Book Marks: RA Montgomery, Libraries, And Ursula K Le Guin's Speech

An era died a bit more last week with the passing of Glen A Larson, writer of the series my generation grew up with (Knight Rider, The Fall Guy, BJ and the Bear, etc.); and R. A. Montgomery, author and publisher of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.

Plus:

• As part of a conference organised by the Association of Senior Children's and Education Librarians (ASCEL) in the UK, four young readers talked about the power of libraries and librarians. Author and professional speaker Nicola Morgan was impressed with what they had to say.
• The publisher of (deep breath, please) Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: The Plane, the Passengers—and the True Story of What Happened to the Missing Aircraft says the new book, coming out early next year, "solves mystery of MH370" - except that author says it doesn't. But seems the publisher also screwed up when selecting the cover.
• When freelance journalist Mridu Khullar Relph spoke to an editor at TIME, he shares some tips on how to pitch one's queries. Also: writer Catalina Rembuyan put together this basic guide on e-book publishing (in Facebook, so you gotta log in, BOO) for Malaysian authors - more than just a primer for those considering digital publishing.
• Y'all heard about Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards? Here it is.
• Andrew MacGregor Marshall, author of A Kingdom in Crisis, is apparently "delighted" the book is banned by Thai police. In other words: free publicity.
• How the religious right bought its way into the New York Times best-seller list. Shocked? Don't be. It's not new.
• New York Times book critic Dwight Garner on reading, reviewing and avoiding blindness.
• Publishers get kicked out of the Sharjah International Book Fair over copyright violations and other issues.
• Publishers Pearson and McGraw-Hill pledge to remove climate change denial from their textbooks.
• Black-market crime fiction and spy novels are becoming popular in North Korea, where titles are available for rent. Considering the level of intrigue in the Hermit Kingdom, this shouldn't surprise anyone. I remember reading about crime and noir fiction being popular in Cairo because audiences kind of relate to what's in them.

Book Marks: Pioneer Girl, Bezos's Behemoth, And Lang Leav

Howard Yoon, literary agent and partner at the Ross Yoon Agency in Washington DC, admits that:

There's been a lot of talk about this lately, brought about by the much-publicized dispute between Hachette and Amazon. As a nonfiction literary agent, I wouldn't hesitate to agree that this industry has serious problems, and I think most of my colleagues would agree.

However:

As imperfect as our business is, anyone who wants to write a book of lasting value, a book that can change the way people think about the world, a book that can get national and possibly global distribution in real hard copies, knows that the traditional publishing path is still the best path to take.

Let him tell you why.

Though the Amazon-Hachette spat appears to have ended, it's perhaps a matter of time before the next tussle begins.

Plus:

• "For generations, the Little House books have stood as the canonical versions of Laura Ingalls Wilder's childhood story," writes Ruth Graham in Slate. Now comes her autobiography, first drafted in 1930 and annotated and published after more than 80 years later.
• "Anthony Powell's bleak first book is the funniest novel you've never read." This review almost made me run out and get a copy.
• The poet Lang Leav will be in town on 30 November. Get to know her and her work (a little) before then.
• Amir Muhammad was at the Sharjah International Book Fair to, among other things, talk about translating works in other languages. We're all familiar with how Amir's ability to ... lighten things up, but Publisher's Weekly could have picked better soundbites.
• A Q&A with Lydia Millet, author of Mermaids in Paradise.
• Mexico's "most erotic poet and its most dangerous nun"? A look at a new translation of the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
• "I think this is one of the strongest shortlists in recent years, containing some real literary heavyweights," said Literary Review magazine's Jonathan Beckman about this year's candidates for the Bad Sex Award.
  
  Among the lucky ones are The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham, The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami, The Age of Magic by Ben Okri and Desert God by Wilbur Smith.

Sunshine On A Plate

My preoccupation with pasta dishes might have something to do with how versatile I find them. Plus, pastas are becoming a great alternative to rice in my kitchen.

I haven't come up with a name for one pasta dish I cooked up, but I suspect it might already have one: this thing with fresh tomatoes, anchovies (not ikan bilis), garlic and the optional lemon zest and hot sauce.

Let's call it sunshine pasta.

"Sunshine", because it's bright in colour and taste and relatively light. I don't know what I'd call it if you threw in, say, a few lardons of bacon or lamb ragù.

But the lemon zest fits, and I've wanted something with anchovies aka orang putih punya ikan bilis for a quick throw-together when I can't decide where to eat out.

I'd go easy with the hot sauce, though; too much and you'd have a plate of scorching Sahara rather than the tepid tropics.

Mise-en-place for "sunshine pasta"

First, your mise en place (prep): chop or dice a tomato or two, seeds removed. Thinking of keeping the wet jelly-like mess next time. Then, mince two to three cloves of garlic and slice three or four shallots (which you can substitute with a medium-sized red onion).

Pour some hot sauce (maybe two tablespoons) into a bowl and mash an anchovy or two in it, depending on the size. Some anchovies can be as big as small sardines and salty as heck. If that's the case, I won't salt the pasta water.

Boil your pasta as usual. I like mine al dente. Whether it's fusilli, shells or spaghetti, I'd add several extra pieces to test the texture - which is why I don't bother with timing here.

When it yields under your teeth like a stick of chewing gum (without the crunch of the uncooked stuff), take it out of the water. If you're going to throw the pasta back into the pot to cook with the sauce, take it out sooner, maybe a couple of minutes.

You can mix a bit of the pasta water to the hot sauce-anchovy mix but plain water's also fine. Give it a taste; if it's too salty, junk some of the sauce. Otherwise, you can adjust the seasoning later.

Sunshine on a plate, whatever the weather

Plate the pasta and toss it with a bit of olive oil to prevent it from sticking. Some would run the whole lot through cold water to stop the pasta from cooking further (from the residual heat), but I don't. Often, it's not necessary.

Fry up the garlic for several minutes in oil, then throw in the tomatoes, followed by a little water. Let the lot simmer for a few minutes, then start mashing with a fork until you're satisfied with the texture. I usually lift the pot off the heat for this.

Onto the heat for one more stir and in goes the hot sauce-anchovy mix. Give it a quick stir - beware of any fumes from the hot sauce - and toss the pasta in. Stir for a minute or two to let the flavours get in before plating it.

The lemon zest can go in before or after plating, but be sure to toss and stir well before serving.

Sunshine on a plate.

Book Marks: Wylie Guy, Touchy Pianist

At the at the International Festival of Authors, Andrew Wylie talks about the state of the publishing industry. He said a few other things as well, elsewhere, and they're worth noting.

• A touchy pianist asks The Washington Post to remove a 'bad' review of one of his concerts under the EU's "right to be forgotten" ruling - and now everybody knows why it 'sucked'.
• Literary agents share some of the worst ways to start a novel, just in time for NaNoWriMo.
• The Boss reveals the books and authors that inspired him.
• Not "Waitressrant" - Stephanie Danler and her six-figure novel Sweetbitter.

...Yes, not much from the book world interested me last week. Work's picking up again, and I'm hitting a trough in the creativity department.

Book Marks: Cli-Fi, Horror, And Mainstreaming Fan Fiction

Climate fiction (a.k.a "cli-fi") is hot right now; just ask Paolo Bacigalupi, who told Salon:

"I'm definitely writing my fears," Bacigalupi says. "It's almost therapeutic to at least voice a terror, to say, ‘I'm worried that Lake Powell looks low and Lake Mead looks even lower.' My brain was always wired to worry about what happens if this goes on, what happens if this gets worse?"

Bacigalupi says he's happiest when unaware of what's happening around him. "I think we've all found that. That's why really good news reporting is in decline and why BuzzFeed quizzes are on the rise. We're all happier when we know less, because the details are frightening and haven't really improved much. The more you pay attention, the more horrifying the world is."

What Bacigalupi has written (The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker) can be considered "cli-fi". The term was apparently coined by Dan Bloom, a journalist and self-described "public relations climate activist")

But what does Bacigalupi feel about that? "I didn't think of myself as writing ‘cli-fi' but I'll take the label," he replied. "I'll take any label that makes someone think they might be interested in my stories."

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"Finding light in China's darkness: Why Yan Lianke writes:

I am reminded of Job, in the Old Testament, who after experiencing countless misfortunes said to his wife as she was urging him to curse God, "Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?" This simple response demonstrates that Job understood that his suffering was merely God's way of testing him, and was evidence that darkness and light must exist together.

I don't pretend that I have been uniquely selected by God, as Job was, to endure suffering, but I do know that I am somehow fated to perceive darkness. From these shadows I lift my pen to write. I search for love, goodness and a perpetually beating heart.

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A book by investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez might shed new light on the murder of Matthew Shepard, reports The Guardian:

Jimenez found that Matthew was addicted to and dealing crystal meth and had dabbled in heroin. He also took significant sexual risks and was being pimped alongside Aaron McKinney, one of his killers, with whom he'd had occasional sexual encounters. He was HIV positive at the time of his death.

"This does not make the perfect poster boy for the gay-rights movement," says Jimenez. "Which is a big part of the reason my book has been so trashed."

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From Fifty Shades to After: Why publishers want fan fiction to go mainstream. From The Washington Post:

"The books we love the most are the ones where you close the book and you're still thinking about those characters," said Carrie Bebris, author of the "Mr. and Mrs. Darcy Mysteries," in which the main characters of Austen's beloved "Pride and Prejudice" solve mysteries together. "We want to be drawn into their lives again, because we didn't get enough the first time."

Plus:

• Three horror writers: Tunku Halim, Julya Oui and Eeleen Lee on Malaysian horror fiction - and maybe why it's time for our authors to look into the crypts in our backyards for a good scare. Just in time for Halloween.
• Someone wrote to The Star asking for improved accessibility to online Malay literature. Can someone make this happen?
• Two books: Money Logging: On the Trail of the Asian Timber Mafia by Swiss human rights campaigner Lukas Straumann and The Peaceful People: The Penan and their Fight for the Forest by Aussie journalist Paul Malone were launched in Kuching. "Surprising", considering the former contains criticisms of a former Sarawak chief minister. Then again, "the book, sold at RM105 a copy, is only available from November 3 by mail order," reports The Malaysian Insider. Didn't take long for the former Sarawak chief minister to act on the book's release.
• Haunted by his role in the bombing of the abbey of Monte Cassino, this US airman wrote a novel that became a sci-fi classic.
• The history of gay publishing in one career: Slate's Q&A with editor Michael Denneny.
• Of all the evil figures in literature, does Sauron stand supreme? If he does, it might have a lot to do with his depiction in the Lord of the Rings saga, or a lack thereof: "Throughout The Lord of the Rings Sauron is never described ... All we see is his influence: the endless armies of orcs who ripple forth at his command; the tribes of men who fall beneath his sway; the scorched and blasted plains of Mordor, where nothing grows; the way his malignancy intrudes on the counsels even of the allies ranged against him."
• Has foodism gotten out of hand? Here's John Lanchester on what's wrong with our food culture. "The intersection of food and fashion is silly," he writes, "just as the intersection of fashion and anything else is silly. Underlying it, however, is that sense of food as an expression of an identity that's defined, in some crucial sense, by conscious choice. For most people throughout history, that wasn't true. The apparent silliness and superficiality of food fashions and trends touches on something deep: our ability to choose who we want to be."
• "Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers," says Matthew Yglesias Yes/No? (Hint: NO - not just because I'm with one). Oh, and Amazon's crowdsourced publishing programme Kindle Scout has been launched. Writer Beware lays out some of its pros and cons.
• This might be news to some but the swastika wasn't always a symbol for evil. But is it too late to take it back from the Nazis?

Rocking The (Noodle) Boat

I probably should note that the photos were taken by my makan kaki that day, not me, but she didn't want to be identified by name. Maybe some day.

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Rocking the (noodle) boat

first published in The Malay Mail Online, 31 October 2014


Like that prototype stealth ship the US wants to build, a new craze appears to have sneaked into the Klang River unnoticed ... at least, by me.

A quick search online revealed that this Thai noodle dish used to be served out of boats in Bangkok’s waterways: a small portion of flat rice noodles with pork balls, minced pork, herbs that includes lots of coriander (ugh) and a meat broth thickened with pork blood.

It came in small bowls because those boats — floating stalls, basically — had little room, and the rocking of waterborne vessels came with the risk of being scalded with hot broth. Nothing like the good old days.

Some of these boats were eventually forced on land, but the name stuck: boat noodles.

Boat Noodle co-founder Tony Lim, who has a Thai wife, said in a radio interview that he saw the potential in the dish and brought it to Malaysia.

At the time, the small-portion, bowl-stacking format is already fading in Bangkok (“Maybe they found it too troublesome” Lim said); many stalls over there serve bigger portions now. But he feels the time is ripe for the “Instagrammable” bowl-stacking experience here.

Some of the establishments that exclusively sell this dish include the Boat Noodle outlets in Subang’s Empire Shopping Gallery, Jaya One and Publika; Thaitanic (seriously?) at Scott Garden, along Old Klang Road; and another at Sea Park called The Porki Society, where one of the co-founders has a Thai girlfriend.

Bowl-tower rating: like a red cape to kiasu Malaysians (left); the
portions may be small enough to inhale, but the soups pack a punch

But it was at Zab Zab Boat Noodle at Kuchai Lama where makan kaki Melody and I got our feet wet on the whole boat noodle thing. This was the height of the mania and we had to wait for about 20 minutes for our turn.

Hungry and tired, I stewed outside, glaring at a table of three (a codger and his two sons) that ordered another eight bowls while several towers of empty bowls were still being built.

Hope the whole pile tilts and squashes you all flat, breaks into pieces and shreds you.

I nearly wept with relief when we finally got a table. However, even with three cooks the noodles took a long time to arrive. And the much-touted pandan coconut dessert had run out.

We got eight bowls each: four of the (supposedly) pork-blood broth and clear tom yam soup each. All bowls had the prerequisite pork balls, a little minced pork and some bean sprouts. Looking critically at the bowls, I spooned some oil-soaked chilli flakes into my first bowl of tom yam noodles.

At a boat noodle restaurant, this is average (for a table for two)

Which might have been a mistake. Because after that I couldn’t tell whether the blood-broth noodles were also spiked with chilli.

In spite of the heat, I found myself preferring the clear, citrusy and spicy(!) tom yam variant, which also had a sprinkling of crushed peanuts. I felt the thicker and heartier blood-tinged broth didn’t need the coriander.

Melody and I were assured the recipes are authentic. Considering the competition and the portion size, I don’t think the players would rock the boat too much. I vaguely recall the guy we spoke to, presumably the manager, say his wife was Thai (I see a pattern here).

The concept is minimalist and certainly Instagram-worthy, but I can understand why some might regard the dish as "not for human eats one."

Boat Noodle at Jaya One (with a real boat and a road sign) was singled out for minute servings of cool congealed noodles. I’d visited the place before and after the criticism and it looks like the owners were watching the social media channels.

Other complaints include the serving size. An option to lump multiple servings into one bowl is available at Zab Zab but I’m not sure about the others.

Things appear to have cooled down for boat noodles of late. All fads fade away, but I can’t help wondering how long the spicy, hearty flavours in the little bowls will stay afloat in our fast-changing culinary landscape.

---

Zab Zab Boat Noodle

43G, Jalan Kuchai Maju 7
Off Jalan Kuchai Lama
58200 Kuala Lumpur

Non-halal

Daily, 12pm-10pm

Facebook page

"If Migrants Can't Work The Wok, How Lah?"

Strangely enough, it wasn't the announcement of the ban that seeded the thoughts for this op-ed, but another opinion piece in The Malay Mail Online weeks earlier that seemed to support the ban as it was being mulled.

One of the offending phrases was, "A French masterchef once told me that you can never beat a French chef when it comes to cooking a good French cuisine."

Even if that's true, can anybody identify "good French cuisine" by taste? When even food snobs can be tricked into thinking McDonald's is organic? And do you care who is making your 'Thai' boat noodles?

Hell, maybe the idea of "authenticity" in cuisine (Thanks, Robyn Eckhardt) is bullshit all along.

Still, I thought they'd never go through with it. But 2016, the year this ban goes into effect, is a long way off. Anything can happen in between.

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If migrants can't work the wok, how lah?

First published in The Malay Mail Online, 29 October 2014


So, foreign migrants will not be allowed to cook hawker food in Penang.

The move, ostensibly, is to safeguard the authenticity of Penang's street food culture. Nobody wants to eat hawker food made by foreigners, it's been claimed. The thought of a Myanmarese, Nepali or Bangladeshi frying char koay teow, dressing jiu hu char and stuffing pie tee is just too traumatic for gourmands who endured long hours of travel to finally bask in the glow of one of Malaysia's street food meccas.

I don't know if I should be appalled, angry or amused (or maybe all three) at this.

First of all, most of today's Penangites were descended from foreigners, who brought and shared their own food cultures with the locals. How else did this unique panoply of aromas, colours, flavours and textures arrive and evolve into what we're Facebooking or Instagramming today?

Former chef Tony Bourdain, one of my favourite writers, seems fine with the Hispanic migrants cooking French food in the restaurants he's worked in, saying that they have better work ethics than some Americans. They pick things up, he says, can take it on the chin and cook French cuisine right. Can't migrants to our shores be similarly taught?

Second, how do we determine whether something tastes "100 per cent Penang-mari"? I doubt many Penangites — even those who've never left their neighbourhoods — could agree on one set of flavours that represents the state. Let's not mention the "outsiders", including the sons and daughters of Penang who've been away from home for so long, who probably can't tell, either.

Food writers and lifestyle people tend to lament "the passing of a legend" or "the fading away of an institution" in terms so melancholic you'd wonder if they're mourning the passing of a country's founding father.

But did Char Koay Teow Auntie ever want to be an institution? Maybe all she wanted was to get out of the house or put her kids to school so they won't have to slave over a stove like she did.

Then some rube from CNN encounters her stall and elevates her signature dish to UNESCO-heritage status — when she's on the verge of retirement. What if she's adamant on closing shop and not selling the business off to someone for the sake of preservation?

For every "institution" hyped up in the press there might be a dozen or so somewhere in the boondocks or a quiet alley, hidden from treasure-seeking hipsters, serving a clientèle selfish and smart enough not to share their little gems with the outside world because they know what will happen if they do.

Cooking isn't something you can totally pick up from books. You need stamina, a love of food and the drive to see food happen in your life and share that with people. Maybe that's why I feel some of the best cooks work out of their own kitchens.

Preserving a range of flavours for commercial or entrepreneurial reasons can be even more daunting. You need pros — people trained and drilled to churn out the same things, day in day out. If the descendants of Char Koay Teow Auntie would rather go into sales or blogging than stepping up to the stove and fling flat rice noodles, cockles and bean sprouts all day, an chua-leh?

For me, the bigger issue is how are we going to preserve the hawker fare we grew up with. The hints of cultural jingoism in the response to the foreign cook ban suggests Penangites feel the street food culture is best preserved by keeping it in Penang. I wonder what Bangkok residents feel about the rise of boat noodle places in the Klang Valley.

If the dishes peddled by the hawkers are so unique to the state, we shouldn't be too picky about the custodians. A street food academy or the introduction of modules on street food in existing culinary courses might be more helpful than not letting foreigners in the kitchen.

To assume that our local food culture is done evolving is a fallacy. No culture or civilisation is ever done evolving, except when it's extinct — or insulated from change. Penang's street food culture is no different, and it will eventually fade away if we don't learn to let it flow with the times.

Some Scenes From Kolumpo Kita Punya!

These days I let pictures do the blogging, so here's a bunch of them during the KL Writers and Readers Festival on 18 October, a.k.a. "Kolumpo Kita Punya (Kuala Lumpur Is Ours)!"

Publications for sale at the Merpati Jingga booth; one of the few I could
note, thanks to Raja Azmi's novel Karkuma

Many of the usual suspects (those I've heard of) have set up booths at Dataran Undrgrnd, a cool spot with lots of shoplots and even a fountain underneath the historic Dataran Merdeka.

At left: Liew Seng Tat (I believe), manning the booth for Arif and Zan; and
who I think is the blogger/poet who mysteriously calls herself GDSJHT

Merpati Jingga, Selut Press, Lejen Press, Dubook Press, Sang Freud Press, Terfaktab, Fixi (of course) and many others were present at the one-day event.

It's been almost two weeks since then, so I'm having trouble remembering what most of the photos were about. Maybe each booth should've sported bigger banners or something. So much to take in, so little room in my head - and not enough stamina to last till the evening.

The atmosphere was lively - and got livelier towards the afternoon. When I walked in a book discussion was taking place between the moderator and the guests: Zan Azlee and Arif Rafhan Othman (Adventures of a KL-ite in Afghanistan) and Azlinariah Abdullah (Air Mata Kesengsaraan Rohingya (The Rohingyas' Tears of Anguish)).

From left: Arif, Zan and Azlinariah share stuff about their books with
the audience

Business at many booths seemed brisk. Events like this, featuring local indie publishers, are more common than people think. The industry is vibrant - maybe it's just that they're not coming up with what certain observers of the industry like to read.

Myself, I've a pile of unread books and I'm already a little bibliophobic from the reading I do at work. Money's a bit tight. And I didn't go in to 'cover' the event. I used to enjoy things like this - really enjoy - until I got into publishing.

A separate area held a KL Zine Fest for - what else? - zines. A poetry
performance session took place there, and the performers were so ...
spirited I thought a fight had broken out

Still, I feel heartened by what I saw that day.

All these people, all these books, all the voices and creativity ... it's vibrant, loud and alive.

It's all good.

It's 2014 And I Still See...

...this:

[The s]tock market lets you buy into [a] variety of good businesses...

Don’t get be discourage[d] by their somber [sombre] stories. Instead, find out why they failed. Ask whether did they know [knew] what they were doing? [full stop, not question mark]

Plus[,] when you invest in stocks [–] or any others investment[s,] for that matter [–] of fact, you must have the fundamental believe [belief] that the economy will be fine.

After a certain point, you stop wondering why and just do the needful.

People tend to ignore the fundamental[s] and [are] comfortable put[ting] their money into ventures they completely have no clue know nothing what is it about. [certain fundamentals were probably ignored when writing this sentence, too]

Once you have grape[grasped] - [is the author trying to make me happy?] these points, you will able to...

That explain[s] why he has brilliance[brilliant] views on the stocks that he owns. He is also patience[patient] and discipline[d] - [argh] when [it] come[s] to investing.

It's a living.

(No need to guess which manuscript this came from. I see enough to create examples for educational purposes.)

Book Marks: In Praise Of Copy Editors, Book-Ban Boosts

Author Holly Robinson "can't believe all the mistakes I made in this book -- even after eight or nine revisions, two of which were done in collaboration with my savvy, brilliant editor."

Among these:

"I crossed out 'Tuesday' because later you say it's Wednesday."

"She's fifty-nine here and fifty-eight on page 102. Which one?"

"If he Googles the land line, why is she answering the call on her cell phone?"

Mm-hmm.

So here's her shout-out to all copy editors, "publishing's unsung heroes".

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In China, book ban rumours are boosting authors, thanks in part to social media. A Weibo user was reported as saying:

"These days, smothering someone is as good as crowning that person—previously unnoticed but now many people are interested in his views and works. A 'smothering' order is a reading list."

Among those allegedly blacklisted are "prominent liberal economist" Mao Yushi, newspaper columnist Xu Zhiyuan, Chinese-American historian Yu Ying-shih and media personality Leung Man-tao.

Now, it's not certain whether these writers are officially banned, but over there, as in other places, an imminent sweep of banned titles tend to generate an unusual demand for them as soon-to-be-gone collectibles - which sort of defeats the purpose of such bans in the first place.

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Rob Spillman at Salon wonders why Hugh Howey (Wool) keeps defending Amazon.

In a spectacular bit of short-sightedness, Howey complained to the Times that independent bookstores "blacklist my books."

So, let me get this straight—you would like your books, which are published by the company whose avowed goal is to eliminate brick and mortar stores of any kind, to be carried in the same brick and mortar stores your publisher is trying to destroy?

Spillman also chides Howey for apparently trying (not very well) to pull the wool over some eyes:

In an article in today's New York Times, Howey defended Amazon and characterized Ursula Le Guin's statement that Hachette's tactics amount to censorship as "mostly lying."

Mostly lying? That’s the equivalent of "a little pregnant."

Howey's defense of Amazon is perhaps understandable when you know that it played a role in his break-out book. Still....

Meanwhile, Spillman discusses Amazon and the impacts of its business model on publishing with author Joe Konrath ("who has self-published 24 novels (three of them No. 1 Amazon sellers), hundreds of stories, and has sold over 3 million copies of his books"), who seems to be on Amazon's side.

But, as writer Emily Gould notes, "neither 'side' is exactly easy for authors and readers to be on."

My stand on Amazon should be clear. Even if the future sides with Bezos's behemoth and its ilk, no one entity should be allowed to direct the evolution of bookselling and publishing.

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In The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead mentioned Neil Gaiman's 2013 lecture at the Barbican in London, where he once said there was no such thing as "a bad book for children" ...

...adding that it was "snobbery and ... foolishness" to suggest that a certain author or particular genre might be a baleful influence upon young reading minds—be it comic books or the works of R. L. Stine.

Well-meaning adults, he continued, can easily kill a child's love of reading: "Stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian 'improving' literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant."

Taking Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books as an example, Rebecca Mead thinks that any book that that a child "avidly" embraces can be the start of his or her lifelong love of reading. But...

...What if the strenuous accessibility of "Percy Jackson's Greek Gods" proves so alluring to young readers that it seduces them in the opposite direction from that which Gaiman’s words presuppose — away from an engagement with more immediately difficult incarnations of the classics, Greek and otherwise? What if instead of urging them on to more challenging adventures on other, potentially perilous literary shores, it makes young readers hungry only for more of the palatable same?

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A notebook by photographer, surgeon and zoologist George Murray Levick who was in the ill-fated Scott South Pole expedition was apparently thawed out of the Antarctic ice by climate change.

"After conservation work by the trust in New Zealand the notebook, a Wellcome Photographic Exposure Record and Diary 1910 according to the cover, is remarkably legible, with Levick's name written in the opening pages," The Guardian reported.

Other than some of his observations on the sex lives of penguins (SNRK), the notebook also contained "lists of dates, subjects and exposure details for images he took at Cape Adare – but fascinating to historians as many can be cross-referenced with images now in the Scott Polar Research Institute collection at Cambridge."

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What you read in the news gets cut. But what gets cut and why?

When commissioning news stories, desk editors invariably ask for more words than they need, and writers invariably file more words than they were asked to. This is just common sense: it's better for a story to be too long than too short, because cutting it down is much quicker than padding it out.

...desk editors and subeditors generally find themselves with an article that's anything from 5% to 500% too long for the allocated space.

Also:

• In case you missed it, the Court of Appeal upheld the ban on Kim Quek's March to Putrajaya. Sad, but the so-called march to Putrajaya is on hold sampai tak tahu bila anyway.
• The UK publishes more books per capita than any other country. But it's only the third leading publisher in the world in terms of number of titles published after China and the US, according to the International Publishers Association.
• Is Enid Blyton's The Faraway Tree coming to cinemas?
• Douchebag: where did this insult come from and how to (sort of) apply it.

The Pork Curry Plunge

A dish I've been trying to make, perfect and call my own is curry. So on one weekend, I took the plunge.

Mis en place: prepared items for curry while shallots being fired

Nothing special: pork, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes and Baba's (meat) curry powder.

Shallots being sautéed; hard to prep but work better than red onions

First, sliced shallots are sautéed in oil. Then, came the grated ginger and garlic. After stirring for a while till it smells good, in went the tomatoes, followed by the pork about ten minutes later. Thought I'd try not browning the meat first.

Pre-curry pork, tomatoes and sautéed herbs

When the meat looked all cooked on the outside, the water went in, followed by curry powder (the whole packet) and the root vegetables. After seasoning with salt, all that stewed for about thirty to forty minutes.

Final product, ready to be dried out

After which, the lid came off and the curry (which looked like pie filling - ARGH! - by now), is allowed to cook and dry out a bit for fifteen to twenty minutes. I kept stirring every six to eight minutes to keep the bottom from burning.

Final product is poured out into a bowl, finished with a bit of olive oil and served.

Not like what I'd thought it would be, but still edible

Major complaints: lumpy gravy, melting root vegetables, and still too much gravy. Also, it lacked a certain kind of sweetness (there's no sugar in the house and these days I sweeten my beverages with honey).

I picked out the most solid bits from the bowl and put them on a plate. ...Ah, that is what it's supposed to look like.

Worked much better with less gravy; wish I had some rice, though

Thinking of using another fruit, maybe grated apples. Might also want to blitz the whole lot with a blender for a finer gravy.

Still, not bad for a prototype curry.

Book Marks: Excerpts, Endings, Etc

Author Raja Azmi Raja Sulaiman was reportedly barred from UIAM Kuantan over her novel's content (I mistakenly referred to the author as "he" when tweeting this for the first time).

The article is in Malay, but the gist is that Raja Azmi was supposed conduct a dialogue session about her writing career and her novel Karkuma with students at the International Islamic University campus in Kuantan during its open day tomorrow (18 October). The university's administration apparently cancelled the event over certain elements in that novel. The author is, understandably, disappointed (also in Malay).

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Part of an excerpt from The Vulgar Tongue: Green's History of Slang by Jonathon Green, which reads thus (paragraph split):

Slang's literary origins are widespread and ever-expanding. Its social roots, however, are narrow and focused: the city. If, as has been suggested, the story of standard English is that of a London language, so too is that of English slang. And the pattern would be repeated elsewhere as colonies became independent and rural settlements became major conurbations.

London's chroniclers had always noted the urban vocabularies, though none before the eighteenth century had rendered their discoveries lexicographical. The pioneer of such investigations, John Stow, laying out Elizabethan London in his Survey of London (1598), had barely touched on language (his text offers gong farmer, a latrine cleaner, night-walker, a thief, and white money, meaning silver coins). In time those who told London's story would offer a far more central position to the city's speech, alongside its population and topography.

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India's home-grown thriller writers are sneaking up on international names on the best-seller lists. Some possible reasons:

Some attribute the rise of the thriller to publishers being more willing to take risks in what was once a very conservative market; others to the hundreds of millions of young, literate people in India who for the first time can afford books priced at about £1. There has also long been a strong pulp fiction tradition in local languages, particularly Bengali, Urdu and Tamil.

The thrillers also provide a sense of accountability, which resonates with readers in a country of deep inequality where systems of justice are profoundly flawed. Many feature investigative journalists on the trail of corrupt big businesses or politicians in league with the police or judges.

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Apparently, Benjamin Hale (The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve, 2011)) can't review a novel because he didn't like it. So he wrote a letter, presumably to an editor, to explain:

This book has been an anchor around my neck ever since you sent me a galley back in the winter. I have finally clawed my way out to page 700-something and still the remaining 300-some pages loom ahead, foreboding and without promise. At some point in the more than six months it's taken me to get this far into the book, I started forcing myself to read it by taking it to the gym with me. It made sense for the task of reading this book to accompany my trying to lose weight on the stationary cycle: both are joyless, laborious, repetitive chores done in a state of squinty-eyed perspiration and only in the distant hope that, eventually, I will finally get rid of something heavy.

No clue as to which novel he's referring to (I really want to know!). But it sounds like one of those that are laboriously difficult to read - and possibly write. A "good" book by some standards but "difficult" by others.

Could this be a creative way of commenting on whether "good" books must also give the reader some pleasure in the slog, or merely a rant by someone who can't finish a book and wants out of a commitment?

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From how The Sopranos ended, an anatomy of endings. Why do we seem so hung up over "The End"?

Endings haunt us because they are our mortality formalized. They give us a simulated symbolic version of our own endings, which are either the Clincher, sudden and unexpected and ironically right, or else the Closer, the deathbed gathering. The grim trick, of course, is that, as long as we maintain the sense of an ending, it isn't over.

...As long as a sense of the ending hovers, the story goes on. We close the book, leave the theatre, shut off the screen, and return to the world, bewildered, maybe, but still breathing. In this way, a bad finish is a great gift, indignation at an unsatisfying ending being the surest sign of life.

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Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower is "rediscovered" through her re-issued works. What to expect:

Harrower's writing is witty, desolate, truth-seeking, and complexly polished. Everything (except feeling, which is passionately and directly confessed) is controlled and put under precise formal pressure. Her sentences, which have an unsettling candor, launch a curling assault on the reader, often twisting in unexpected ways. And although her novels can feel somewhat closed, and tend to repeat themselves in theme, her prose is full of variety.

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"North America is a crime scene"? An excerpt from An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. A taste (paragraph split):

Jodi Byrd writes: "The story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime." It is necessary, she argues, to start with the origin of the United States as a settler-state and its explicit intention to occupy the continent. These origins contain the historical seeds of genocide. Any true history of the United States must focus on what has happened to (and with) Indigenous peoples—and what still happens.

It's not just past colonialist actions but also "the continued colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands" that allows the United States "to cast its imperialist gaze globally" with "what is essentially a settler colony's national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy," while "the status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d'etre."

Also:

• Fixi is calling for entries for Cyberpunk: Malaysia, the next Fixi Novo anthology, which will be edited by Zen Cho (Spirits Abroad (Fixi Novo, 2014)). The deadline's 31 December. The first entries came in several hours after the announcement. It's like these writers have something lying in wait somewhere for just such an occasion.
• In The Guardian, The Man Booker Prize in numbers. The Prize is significant this year because it's been opened to American authors, but it was Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North that scooped up this year's award.
• From The New Yorker, some chef stories, including Anthony Bourdain's "Don't eat before reading this", plus pieces on Mario Batali, David Chang, Julia Child, Alice Waters and Grant Achatz.
• Why do books come out in hardback before paperback? The Economist explains:
  
  

  Known as "windowing", this sales strategy is also used in the film industry, where titles are released in the cinema several months before being sold on DVD. Like cinema tickets, hardcover books generate more profit per unit than paperbacks. And just as cinephiles like to see films on the big screen, collectors enjoy the hardback's premium quality. ...Hardbacks' durability means they are also popular with libraries. And they hold a certain snob value, too: literary editors traditionally don't review paperbacks.

  
  Also from The Economist: the future of the book.
• Ten grammar mistakes that aren't - sort of.

MPH Warehouse Sale 2014, Part II

Yes, it's back, from 21 to 26 October at:

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

Hours: 8am to 6pm

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The map to the venue is here.

Kindly note that the Petaling Jaya City Council has made several roads around PJ into one-way routes beginning 12 October 2014; details can be found here (PDF file).

Book Marks: ZI In Court, And Evening Mists In Film?

So this happened yesterday:

"In a landmark case that will determine the extent of the freedom of expression in Malaysia, the country's top court will weigh today the constitutionality of a state Shariah law to ban "religious" publications deemed against Islam," The Malay Mail Online reported.

This is related to the Selangor's religious authorities' raid on the premises of ZI Publications and seizure of the Malay-language version of the book, Allah, Liberty and Love, by Canadian writer Irshad Manji two years ago. A ban on the book was overturned by the High Court in September 2013.

Meanwhile, the Court of Appeal lifted a ban on Perak Darul Kartun and 1 Funny Malaysia, two books by cartoonist Zunar, on the grounds that they did not threaten national security or disrupt public order.

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"Thanks to Aunty, a local film studio has set itself the ambitious task of turning an international bestselling novel into a movie." Ya meh? Apparently, yes.

So an article by June Wong on how Tan Twan Eng's Man Asia winner The Garden of Evening Mists would make a great movie managed to catch the eye of Henry Tan, Astro's chief operating officer for strategy, content and marketing.

"Fascinated by how Psy's Gangnam Style video brought South Korea world attention and 'adoration', I suggested this highly acclaimed novel set in Malaysia written by a Malaysian could be our ticket to fame if it was turned into a movie by a Hollywood or British studio," Aunty wrote.

No, "Aunty", you SO DID NOT compare a Man Asia literary prize winner with a human joke magnet, did you?

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Ben Yagoda wonders if the long novel is still relevant.

So many door-stopping novels would find their best form as novellas ... They do not, for two main reasons. The first is that authors generally like to hear themselves talk, and editors, with so much on their minds, especially these days, aren't sufficiently ready and willing to pare the extraneous.

...Also, since the market, as it's been defined for a pretty long time, doesn't have a place for novellas and 25,000-word nonfiction works, ideas that would work best at such length get artificially bulked up, like an offensive lineman on steroids. E-books are a promising receptacle for shorter texts, but the form has a ways to go before authors and readers alike are comfortable
with it.

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Martin Scorsese made a film about The New York Review of Books and Laura Miller over at Salon thinks it can teach us a thing or two about the true worth of writing and editing.

"Consumers who demand that the price of e-books be slashed to less than half the hardcover list price reveal a belief that the work and expertise of a writer are worth less than a handful of paper and cardboard," Miller writes. Also:

Even readers who claim to value non-automated editing have little sense of a editor's actual responsibilities. The familiar grouse that "no one edits anymore" is usually followed by lamentations over the typos, grammatical errors and misspellings someone has found in traditionally published works. But correcting that kind of micro-mistake is the job of a copyeditor (or in some cases a proofreader), not the editor. So if the editor is not in charge of fixing "spelling, etc," then what does an editor do?

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"Have we fallen out of love with e-readers?" asks The Independent, which then links this with findings that suggest people retain more of what they read on print rather than the screen.

Publisher Scott Pack seems to concur. "I retain a very physical memory of a book for some time after reading it," he says in the report. "I can recall whether a particular scene or quote appeared on the left- or right-hand page, towards the top or bottom, and sometimes the page number, too."

He also highlighted some related sentiments from a bookbuyer on Twitter about buying e-books: "From a letter I received today 'Occasionally I do buy a digital book but it feels a bit like getting takeaways instead of cooking dinner'."

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In Zimbabwe, a writer bids farewell to book writing, no thanks to "book pirates, photocopying technology and weak copyright infringement laws".

Ignatius T. Mabasa's novel, used as a national school set text for studying the Shona language, was pirated by bootleggers, leaving him and his publisher high and dry. But it's not just authors:

During the 2014 National Arts Merit Awards, I shared a table with Enock Chihombori and when he was announced winner for his film -- Gringo the Troublemaker, instead of rejoicing, Chihombori wept uncontrollably before telling the nation that he had used family savings to produce the film, but he never benefited at all from his creative talents. The film was pirated and available on the streets before it was even launched.

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Beware of "popular" self-published books on Ebola being sold on Amazon. Seems they're written by quacks aren't doctors - and they're part of the problem, not the solution, says WHO and the UN.

"Both the World Health Organization and the United Nations have said [misinformation has] contributed to the spread of the disease, says the Washington Post report. "In fact, per the WHO, one of the most persistent obstacles to fighting Ebola is 'rumors on social media claiming that certain products or practices can prevent or cure' it — when in fact, they can't."

This is one reason why the industry still needs gatekeepers.


Also:

• Just in case: here's how to request rights reversion from your publisher.
• Over at Singapore, a literary prize is "not on the same page" with publishers.
• Meet Patrick Modiano, French writer and winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature - congratulations. And check out the bump to the Amazon ranking for Modiano's novel Missing Person.
• A pop-up bookshop selling music-related titles and hosting gigs - is this the future of bookselling?

Book Marks: Fantasy Killings, Indian Detectives And Cairo Noir

Author Hilary Mantel wrote about killing Margaret Thatcher and some people weren't happy. Never mind that Maggie's no longer here.

James Poulos wonders what drives people to create such scenarios, and argues that assassination fantasies expresses (I think) our urge to turn to murder. But the "artist" should, he says, bear in mind that what they visualise can become reality, especially in such trying times as these:

...no human with a feeling intellect should bash out a dramatized act of butchery without feeling some sickness over the possibility that it might be acted out in real life. At the very least, even an accidentally copycat killing makes your dark imagination feel complicit in a curse—a sensation experienced every day by people who desperately try not to visualize the crash of the airliner they’re on. For artists, that moral sensibility, superstitious or no, ought to be cranked to 11.

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Coming next year: the adventures of Mumbai-based detective Ashwin Chopra by Vaseem Khan. The detective's début in The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra will have him paired up with an unusual partner: a baby elephant.

Hāthī Mērē Sāthī would've been more apt.

The report goes on to say that "If successful, Khan's creation could be joining a number of other well-known Indian crimefighters: Inspector Sartaj Singh of the Vikram Chandra novels 'Sacred Games' and 'Love and Longing in Bombay,' HRF Keating's Mumbai man Inspector Ghote, Byomkesh Bakashi of Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay's series, as well as Satyajit Ray's Calcuttan PI, Feluda, who was accompanied not by a baby elephant but by his younger cousin Tapesh."

Hmm, no mention of Tarquin Hall's Vish Puri (beware, web site has audio on by default)? Is it because Puri's a private eye and not a policeman?

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Seems noir is making a comeback in the Middle East.

"The genre has long been popular in the Middle East though often considered too lowbrow for local and international scholarship," Jonathan Guyer writes in The Guardian. "Mid-century paperbacks – shelves of unexamined pulp, from Arabic translations to locally produced serials, along with contemporary reprints of Agatha Christie – languish in Cairo's book markets. Writer Ursula Lindsay quips: 'Cairo is the perfect setting for noir: sleaze, glitz, inequality, corruption, lawlessness. It's got it all.' "

Almost excited to see if any of these reaches our shores.

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Peter Foges considers Martin Amis's Zone of Interest as the latter's tour de force and delves into Amis's exploration into Nazi evil.

"However since he simply could not fathom Hitler's depravity even after plowing through every book and interviewing every 'expert,' he found himself stuck," says Foges. Until he encountered the words of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi:

"One must not understand what happened," wrote the most morally eloquent of the Holocaust's survivors. "Because to understand is almost to justify. ... There is no rationality in the Nazi hatred; it is a hate that is not in us; it is outside man."

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Ellora's Cave, a publisher of romance and erotica, is suing a blogger for reporting its troubles on a blog post and is apparently also demanding the real identities of those who commented on that post.

I thought it was a pretty familiar story; lots of such cases have happened elsewhere, but most of these generally backfired. And it seems this phenomenon has a name: the Streisand effect which, according to the Wiki, is where "an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet."

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One of my favourite book people sums up why an editor of a book magazine doesn't want to feature a certain book - not just because it's a "self-published indie" volume, I hope.

He also admits there could be lots of "interesting, engaging, informative, moving, timely and/or newsworthy" books out there that are being ignored - "and that's a tragedy. But it's not a tragedy that I can solve by reading 25 pages of every one of the 300,000 self-published books that would land in our office if we opened the door."


Also:

• Here's how to diagram a sentence. This is an old technique to visualise parts of a sentence that has fallen out of use. "But, like fresh apple pie made from scratch, sometimes sticking to the basics is best. Diagramming a sentence creates a clear visual that helps you analyze what you're writing."
• Who has heard of this book critic called Ed Champion? Not many, until he threatened a writer over a perceived slight. A background on him and the incident is one of several related articles on Salon, and his story has gained some traction. Over at The Daily Beast, someone wonders if Champion is now the most hated man in books.
• I heard That Book by Mr Bak Kut Teh Who's On The Run has finally been published. Like many others, we had the honour of being offered his manuscript but thought his chances of being published would be better elsewhere. While you wait for its arrival (if ever), how about some of the 15,000 titles Harlequin just made available on Scribd?
• And because we can never have too much Anthony Bourdain, here's Hollywood Reporter's profile on the man who "could save CNN". They expect so much of him since Kitchen Confidential.

Book Marks: Best-seller, Memoir Moms

The Hindustani Academy has started publishing (re-issuing, rather) rare out-of-print Hindi and Urdu literary books, beginning with a book on "legendary king" Raja Bhoj.

Which can only be good. It's just that anyone trying to find out more from the Academy's web site would have to learn Hindi. Maybe we can e-mail?

And here's more good news:

Made in Malaysia makes the top of MPH's weekly list of best-selling
local non-fiction for the week 15-21 September 2014

Naturally, I'm chuffed, because this was a challenging project. The launch was a bit hectic, but I was impressed overall. There was music, spoken drama, a radio show host, a huge crowd, and more.

Though bookstores in the Klang Valley should already be stocking it, copies might only be available at outlets and stores outstation sometime next week. Here are more details on the book and a bit about the launch.

And I got the news today that we're reprinting this book. Pedalling Around the Peninsula chronicles the gruelling, sometimes zany adventures of a lady and her friend who took 37 days to cycle around Peninsular Malaysia.

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Beleaguered national airline MAS is dissatisfied over a satirical "news report" on a parody news site and a book on the fate of MH370. The latter is rather upsetting, as the book suggests the late pilot of the plane downed it in an apparent murder-suicide attempt.

The authors: journalist Geoff Taylor and Ewan Wilson, former CEO of a defunct airline and a "convicted New Zealand criminal fraudster", hit back at MAS and defended their findings as "the result of a robust analysis of the known facts".

I guess people just can't get enough of a mystery. Whatever happened to the plane and all aboard, it's all conjecture so long as they remain missing. But yeah. Once you have a rap sheet, it's tough to sell certain things.

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After "Blade Runner" Oscar Pistorius was acquitted of murder, Reeva Steenkamp's mother is reportedly coming out with a book that "will tell, for the first time, the full story behind the most dramatic trial of the 21st century," according to the publisher. This came after the buzz over Pistorius publishing his own book about the incident, which seems to be in doubt.

Another sort-of-famous mom who's publishing is Susan Klebold, whose son Dylan was one of the Columbine shooters.

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It's Banned Book Week now in the US and here's a look at banned books through five infographics. Graphic nudity I understand. But nudity in text?

Another candidate for (unnecessary) banning is Adam Mansbach's You Have to F—king Eat, which is scheduled for release on November 12 and- Oooh, LEMURS!

Ring-tailed lemurs, from the look of it

Everything's better with lemurs. Who'd ban lemurs? They're critically endangered already.

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What happens when the posts in a once-thriving blog start coming in slowly; the emotions in the writing, if any, feel forced; and there are more product placements and promos than in-depth pieces? Probably signs of blogging burnout.

(Oh, expect lots of listicles, too. And maybe lemurs...)

Though this New York Times piece is about DIY and interior design blogs, it pretty much revisits an old issue. For one, are bloggers not entitled to some off time when it all starts becoming more of a slog because they make big bucks?


And finally, let Neil Gaiman tell you about Sir Terry Pratchett. "Some people have encountered an affable man with a beard and a hat, Gaiman writes in The Guardian. "They believe they have met Sir Terry Pratchett. They have not."

Launch of Made in Malaysia

The Malaysia-Day launch of Alexandra Wong's Made in Malaysia: Stories of Hometown Heroes and Hidden Gems took place at MPH's Nu Sentral flagship bookstore.

The store put up about thirty-plus chairs in the beginning. We were told (or promised, rather) that more people will be coming, so the staff took out all the chairs they had (which would STILL not be enough).

Noelle Lim, Queen of the Breakfast Grille programme on BFM89.9 and the author's long-time friend was picked as the emcee for the launch.

The author, Alexandra Wong, started signing books early, almost an hour before the launch began. Her book is a compilation of selected articles from her "Navel Gazer" column in English-language daily The Star.

She got the idea of getting launch attendees to write their names on these stones from somewhere online. She plans to put these stones in a big glass bowl that will take place of pride in her new digs - another element that's in line with her community project of a book.

Every now and then, Alexandra takes time out from signing books to greet her guests and their friends and relatives. Her articles feature the whole gamut of Malaysians, from everyday people to luminaries, and she cherishes every encounter.

It got a bit hard for her to personally thank everyone who attended the launch as the day wore on. Among many of the attendees are Alex's parents and her friends/acquaintances and their relatives or friends.

Showtime was just after 3pm.

As expected, we had no problem filling seats - just getting them. Around the middle of the launch, the bookstore people brought out wooden stools from somewhere inside the store, but it remained standing room only until the end.

Noelle did a fine job as an emcee, even though she claimed this was her first time. Alex thought she'd exceeded expectations.

Singer-songwriter Ray Cheong volunteered his time and talents to open the launch. When he and Alex met, she'd begun her freelance writing career and he was selling cameras.

Now, she's an author and columnist and he's got an album (sold at indie talent venue Merdekarya) and, among other things, opened for Pixie Lott's 2012 Kuala Lumpur tour.

Like I said, no problems filling seats...

...just finding them.


Young Visaghan delivered a dramatised reading of a story in the book, "My superwoman BFF". Said superwoman is his mom, Shivanee Selvaratnam, one of Alex's childhood friends, who couldn't make it and pledged her husband, sons, mother-in-law and several relatives to stand in her stead.

Seems she coached the kid to memorise the lines by heart and, after getting Alex to eat out of his hand during his first encounter, had the audience in the palm of the same hand as well. He's like, what, only ten?

An unscheduled and surprising bit of entertainment was provided by Semai craftsman Raman bah Tuin, who took about two minutes to introduce himself and play the nose flute for the audience.

Alex went all the way to Raman's home to interview him for an article in MAS's in-flight magazine, Going Places (which is pretty much her ambition). If the audience thought his nose-flute playing was enchanting, they should hear it at his backyard, closer to nature.

The author herself finally took the stage to speak about the book and invite some "guests of honour" to share the spotlight with her.

Of course, Alex's parents were first. Their presence at the launch was significant, as she fought for years to earn their (especially her mom's) approval of her freelancing writer's career.

To Alex's surprise, Mrs Wong took the mic. The author's gung-ho, always-seize-the-moment attitude definitely came from her mother. "She never told me about this book until the last minute," Mrs Wong told the audience, to their amusement.

Quiet, dignified Mr Wong, meanwhile, isn't used to being in the limelight.

One thing she forgot to mention: that fellow sitting in the barber's chair on the cover of the book? That's her dad, Mr Wong, getting a haircut at Ipoh's Star Barber.

More and more of the guests of honour - some of the "hometown heroes" and "hidden gems" Alex encountered so far in her career - are invited up the stage and would later sign the mock book towards the end of the event.

This is, after all, their book and their stories.

I'd been sick (sinuses and itchy throat) for the past several days; I only felt a bit of it during the launch, but it got even worse later that night. And it's the first launch I actively participated in since becoming an editor....


This is a truncated version of my Facebook photo album of the event, which for some reason is still "unavailable" despite its "Public" status (Facebook can be so dysfunctional).

Made in Malaysia should be available now at bookstores in the Klang Valley, including Borders, Kinokuniya, Cziplee and, of course, MPH. Some details about the book can be found here.