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This month marks Auden’s birth centenary, reminds the Guardian. He was born on Feb 21, 1907. He was the people’s poet, says the article in the Guardian. The writer, Theo Hobson, says: “Auden’s rise to fame in the 1930s is hard to believe now: it is impossible to imagine a young poet achieving comparable status
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Eats, Shoots & Leaves author Lynne Truss now has her own website! So what? Every writer has a website now. Hello! This is big news, reported by Reuters. However, after visiting http://www.lynnetruss.com. I don’t think any punctuation mark can do it justice. It deserves an emoticon. Like this: 😦 Truss may well riposte, “Talk to
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This is the second book I have read by Alexander McCall Smith. I loved his bestseller, The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. In a way, this is even better. Isobel Dalhousie is as far removed from Precious Ramotswe, the owner of The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, as Edinburgh from Botswana. Precious is Botswana’s only
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Avid readers can download and print classics such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Aesop’s Fables through Google’s Book Search for free from today, say the Guardian and the BBC. Readers will be allowed to download PDF files of books no longer under copyright. But I wasn’t able to access the service here in Singapore. The
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 The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber Sugar is a 19-year-old prostitute in Victorian London who wants a better life, William Rackham a perfumer’s son who wants to be a gentleman and not a businessman. Married to a lord’s stepdaughter with mental problems, however, he visits Sugar after hearing about her from
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Three Novels by Amit Chaudhuri: A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, Freedom Song Amit Chaudhuri is like no other Indian writer I have read recently. He writes about ordinary day-to-day life like RK Narayan and Ruskin Bond, but in a language so vivid and evocative it sometimes rises to poetry. His novels are not
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The Good German by Joseph Kanon This is a classic, a twisty, noirish, romantic thriller. I fell hard for the love interest — the hero’s, that is. American newsman Jake Geismar flies into Berlin after the death of Hitler on an assignment from a famous magazine. But he has returned really to look for the
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I just finished reading PD James’ latest mystery, The Lighthouse, which came out last year. And I must admit I am a little disappointed. Not that I would have missed it for anything in the world. PD James is too good a writer to ever really let down her readers. The writing is as assured
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Some of the chapters in this book are mind-blowing. Thomas Friedman really dazzles with the breadth of his knowledge about the innovations changing the world today. He was not my favourite New York Times columnist when I could read him online for free. Some of his analysis struck me as too simplistic. Despite being one
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Paul Theroux is in Singapore, planning to write a sequel to The Great Railway Bazaar, reported The Straits Times yesterday. I can’t recall what he wrote about Singapore in his famous book about the various trains he rode on an epic journey from London to Tokyo and back. I was more interested then in what
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