Category: Books
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The Sunday Philosophy Club
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…
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Google Books? Not yet in Singapore
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…
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A prostitute falls in love
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…
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The poetry of Amit Chaudhuri
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…
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I fell hard for the love interest
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…
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PD James and The Lighthouse
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.…
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The World Is Flat — and mind-blowing
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…
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Paul Theroux, Singapore and Naipaul
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…
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The amazing teen fiction factory
Writing fiction may no longer be a solitary exercise: other people may be involved too besides the person named as the author on the book cover. The New York Times spills the beans on how some teen fiction gets written. Kaavya Viswanthan is named as the author of How Opal…
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How to write a bestseller — like an ad
Only the author’s name may appear on the book cover. But the book itself may be the product of team work much like a commercial advertisement. Writing a novel need not longer be a solitary exercise of a writer pegging away alone, putting down thoughts on paper. Indian-born Harvard sophomore…
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