ethnically-biased Mexican-American studies in schools. Some see it as part of a wider plan to marginalise the Hispanic community by a state that's increasingly hostile to immigration, specifically Latino immigration.
  
  Why am I following this? It's just so... suspenseful! I want to know what happens next. And I do hope that there would be no book ban - or any ban whatsoever.
• Mercer County libraries add e-books to their shelves - but not without hiccups. As reported days ago, some of the big name publishers have stopped selling e-books to libraries. And some old fogies still aren't used to e-readers.
• New York payphone booths turned into "guerilla libraries". Would it work in Malaysi- no, it won't. But I guess it depends on what kind of books you'd put there....
• Survivors of the Bosnian war in pictures: The literary treasures of Sarajevo's centuries-old Gazi Husrav Beg Library. Pretty books, pretty pictures.
• Amazon does it again. The firm that's shaping up to be the Death Star of publishing and bookselling has pulled 5,000 titles by Chicago-based distributor Independent Publishers Group from its catalogue over sales terms. It's Amazon vs Macmillan all over again.
  
  Meanwhile, another boycott - by Barnes & Noble on Amazon titles - hits a number of books, including Penny Marshall's My Mother Was Nuts. It just means that it won't be displayed at B&N's network of brick-and-mortar shops, where new books are usually showcased. But is this a smart move?
• Satire, serials and shorts: Publishers are trying out variations of the e-book. Okay, e-books may be democratising publishing, but I still think you need people to make them better.
• Did you hear about Paramount Studios suing the Puzo estate to prevent more "Godfather" books? The suit claims that a previous Godfather novel "tarnished the legacy" of the film and "misled consumers in connection with advertising, marketing, and promotional material related to the first and second sequel novels".
  
  Just so happens that I have one of these books on a list of tentative titles to review later. Now I really want to get my hands on it.
• Speaking in tongues: Aravind Adiga's lingusitic journey. "...it was common for a boy of my generation to speak one language at home, another on the way to school, and a third one in the classroom. ... Kannada, which I spoke at home, and Hindi, which I had to learn in school, belong to different linguistic families and are as dissimilar as, say, Spanish and Russian."
• A shortlist for the Diagram prize for oddest book title of the year. Gotta love the standfirst.
• Oh, and Anthony Bourdain's book imprint Ecco announces new authors and books.

Yes, yes, JK Rowling is writing a book for adults (whatever that means) and US comedian Stephen Colbert is coming up with a children's book. Like I care a whole lot about either.

Language of The Reviewer

Ron Charles's hilarious video "Sh*t Book Reviewers Say" awesomely explains, without much explanation, how some overused words and phrases in book reviews might not belong there.

Some theorise that any review with two or more of such words is either a rush job or a disingenuous dissertation of the book, the author's art or both. Repeated use of certain words in the reviewer's repertoire imply inflexibility, laziness or, depending on the difficulty level, lexical snobbery.

Do any of the following sound familiar?

"...it's fun if you like that sort of thing..."

"It's just stunning!"

"...Kafkaesque..."

Holding a copy of Salvage the Bones: "...a love child between Jonathan Franzen and Emily Dickinson."

"...electrifying!"

Holding Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot: "It's like a cross between [Jhumpa Lahiri's] Interpreter of Maladies and Pat the Bunny."

"...her lapidary prose..."

"...an absorbing story...!"

"...gripping... provocative... riveting..."

Holding Karen Russell's Swamplandia: "It's at once thrilling - and deeply sobering...!"

"...so ...poignant..."

"The pages practically turn themselves!"

"...edgy ...haunting ...wildly imaginative!"

"Unputdownable!"

..."lapidary prose." Ha. No prizes for guessing who took that hit.

Because when you call something "Kafkaesque" ("marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity"), "Updikean" (like... John Updike), or "Dickensian" (reminds you of the poverty, social injustice and other aspects of Victorian England that Ol' Boz frequently wrote about), you're so not talking to the people who dig Danbrownian, Rowlingesque or Ahernite prose.

I'm guilty of some of these offences as well. A partial indictment:

"...gripping...

"...compelling..."

"...poignant... engaging..."

"...lyrical..."

"...poignant... poignant... poignant... poignant... poignant..." Yes, I'm a serial offender.

"...vivid..."

"...genius..."

It does feel as though I close one eye while typing, doesn't it?

Stripped of the remaining text and laid bare, these "forbidden" words stick out like sore digits. But is it such a horrible crime to re-use some words - particularly if they fit?

Now, let me introduce Orwell's wonderful essay on book reviewing, which I've been dying to do for months since I was given a printout of it.

One passage in the suspiciously autobiographical essay sums up the pain book reviewers go through:

...the prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash--though it does involve that, as I will show in a moment--but constantly INVENTING reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever. The reviewer, jaded though he may be, is professionally
interested in books, and out of the thousands that appear annually, there are probably fifty or a hundred that he would enjoy writing about. If he is a top-notcher in his profession he may get hold of ten or twenty of them: more probably he gets hold of two or three. The rest of his work, however conscientious he may be in praising or damning, is in essence humbug. He is pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.

...of course, I cannot argue against the existence of book reviewers who, for money or prestige, wallow in this misery.

"So then, Mr Local Book Reviewer, what are your two cents on this issue?"

When I have the time. I have at least two books which I haven't read to review for the papers and several more for the blog.

The Week Before Last

...I was busy with things to buy, things to rush, things to eat and drink, and things to read.

Dust mite-busting
After uncovering the main source of my stuffy nose problems, I've been taking small steps to address it...

From left: Demitze anti-dust mite spray, and LactoGG probiotics supplement

...And a Pen-SOH-nik vacuum cleaner, because a man needs at least one power tool in the house. Next on the list: anti-dust mite pillow and mattress protectors.


Book project wrap-up
At work, a book project to wrap up before the tentative date launch date of 10 April this year:

Coming soon to all good bookstores

Since last July, I've been editing this in-between other things at the office. This was a big one in terms of number of pages and images, all in colour.

Now, all we're waiting for is the Cataloguing in Publication data from the National Library. But the other pages are ready for printing.

For now, that's all I'm going to say. More will be revealed once I get my hands on a real copy.


Farewell, Coffee In Love Café
For those who still haven't caught on: the Coffee In Love Café at Easter Nursery, Sri Hartamas has closed, in preparation for a move to Publika, Solaris Dutamas. The café's concept will also change; I heard they're merging coffee with... tattoos.

However, I managed one last weekend visit before that, and how appropriate that Helen the owner was the barista on that day.

Helen in the house at Coffee In Love Café

Kind of sad to see the place go. Hopefully, the coffee, if served at the new place, will still be the same.


Reviews and more books
So a few of my submitted reviews were considered past their sell by date and won't make the papers. I felt less disappointed than I'd thought, probably because I was more concerned with keeping this blog fresh. And I'd read several books during Chinese New Year and finished a review on one of them. I'll be spreading these out over five or six weeks, so I guess I go that covered.

And the distributors' rep suggested more titles for review later, on top of the previous reading list:

Pantheon
Sam Bourne
HarperCollins (Feb 2012)
416 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-007413621

Unholy Night
Seth Grahame-Smith
Grand Central Publishing (Apr 2012)
320 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-446563099

The Family Corleone
Ed Falco
Grand Central Publishing (May 2012)
448 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-446574624

Had a nice dinner last week as well. You'll be hearing about it.

Later.

News: E-Book Rush, Book Deals And Libraries In The Lurch

The big news last week was the passing of artiste Whitney Houston. As tributes poured in, some people decided to cash in by publishing e-books dedicated to her and her memory. This, even before she's buried.

All these big pop stars can't even get a break offstage, thanks to the paparazzi and the spectacle-hungry fans they feed with all the latest on their idols. Even in death, her funeral had to be a public spectacle. For the world to mourn along, perhaps. But haven't they been doing that for days prior?

In India, a bookstore dies: The owner of the decades-old Manneys in Pune is folding up his shop because his children aren't interested, and there's no one he can pass the torch on to. So... Will the flame survive long after the hearth is gone? The article says "yes".

Someone is already asking whether out-of-print books can be considered antiques.

• More e-book app news: The Readium Open Source initiative has been launched to hasten the adoption of the IDPF EPUB 3 standard for e-books. Sounds like a good idea, if Apple, Amazon, etc can get on board. I expect some resistance from Apple in particular.
  
  Another platform that's "not Apple" (rubbing it in a little, I suspect) is Inkling's free interactive e-book publishing platform.
  
  Booktype, meanwhile, launches a collection of crowd-sourced e-book tools. From what I can see, it's a bit more involved than Unbound, where authors editors and designers get together to create and publish a book.
• Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other publishers are fighting over e-books while libraries suffer. The main concern is, according to the report: "If borrowing a book is too easy, in other words, you won’t buy it."
  
  It seems the digital book has raised serious legal, logistical and technical concerns among publishers and vendors. The tussles among these titans threaten to leave libraries in the lurch over e-book lending: what are libraries if they can't lend books - physical or digital ones?
  
  Underscoring that is Penguin's decision to stop selling e-books to libraries. They've also shut down some alleged book piracy sites, including library.nu.
• More fighting over Amanda Knox's future memoir, which is likely to discuss her murder trial in Italy. Since then, Knox has signed a US$4m book deal with HarperCollins.
  
  I'm sceptical, naturally. "Truth"? Perhaps. Booming sales? "Would be nice..." Sure.
• Some "Crabbit Old Bat" has some tips for you blogging writers. I thought the post makes a great point of reference.
• Apparently, it's hard to name a publishing house.
• Not a dream publishing success: Randy Susan Meyer's path towards publication. Think this is what the majority of authors face.
• Quentin Rowan, aka QR Markham, "author" of the controversial Assassin of Secrets, profiled in The New Yorker.
• Some non-textual content: Shit book reviewers say, by Washington Post fiction editor Ron Charles. I think there's at least one nod to Michiko Kakutani in there. The way Charles intones, "...her lapidary prose..." just cracks me up.
  
  Do check out Charles's other video where he wears bacon on his head for his video review of Danielle Evans's short story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self.
  
  There's more pork as devout Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow reads Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss. And does it quite well, too. Tebow to Tebow.

When New World Changes Old, And Vice Versa

I don't have much to add to this review, other than the doubts I had about the "Mongol empire in ruins". A quick but much-belated check revealed that the Mongol Empire began breaking up around 1368, when the Yuan Dynasty fell and was replaced by the Ming Dynasty.

Now, we have the Internet, which not only informs us when an empire falls but can potentially facilitate the fall of empires. Misinformation, conquest, and war and all its inhumanities, however, are still with us.

---

Clash of civilisations

The shockwaves of Christopher Columbus's voyages of exploration and discovery five centuries ago still reverberate today

first published in The Star, 17 February 2012


The Christopher Columbus I read about in school was the famous explorer and navigator who discovered America. His image then was viewed through rose-tinted lens, his exploits written and spoken of in admiring tones.

Years later, I'm older, just a teeny bit wiser, and ready for the rest of the story. So thank you, Laurence Bergreen, for writing Columbus: The Four Voyages. This book appears to be an attempt to fill the gaps in the Columbus narrative and explore the darker side of the explorer's forays into parts of the Caribbean. It is dark, and bound to instil revulsion towards the behaviour of the Spaniards who would later hasten the demise of the Inca and Aztec empires.

Apart from the life story of Christopher Columbus, or Cristóbal Colón as he was known in Spain, the author also shows us what it was like in Genoa and Europe back then, thus providing historical context for everything else that followed: Columbus's voyages and the subsequent colonisation of the New World and the subjugation of its native populations. Bergreen also notes that other Genoans before Columbus tried – and failed – to sail across the Atlantic. And the reaction from those who heard about his research: "You mean he made four voyages?" Yes, he did.

The Genoan's idea to cross the Atlantic and arrive in the East was, from Bergreen's writings, a badly informed venture based on mostly unreliable accounts by the likes of Marco Polo and the polymath Ptolemy (c. 90–c. 168CE). By Columbus's time, the rule of the "Grand Khans" in China was long over and the Mongol empire lay in ruins. But he didn't know that.

They even added an image of the explorer, allegedly painted
by Venetian artist Sebastiano del Piombo (1485–1547). No
paintings of Columbus were made when he was alive, and no
one is sure if the guy here is ol' Chris. If he hadn't been
away most of the time...

Of course, the undertaking needed lots of resources. Failing to sell his idea to the king of Portugal, Columbus turned to the Spanish monarchs. His proposal, in short, was: Give me men, ships, and stuff, and a nice shiny title, and I'll bring back spices, gold and all manner of riches – and convert a few locals to Christianity. The self-styled "bearer of Christ" believed his was a holy enterprise. That belief was strengthened by the safe crossing of the Atlantic on his first voyage, and a few other strokes of luck in subsequent journeys to "the East".

But his luck and supposed divine protection was not foolproof. Though a masterful mariner and expert on the water, Columbus was rather clumsy on land and in politics. Many of the men who came with him to the New World on subsequent voyages behaved badly, to say the least. Columbus himself was accused of using torture to keep the peace and force the natives to bring him gold. News of his alleged mismanagement of the New World settlements reached Spain, and at the end of his third voyage, he was sent back in chains and stripped of his authority. After returning from his disastrous fourth and final voyage, he died in 1506, a physical and emotional wreck.

Bergreen has done a good job researching and writing Columbus. The facts practically turn the pages for the reader, though one could argue that it could also be the morbid fascination with people's bad behaviour. Even some of the "noble savages" exhibit varying degrees of political cunning, using their ties with the explorers to their advantage.

As for Columbus himself, sadly, I came away with an impression that he was a self-serving, delusional jerk with gold fever, who was not averse to the idea of enslaving the natives, even those who had been kind to him and his countrymen. The author uses several forms of the word "delusion" a few times.

Though Columbus may not have been the first to reach the Americas, he did make it public, triggering the massive and continuous influx of people to the Americas. A partial result of that is the world-shaping superpower that is today's United States. His name has been given to many roads, buildings, vessels, geographical features, and towns in that country. The native populations there, however, would probably have other opinions.

Bergreen's Four Voyages shouldn't be seen simply as an indictment of his subject's failures – as a governor or explorer of the East – but also a historical account of the consequences of empire, and how lofty goals and high moral grounds can never fully justify the damage done to the colonised in the name of religion, wealth and nation.

Even so, Columbus shouldn't be harshly judged for the times his conduct was less than exemplary. His fate depended on the successes he promised he would achieve upon crossing the Atlantic. If he didn't make it, well, who can say that a world unmarked by his voyages would be any better?


18/10/2014  About a week after this review was published, someone wrote to The Star in response to it. The paper published my reply not long after.

Another issue I felt I haven't explored was the 'true image' of Columbus in comparison with one Bartolomé de las Casas. But I think I'll let The Oatmeal handle that.

---

Columbus

The Four Voyages

Laurence Bergreen
Viking (2011)
417 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-670-02301-1

MPH Quill Issue 33, Jan - Mar 2012

This issue is a bit... subdued, but still interesting.

Cover for this issue (left), and the Richard Zimler interview

Andrew Matthews, writer and illustrator of the best-selling self-help Happy books, talks about happiness, attitude, and success. And his latest book on bullying, a departure from his usual theme(s).

Sample shots from the Andrew Matthews feature

...That looks like a real practised smile.

Meanwhile, Eric Forbes speaks with Richard Zimler, author of such books as The last Kabbalist of Lisbon (1996), Hunting Midnight (2003), The Warsaw Anagrams (2011). Also featured is Margaret Stohl, YA author of the Beautiful Creatures series, and the Zapp family who travelled the world in a 1928 vintage Graham-Paige.

First pages of the features for Margaret Stohl (left) and the Zapps

Robert Raymer ponders whether creative writing workshops are fun or torture, while Geoffrey S Walker (The Bomoh's Apprentice (2010) and Blood Reunion (2011)) encounters an otherworldly distraction while writing.

Also included are excerpts of the coffee table book Sikh Community in Malaysia and bits about Charles Dickens, in conjunction with his 200th anniversary of his birth. And visit Cappadocia in the Turkish region of Anatolia, a place known for its chimney-like rock formations. It also has several underground cities where early Christians hid.

There was some talk about an annual issue for 2012, but nothing concrete so far.

News: Dickens 200th, E-Book Apps, And The Amazon Boycott

Last Tuesday (7 February) marked the 200th birthday of Charles John Huffam Dickens, author of such works as A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist and founder of the literary magazine All the Year Round. I'd say more, but I haven't read or am familiar with his life or writings. Maybe it's the language, or the length of some of his works.

Bring in the e-book apps. Last week CNet featured another e-book publishing app: Booktango, plus some self-publishing tips. And the Booktrack soundtrack app for books "works", app-arently. The way things are going for e-books, we'll be watching movies on smartphones.

Red Staple Inc, meanwhile, has announced the release its browser-based, Red Staple Enhanced ePub Authoring Tools. And French firm Aquafadas is offering tools to help comic creators self-publish digitally.

Also: There's this book, A Lifespan of a Fact, which is said to be about the task of fact-checker for a novel in progress. The excerpt, however, does the book little help: it looks like part of an exchange between a beleaguered fact-checker trying to do his job and an author who changes facts to better suit his "art". It does looked hammed up, doesn't it? Despite the apparently less-than-glowing reviews of the book, I'm still curious about it.

Some time ago, Barnes & Noble announced that they won't be selling books published by Amazon, in protest of the latter's allegedly aggressive tactics to monopolise the book publishing sector. That number rose to three with Canadian outfit Indigo and US company Books-A-Million following suit. Then the American Booksellers Association for-profit division IndieCommerce hopped into the anti-Amazon bandwagon.

In the short-term, this tactic may help highlight Amazon's bold moves and open it up to some scrutiny, but I'm not sure what it would do to these companies in the long run as Amazon cranks out more and more popular titles.

• Running on empty: US indie publishing house Grateful Steps in Asheville, Colorado. Working without pay? In the US? That's dedication.
• Edinburgh book festival chief Nick Barley wants authors, not celebrities.
• Writer Adam Mars-Jones's take on Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall wins The Omnivore's inaugural hatchet job award. The prize is given to the 'writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review' of the past year 'not to punish bad writing, but to reward good and brave and funny and learned reviewing'", says the Guardian report.
• Tamil audio books, it seems, are making a comeback in India.
• Another self-publishing success story: Kerry Wilkinson sells over 250,000 copies on Kindle, beating Lee Child, Stieg Larsson and James Patterson.
• The future of academic publishing: accessible, borderless, connected. Sounds like the Internet.
• What's missing from children's books of late? A study suggests that kids' books these days are being set in nature less and less. Imagine that. And imagine this:
  
  "Junior, stop changing your iPhones so often. Money doesn't grow on trees, you know."
  
  "Trees? What are they?"
  
  Shudder. Elsewhere, more and more parents are reading less and less fairy tales to their kids. Why? "Too scary," it seems. Look at the top ten list. Of course "Jack and the Beanstalk" is "unrealistic". It's. A. Fairy. Tale. Make-believe.
  
  If only they knew just how Grimm some fairy tales used to be. Guess they don't make kids like they used to.