Readiscovery

What I've read and discovered

  • Happy birthday, Salman Rushdie

    Happy birthday, Salman Rushdie! He is all of 67 today. What a pity a book he began with such brio has haunted him ever since. Few books open as memorably as The Satanic Verses. I cannot imagine any other writer describing an air crash quite like him. After the plane…

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  • The Circle’s a must for Google, Facebook users

    Anyone who uses Google, Twitter or Facebook – and that’s practically everybody – needs to read The Circle by Dave Eggers. Fiction, but a chilling possible look into our future. Good book. Actually, I am quoting somebody else to give my own views on The Circle, Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel.…

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  • A Steve Jobs favourite

    I am reading what was probably the first book downloaded by Steve Jobs on his iPad 2. The book: Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda, an Indian yogi who moved to America in 1920 and died in Los Angeles in 1952. Steve Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, saw the book…

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  • Janis Joplin and Simon and Garfunkel

    I am enjoying reading the early chapters of record producer Clive Davis’ memoir, The Soundtrack of My Life, where he recalls working with artistes like Bob Dylan, Simon Garfunkel, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Chicago, Johnny Winter and Miles Davis. Davis,…

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  • Capital in the 21st Century, according to Thomas Piketty

    I was surprised I couldn’t find Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century when I searched the Singapore National Library catalogue online. An Amazon bestseller, it is the most talked-about economics book today. Piketty, a French economist, writes about the growing inequality between the rich and the poor. Inequality is…

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  • Wordsworth’s finest

    Which is Wordsworth’s finest poem? How can one even ask such a question? He has written so many memorable poems, it seems impossible to single out any one as the very best. Yet the question has been on my mind these past two days since the birthday of Wordsworth (April…

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  • John Updike: Middle-aged love in Rabbit Redux

    Today is the birthday of one of my favourite writers, John Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009). Like PG Wodehouse, he is irreplaceable. No one can take his place. Lawrence Durrell and Jan Morris are the only writers I know with prose as lush and sensuous as his.…

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  • Updike: Music from Rabbit at Rest

    Today is the birthday of one of my favourite writers, John Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009). Few have written so sensuously of love and sex – or anything else under the sun. Here is Updike writing about one of my greatest loves – pop music from the…

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  • Jan Morris: Both sides now

    “It is not usually given to a man that after nearly a quarter of a century of marriage he should end up as sister-in-law to his own wife and aunt to his own children.” Thus begins a profile of one of my favourite writers: Jan Morris, formerly James Morris. The…

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  • On the Road, on Kerouac’s birthday

    Today Is the birthday of Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), whom I started reading again last night. I hit On the Road again, which is a joy to read. Especially the early chapters, where the narrator Sal Paradise meets Dean Moriarty and embarks on his travels,…

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