- December 8, 2009
- October 2009
- September 15, 2009
- Monday, June 8, 2009
- Monday, May 18, 2009
- Tuesday, April 21, 2009
- Monday, March 16, 2009
- Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2009
- Tuesday, Jan 20, 2009
- Current Year
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December 8, 2009
Location: Helen's house: Block 11 Upper Bukit Timah View #02/02 Bukit Regency. It is past Courts and then the petrol stations on Upper Bukit Timah road. My home phone is 64646141 in case you are lost.
Time: 7:00 for 7:30 start
It's a Book Swap! Buy a favorite book of yours (you should have read it), wrap it up, and come along. You'll go home with something new to read!
October 2009
Location: Megan's house:
Time: 7:00 for 7:30 start
Genre focus: Graphic novels
Author: Guy Delisle
Texts: Burma Chronicles
A few reviews:
September 15, 2009
Location: Adele's house: 63 Cavenagh Road, 01-01 Cavenagh Mansions, Singapore 229618. Nex to the Istana. / MRT: Dhoby Ghaut/Somerset
Time: 7:00 for 7:30 PM
Genre focus: Biography / autobiography
Author: J.G. Ballard
Miracles of Life - autobiography
The Kindness of Women - autobiographical novel
Empire of the Sun -- autobiographical novel
A few links of interest:
- BBC Radio 3 January 2008 interview with JG Ballard and Martin Amis. Ballard speaks about his autobiography Miracles of Life. Listen to the interview
- Melvyn Bragg interviews JG Ballard on The South Bank Show (podcast directory):
- 34. J.G. Ballard Vodcast
download (video/x-m4v, 147.19Mb)
35. J.G. Ballard Podcast
download (audio/mpeg, 8.57Mb)
JG Ballard talks to Melvyn Bragg about his fiction, and the themes and obsessions which dominate his prophetic and unsettling “cautionary tales.”
- 1984 J.G. Ballard in conversation with Matthew Hoffman re "Empire of the Sun" -- British Library audio download
- Review of Ballard's collected short stories in the New York Times, Sep 2009
- <<Whether you embrace or reject on his behalf the label “science-fiction writer” will indicate whether you regard it as praiseful or damning, but no one reading Ballard could doubt the tidal gravity of his intellect or the stark visionary consistency of the motifs that earned him that rarest of literary awards, an adjective: Ballardian. Now, and not a moment too soon, comes The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (Norton, $35), a staggering 1,200-page collection of a lifetime’s labors in the medium in which Ballard was perhaps most at home.... Taking the measure of a writer’s life’s work can be intimidating, yet I hope this book will be not just purchased but read. Ballard’s sensibility rewards immersion; indeed, it thrives there. He may have written both an autobiographical diptych of novels (“Empire of the Sun” and “The Kindness of Women”) and an actual autobiography, but these stories form another version of autobiography: one inadvertent, oracular and deeply telling.>>
- Interview with Claire Walsh, JG Ballard's partner for over 40 years - after his death
- jgballard.com
- Ballardian
- Obituary, April 19, 2009: Telegraph (UK), Guardian (UK), New York Times
- Guardian's whole webpage devoted to appreciation of Ballard and his work
Monday, June 8, 2009
Location: ??? house:
The focus will be on David Foster Wallace
I have been collecting links on Delicious about him: see http://delicious.com/TheLibrarianEdge/david_foster_wallace
Definitely read the college commencement address he gave at Kenyon College a few years ago -- which the Wall Street Journal published when he died and which has recently been put into book form under the title, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.
His books are readily available in the National Library -- and you can definitely find his book of essays Consider the Lobster at both Borders and Kinokuniya. In that I recommend two essays in particular:
-
- "Big Red Son" -- Wallace's account of his visit to the AVN Awards, an event that has been dubbed the Academy Awards of pornographic film, and its associated Expo. (originally published in Premiere as "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment" under the pseudonyms Willem R. deGroot and Matt Rundlet)
- "Up, Simba" - Wallace writes about John McCain's 2000 Presidential campaign, famously called "The Straight Talk Express." The title is a comment from a television news camera man, who says "Up, Simba" before hoisting his camera onto his shoulder. (originally published inRolling Stone and as an e-book through Random House's iPublish imprint; later republished in the context of the 2008 presidential race asMcCain's Promise.)
- "Consider the Lobster" -- available online as a PDF
- My favorite is his long essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", which was published in a collection of the same name. The book is available at the National Library, but I've never seen it for sale here. It was published in Harper's Magazine as "Shipping Out: on the (nearly lethal) comforts of luxury cruise". (That PDF is only 24 pages long -- and I scanned the whole thing from the book and it was so big I put it in 5 PDFs, which makes me think the book version is longer. Anyway, if you want, I can email you the 5 PDFs of the essay as scanned from the book -- or just read the Harper's one.
If you want to know more about the story of his life -- and death -- I recommend this Rolling Stone article or this New Statesman article.
No, I haven't read his most famous novel -- Infinite Jest -- and I don't have time to between now and June.
He's also written short stories -- which I also haven't read. Perhaps others could recommend some??
Monday, May 18, 2009
Location: Katie's house, 05-01, Block 12, Kensington Park condo -- entrance off Serangoon North Ave One, next door to the Secondary Garden Secondary School
Gould's Book of Fish -- by Richard Flanagan
NB: Kinokuniya lists the book as being in stock -- and the National Library has several copies:
Click on the image below to read an interview with Richard Flanagan:
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Location: Adele's house
ADDRESS/DIRECTIONS: 63 Cavenagh Road, 01-01 Cavenagh Mansions, Singapore 229618. Nex to the Istana. / MRT: Dhoby Ghaut/Somerset
Time: 7:00 for 7:30 PM
Seven Types of Ambiguity -- by Elliot Perlman
REVIEW:
<<Cheekily swiping the title of William Empson's seminal work of literary criticism, this second novel by Perlman, an Australian writer, presents seven first-person narrators—whose lives are all nudged off course by a man's abduction of his ex-girlfriend's young son—in a compulsively readable tangle. At the center is a psychiatrist who treats several of the characters, and whose narrative provides some basis for assessing the partial perspectives of the six others. The abductor's self-justifying rants about truth, literature, and poststructuralist theory win over his shrink and, it seems, everyone else. Still, if the individual stories of these characters are compelling, their attempts at Empsonian hermeneutics are less so.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker>>
Monday, March 16, 2009
TIME/PLACE: 7:00 for 7:30 pm -- at Cathy's house
ADDRESS/DIRECTIONS: 60 Greenleaf View. Approach via Maryland Drive off Holland Road opposite Jelita, or from Ming Teck Park off Sixth Avenue. Greenleaf Road continues from Maryland Drive and Greenleaf View is the next turning after the restaurant on the RHS. 60 is second on the right.
The White Tiger - by Aravind Adiga (the Booker Prize winner)
Guardian (UK) article on how the book caused an uproar in India
Aravind Adiga page on Mahalo (links to all kinds of information about him)
Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2009
Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux 
TIME/PLACE: 7:00 for 7:30 pm -- at Ingrid's house
ADDRESS/DIRECTIONS: 7 Stevens Road (next to the Tanglin Club carpark entrance); Ingrid's cellphone 8113-7201 (in case you are lost)
Book availability does seem to be a problem -- as it's not in print -- and a few of you have told me you've had trouble sourcing it.
SUPPLEMENTAL/REPLACEMENT READING:
Barb suggested we read a chapter from Paul Theroux's latest travel book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (available at Borders and Kinokuniya), which is a repeat journey of his The Great Railway Bazaar and features a chapter on his most recent visit to Singapore. He gave a talk at the National Library in early 2006, which several of us attended, and he comments on it in the chapter. He also makes no bones about what he thinks of Singapore -- based on his experience working here in the early 60s and his visits since then.
Here is that chapter on Singapore as a PDF you can download: PaulTheroux_re_Singapore.pdf
Another journalistic piece on Singapore which I like to give people is a New Yorker profile of Lee Kwan Yew published in 1992.
Part 1 to download: Lee Kuan Yew profile Part1.pdf
Part 2 to download: Lee Kuan Yew profile Part2.pdf
Part 3 to download: Lee Kuan Yew profile Part3.pdf
And here's one more article on Singapore -- by another author: William Gibson article on Singapore 1993 -- Disneyland with the Death Penalty.pdf
By the way, I just discovered that Louis Theroux, the BBC journalist, is one of Paul Theroux's sons. If you've never seen his documentaries, I recommend you go to his YouTube channel and watch a few videos.
See also this fan website on Paul Theroux.
National Library copies of Millroy the Magician:
Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!
Tuesday, Jan 20, 2009
TIME/PLACE: 7:00 for 7:30 pm -- at Pamela's house
ADDRESS: 69 One Tree Hill #11-69 -- Tel. 9133 5223
DIRECTIONS: Off of Grange Road, About 150 meters from Grange on the right hand side, 16 story cream-colored older building, Opposite number 1 One Tree Hill – buildings are not found in numerical sequence! On corner of One Tree Hill and Jalan Arnap, if you pass Jalan Arnap on the right, you’ve gone too far
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
Video of the actual lecture that inspired the book -- in fact, if you can't get your hands on the book, just watch the video -- they're almost identical
PLUS (leftover from December):
The Zigzag Way by Anita Desai
Blurb from the National Library of Singapore catalog (NB: they have 19 copies of the book, plus 4 audio versions you can borrow):
"Eric is uncertain, awkward young man, a would-be writer, and a traveller in spite of himself. Happy to follow his more confident girlfriend to Mexico, he is overwhelmed with sensory overload and gradually seduced - by the strangeness, the colour, the mysteries of an older world. He finds himself on a curious quest for his own family in a 'ghost' mining town, now barely inhabited, where almost a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners worked in the rich seams in the earth. Until revolution came to Mexico"
Other links you might want to explore:
Biographical background on Anita Desai
Amazon entry for The Zig Zag Way
Current Year
Singapore Wed Book Group
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