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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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"...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."

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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?!