Skip to main content

One Honking Big Book Launch.

So yesterday I went to Lydia Teh's launching of her latest book, Honk! If You're Malaysian. This probably ranks as the grandest book launch I've ever attended. Even that Roald Dahl launch for Rhyme Stew I went to when I was a kid couldn't beat this.

Congratulations, Lydia, for being able to launch your book with much fanfare.

I should also state here that the book is a really wonderful read, just like her previous collection, Life's Like That. Having already had a chance to read it in public, I can now tag it "Laugh-out-loud-funny".

It also certainly benefits from having Hassan Bahri's illustrations accompanying the text. The illustrated cover he did for the book is one of the best covers I've seen on a locally published book. (One that comes close that I can think of right now is Cinta Ubi dan Laksa, a Malay young adult novel-comic hybrid).

Having Adibah Amin write the intro is a huge plus too... though I thought it was a little insubstantial. (Yeah, yeah I know it's only an intro... but I was left feeling with a "huh-that's-it?" feeling.)

I managed to say hi to Xeus, Yvonne Foong, Lydia Teh (obviously) and Eric, who I finally got to meet. And he really is nice like so many other people say! Hooray! (As a side note, according to Xeus, seems MPH Publishing needs editors. Think you're up for the job? Get in touch with Eric.)

Comments

  1. Hi Ted, it's the first time I'm having a launch for my book. It's great that it's held together with the MPH charity carnival, that's why it's so grand. Thanks for your kind words about Honk! Glad you found it laugh-out-loud funny. Honk honk!

    ReplyDelete
  2. No problem, Lydia. Your book deserves it! :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm going to Clarion West!

So yeah! I'm going to Clarion West this year! If you didn't know, Clarion West is a really awesome science fiction and fantasy writing workshop that runs for six weeks in summer every year at Seattle and is usually taught by a faculty of award-winning authors and editors. Many students who attend this workshop also go on to have illustrious writing careers of their own too. I've been meaning to attend this workshop (or its sister workshop, Clarion UCSD, which is the original Clarion workshop but runs in San Diego around the same time) for years now but never had the courage to apply. Many reasons as to why: didn't think I'd have money for the most part, didn't think I was good enough, didn't think I could leave work long enough, didn't think I could leave family behind, etc. But something sparked inside of me late last year. I felt I should at least give it a go this time round. So I did. They requested a sample of my best work and an applicatio...

Dedicated by Burgess.

I've been wanting to blog this for ages, but I've never managed to make the scanner work properly... that is till now. Some years back, my dad was browsing the shelves of NovelHut, Ipoh's best second-hand bookstore, and found a copy of Anthony Burgess's Time for a Tiger . Price? RM2. (That would be approximately USD$0.60 or GBP£0.30). Did I mention it was a hardcover first edition? Here's the dedication page, with the famous dedication written in Jawi. Jawi is the Malay language written in Arab script, a norm early last century. Nowadays, Malay is written in Romanised form. The dedication says: " Kepada sahabat-sahabat saya di Tanah Melayu " which translates into "To my friends in Malaya." On the opposite page, proof this is the first edition. A first edition is probably valuable by itself. But this copy has something extra that makes it even more special--a personal dedication by Burgess himself to a friend: If you can't make the writing out...

REVIEW: Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami.

UPDATE: My Wind/Pinball review can be found here . ISBN: n/a Publisher: n/a Paperback: 160 pages In Murakami fan circles, simply owning a copy of Pinball, 1973 is a mark of hardcore-ness. Like Hear the Wind Sing before it, Haruki Murakami does not allow English translations of Pinball, 1973 to be published outside of Japan. Back in the 80s, Alfred Birnbaum translated it into English and Kodansha published it as a novel for Japanese students who wanted to improve their English. While the English edition of Hear the Wind Sing continues to be reprinted and sold in Japan (and available for a moderate sum via eBay, see my review ), Kodansha stopped its reprint runs of the English edition of Pinball, 1973 and has now become a collector's item, fetching vast amounts of money on auction sites and reseller stores. Last time I checked, the cheapest copy went for USD$2500. Of course, Murakami addicts or the curious can always download a less than legal PDF of the book, painst...