Skip to main content

Shoulda just bought it instead.

There was some confusion with Kinokuniya (and maybe even The Star) and I won't be reviewing Murakami's Running Book. They gave the review copy to someone else instead. Ah well. Alea jacta est and all that.

Wish they could have told me earlier because then I could have just bought the book and read it already instead of having to twiddle my thumbs.

In the meantime I'm reading an ARC of The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb which MPH kindly gave me. So far so good, although the protagonist is getting to be a little too flawed for my liking.

Comments

  1. 1. you get 'jerk'y comments as well? surprising...and all you talk about is/are books. (i'm confused with my tenses this morning!)

    2. btw, what do you think of Wally Lamb, really? i'm interested but not too interested.

    ReplyDelete
  2. i'm sorry to hear that. yeah, we had copies and they sold out pretty quickly. i haven't bought one myself (and i usually buy new murakamis while they're still in the logistics!) pre-orders and reservations and all that. *sigh*

    ReplyDelete
  3. bibi: Well, sometimes I get jerks dropping by but I delete most of them.

    As for Wally Lamb, haven't read his previous books, but this one's all right so far. It's about a teacher who survives the Columbine School massacre but where I'm at the massacre hasn't happened yet. His characterisation is very deep and I find myself very drawn towards the people inside the story even though I think they're kind of assholes :D

    marineko: I noticed new stock has already come in! (Was stalking Kino almost every day last week.) Hopefully when my paycheque comes a copy will still be there for me :)

    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: Confessions of an Old Boy by Kam Raslan

Kam Raslan's right. In the preface for his new book, Confessions of an Old Boy: The Dato' Hamid Adventures he writes that we've known Dato' Hamid all our lives. Seeing as my own dad is an old boy of MCKK, the people I get to meet when he drags me to an Old Boy function and the people he tells me of, reflect the characters found in Kam's book. It really does feel like I've known Dato' Hamid all my life. Dato' Hamid is a civil servant of the Tunku Abdul Rahman generation. He is the sort of person you rarely see nowadays, a fine example of the anachronistic Malay. This generation, groomed in the ways of the colonial British would be out of place not just in 21st century Malaysia, but in Britain too. And yet, Dato' Hamid, in all his snobbishness and patronising ways, is essentially a Malaysian. Without people like him, our country would probably never exist at all. At least not like we know it now. I'm glad that Kam Raslan decided to capture this ...