The Help by Katryn Stockett

Although The Help was published in 2009 I did not know about it until it was listed in New York Times Bestseller List for the month of June 2012. I love to check out the synopsis of each book that made it to the list and if the plot or contents look interesting, I'd download the ebook. (Obtaining books used to be slightly more irksome as it requires a trip to the local bookstores and sometimes you go away disappointed as they don't have the title you want.) The Help looked promising. 

Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, The Help is about African-American maids working in middle-class white households. The story is narrated by three strong and courageous ladies: 

a) Aibileen, who takes care of Mae Mobley, a two-year-old daughter of Elizabeth Leefolt; 

b) Minny, who is always loosing her job due to her sassy mouth and who now works for Celia Foote, whom the society ladies referred to as 'white trash';

c) Eugenia 'Skeeter', daughter of a cotton plantation owner and journalist wannabe.

Skeeter had graduated and returned home to find that Constantine, the black maid who raised her, had disappeared. No one would tell her what had happened.

Meanwhile, she applied for an editor's job with publishers Harper and Roe. The senior editor, Elaine Stein, called her personally to tell her that her application was rejected, but she was encouraged to write a  book on a subject that was interesting and mattered to her.

Rallying the help of Aibileen and Minny, Skeeter started on her book about what it is like for black maids to work in white households. Secret trips were made to Aibileen's home where interviews with the maids were held. 

As the story unfolded, I was hooked and reeled in like a fish. The 'voices' of Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter were distinct from each other and believable. But most of all, it was the inhumane and racist treatment of the African American maids that got to me. I had never imagined that the whites in America was so racist in the early 1960s. I had to google to verify the facts.

'Blacks are dirty and have disease' was the constant thing you heard. They did not allow a black maid to use the toilets in the house, nor allowed to use the same cutleries or plates as them. Everything was segregated. They had shops for the blacks and shops for the whites. As long as a black woman was not wearing a white uniform signifying that she's shopping for her white mistress, she was not allowed to enter the stores for the whites. In the story, when a black guy was caught buying petrol from a white petrol kiosk, he was beaten almost to death, never mind that he didn't know it was a white petrol kiosk.

It really made me wonder, why are people so uncomfortable with the colour black? And I don't mean only the Africans. Black cats are shunned, too. They are the least adopted, and the myth of their bringing bad luck to a household is propagated throughout the centuries.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

This is the first Haruki Murakami novel that I've ever read, and I would never have touched this book with a long pole if not for the fact that it was in the New York Times Bestseller list on 4th December 2011. Yes, I had downloaded that book into my Kindle since December last year, but was only able to start reading it early last month.

A 3-volume work that was written in Japanese, the books were combined into a huge single-volume monster when translated into English. A friend told me that I would be eighty by the time I finished the book. She was almost right. It took me more than a month to finish the 1000-page novel. But hang on....I've read 1000+ pages novel in one-eighth of the time it took me to finish '1Q84'. 'Under the Dome' by Stephen King comes to mind. So, what gives?

'1Q84' was a long, tedious novel. If 'Under the Dome' was a home-made burger of 100% beef patty, then '1Q84' was a cheap mass-produced burger with lots of fillers added. Hundreds of prosaic pages that did not move the story along were filled for no other reason than to contribute to the wealth of the timber tycoons. I would not have bothered completing the novel except that I was curious to find out if the two protagonists, Aomame and Tengo,  would ever meet and if they had wandered into an alternate reality or living in a parallel universe.

The plot vacillates between Aomame and Tengo with Tokyo as the setting....a Tokyo with two moons and 'Little People' who emerged from the mouth of a dead goat. Little people that came out as two inches tall but shook themselves up to twenty-eight inches. They plucked thin threads from the air and made air chrysalises. 

Those little people, we were told, were intelligent and powerful with long arms. Intelligent....ok, the most intelligent words that came out of their mouths were, "Ho, ho.". As for powerful.....they can't directly harm the protagonists (read: limited powers), and they kept shifting their focus like a short-attention-span five-year-old. 

Last, but not least, four whole months were dedicated to Aomame not doing anything except cook, eat, read, sleep and exercise. A more depressing book I have yet to come across. Each reading left me feeling dejected to the point of being suicidal. Die-hard fans of Haruki Murakami are probably going to slay me for this criticism, but I welcome their putting an end to my misery. '1Q84' is nothing more than a long, painful verbal diarrhea. 

Micro by Michael Crichton & Richard Preston

Micro, a nano-technology thriller, was one-third written when Michael Crichton died. His agent looked for a co-writer to finish the novel based on Crichton's notes , files and two drawn maps. Richard Preston was eventually selected to complete the novel, based on his science background and bioterrorism work. The book was published in November 2011. 

Micro is set in the rainforest of Hawaii and features a villainous entrepreneur, Harvard graduate students shrunk to half an inch tall (though the scientists in the novel referred to them as dimensionally changed), small insects like ants which saw them as food, and micro-robots programmed to kill. In short, it's like a miniature version of Jurassic Park.

The plot opened with a private investigator being hired to check out the nanotechnology organisation which resulted in three mysterious deaths in an office, one of them being the private investigator himself. The police was baffled, as the only clues were ultra-fine, sharp razor cuts all over their bodies. The doors and windows to the office were locked from within and there was no signs of struggles of any kind. They just plopped down dead. 

Besides the action-packed story, the novel also contains a lot of rich details on the flora and fauna, insect life and their anatomy and biotechnology. One of the characters, Rick Hutter, an ethnobotanist, reminded me of my late grandmother. He believed that you could fight venom with venom. My late grandmother would catch centipedes and pickled them in vinegar, or was it wine, I don't remember. I was just a young kid then. Each centipede that crawled in our garden was perceived as priceless treasure and would be carefully picked up with a pair of tweezer before being lowered into a jar of vinegar/wine. She said the venom of the centipede would counteract the venom of a snake bite.   

But I digress....anyway, this novel educates as well as entertains. I was hooked right from the beginning and finished the 424-pages book in one and a half days (read: no productive work was done during that period).

11/22/63 by Stephen King

This is Stephen King's first attempt at a time travel piece, even though the idea for 11/22/63 came to him in 1971. King said that "back then, the wound was still raw and it would require too much research and literary talent" that he didn't think he had. When he returned to the project later, King had to read a lot of historical documents and archives in preparation for the novel. He even found out how much drinks and food cost at that time.

11.22.63 centres on Jake Epping, a high school English teacher at Lisbon Falls, Maine, who travelled back in time to try to prevent the assassination of JKF. The time bubble was at the back pantry of a diner. And the time in the past was 9 September, 1958 at 11:58am, Lisbon Falls, Maine. 

In order to prevent the assassination, Jake would have to stay in the past for four years. And the past is obdurate. It refused to be changed, and would do anything to prevent Jake from changing it. 

The concept was fascinating but somehow, the plot did not hold me in its grip. There wasn't enough tension or action and it was one of the few Stephen King novels that I was able to put down to attend to other things. It wasn't a poorly written novel. But it wasn't one of his better ones either. 

That said, anybody who enjoys reading as a pastime should try to lay their hands on a copy. There's a lot of interesting trivial data, like how women in that era were different from today's women. 

Homer's Odyssey by Gwen Cooper

The first time I heard of Homer's Odyssey was in July 2009, when Random House contacted me to write a review on it. 

Random House, its publisher, had come across my review on Dewey The Library Cat and offered me a free advance copy of Homer's Odyssey, with the view that I would read and write a review on it. All I was told was that it's a true story about a remarkable blind cat. I was very glad to accept the offer, but after I gave them my address in Malaysia, Random House found that they "could not send to an international address due to distribution restriction policy" whatever that meant. 

I was disappointed, but after some time, forgot all about it. Yup, I forgot entirely about Homer's Odyssey even though I promised myself that when the book is available in local bookshops, I would buy a copy and read it.

It was not until last week, when I was browsing around the Kindle ebooks that I saw Homer's Odyssey. The title rang a bell, and I was pretty sure that this was the book I had promised myself that I would read when it's made available. I immediately looked through my emails (thanks to gmail's easy search feature), and yes, it was Homer's Odyssey alright.

Homer was found and taken to a vet when he was merely two weeks old, with eye infection so bad that the vet had to remove both his eyes. The couple who found him asked Patty, the vet, to euthanize him. Unwilling to do that, Patty tried to find a home for him but no one would take a young, blind kitten, even when it was obvious that he would pull through. The author, Gwen Cooper, was the last one on Patty's list.

photo taken from Gwen Cooper's photo gallery --> http://www.gwencooper.com/photo.php

Despite his visual handicap, Homer is a furry bundle of affection and action. He's as active as 5 cats put together, and can leap as high as 5 feet in the air to catch flies in midair, and to climb and jump like a normal, seeing cat. The author attributed his skills to Scarlett, the oldest feline in the house. Homer would try to keep up with Scarlett, and however high Scarlett could jump or climb, Homer figured he could do so, too. 

His antics are truly amusing, although those who met him for the first time without any warning are usually nonplussed. This was one of my favourite image.....

"Homer, in those days, was particularly enamored of playing with tampons. Having encountered one by chance, he was fascinated by the way they'd roll around, and by the string at the end. He liked them so much, he figured out where I kept them stored in the cabinet below the bathroom sink and - with unerring 

Last  night, in bed, hubby said, "So, your dream came true." He was referring to my dream and wish that Adam Lambert would come to Malaysia and perform. Ever since Adam Lambert auditioned for the American Idol season 8 competition with a rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody", I had hoped that he would one day go on a world concert tour. (Simon Cowell, I have more foresight than you, LOL!!) He has such an amazing vocal range and is so energetic that all other contestants fell short. Very, very short.

 and accuracy - mastered the task of forcing open the cabinet door and raiding the tampon box.

When I walked in with my date, Homer ran to greet me at the door. And there, hanging from his mouth was a tampon. The whiteness of it stood out against his black fur in vivid, mortifying rellief. He scampered around in gleeful triumph for a moment, then promptly ran over and sat expectantly on his haunches in front of me, tampon clutched between his jaws like a dog with a rawhide bone."

But Homer is more than just pure entertainment. He saved the author from an intruder at 4am one morning, but more than that, he taught the author that she should not live her life in fear. Homer had no fear. 

"Every leap from a chair back or table-top is taken on faith, a potential leap into the abyss. Every ball chased down a hallway is an act of implicit bravery. Every curtain or counter top climbed, every overture of friendship to a new person, every step forward taken without guidance into the dark void of the world around him is a miracle of courage. He has no guide dog, no cane, no language in which he can be reassured or made to understand the shape and nature of the hurdles he encounters."

It is a heart-warming book that makes you laugh and cry. Every pet owner would be able to relate to the author when for a few days she was prevented from returning to her apartment near the World Trade Centre during 9/11, and how she feared for the survival and safety of her cats, especially Homer, who is blind.

The author's success is, in a large part, owed to Homer. She was a struggling 24-year-old with two cats and squatting in a friend's spare bedroom when she took Homer. Realising she can't afford to get her own place and keep Homer was what spurred her on to find a more lucrative career.

This book, like Dewey, is a must-read for all ailurophiles. It can be downloaded at Amazon UK, or purchased from  MPH Online, although I would recommend downloading it from Amazon UK, as it would only cost you RM25, as opposed to downloading it at Amazon dot com, which would cost you RM33, or RM60 from MPH Online. 

Random House, if you are reading this, you ought to do something about your distribution restriction policy and reward me for this post.....LOL!!!

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

I've never felt inclined to read any of Neil Gaiman's works before. But after reading a review of The Graveyard Book by my friend, Bookface, I was sold. 


From what she wrote, it sounded like something right up my alley. That said, I've tried reading some of the books she reviewed, and have personally found that she is a far better writer than some of the award-winning authors themselves. There were some books where the characters and plot were far more interesting in her own words than in the books themselves. 


So I approached the book somewhat hesitantly, trying not to have too high an expectation of it. Imagine my delight when I was hooked right away at the first sentence. It was one of those can't put down books, and I finished it within twenty-four hours. I started it on a Sunday afternoon at a hotel in Cherating, and finished it by the next afternoon. Had I not gone out on any activities, I would have finished it even sooner! 


That may not mean much to others, but it meant that I had enjoyed the book so thoroughly that my nose was buried in it every available second that I had to spare.


What's the book about, you ask. The Graveyard Book is about a boy called Nobody Owens (Bod for short) raised by ghosts and neither dead nor alive creatures in a cemetery. Think "The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling and you'd be dead on. Since I could never write half as well as my friend, please check out her review for a little snippet on The Graveyard Book. 

Amazon Kindle 3: A Review

For the past one year, I've only been reading ebooks and have not bought a single copy of the print book. I read my ebooks on my computer, and there were some issues I had to bear with. For example, the glare of the screen. Reducing the brightness doesn't help as that means the text becomes less readable. My eyes got tired from the hours of reading, and the whites started to develop red 'lines'. 

Then there's the non-portability of the ebooks. I no longer had a book with me to read when I'm waiting for someone or for my turn at some place. And not to mention the computer getting hot from being left on for more than 12 hours a day.


Those became issues of the past when I got my Kindle. The Kindle uses the E-Ink technology which makes reading easy on the eyes. It is very light, and now I carry 300 ebooks (the storage capacity is 3500 ebooks) everywhere with me in my handbag so that I'll have a different book to read for different moods. I would not have been able to do that with print copies.


The Kindle lets you look up the definition of a word without leaving the page you're reading, and if you're feeling lazy and just want to close your eyes and let someone read to you, just activate the text-to-speech and let the Kindle read to you.


And if you like to listen to music while you read, all from the same device, just copy the MP3 files into the music folder in the Kindle. The Kindle is wifi enabled, and comes with a browser. I find the browsing experience extremely primitive though. 


The Kindle does best what it was designed for --- reading ebooks. It really delivers! 

Book Review: 1222 by Anne Holt

I've never read Anne Holt's work before even though she's a best-selling novelist. That's because she's a Norwegian author, and her novels are all written in Norwegian. So English readers like me are lucky when her eighth installment of The Hanne Wilhelmsen series was translated into English.


After having read Snow by Orhan Pamuk, also another translated work, Anne Holt's 1222 is a refreshing change. It draws you in, unlike Snow. 


Although it's a crime thriller, it is not one of those action-packed novels that I like. Rather, it is reminiscent of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes. It focuses more on solving the puzzle of the crime instead of the crime itself. That said, I do like Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, too, so if there is going to be anymore English-translated work of Holt's, I'll be sure to read them.


1222 is the name of a hotel atop a mountain near a train station. The story begins with a snow blizzard that caused the train to derail. The survivors were rescued and taken to Finse 1222. Snowed in and unable to go home, people started to die. 


Amongst the survivors was a former police detective Hanne Wilhelmsen. Paralysed from waist down due to a bullet that hit her 12th and 13th verterbrae, she tried to work out who the murderer was from a long list of suspects.


Even though I am more a fan of fast action novels, somehow the narration of 1222 managed to draw me into the story and it was one of those hard-to-put-down books. Imagine this....my nose was buried in my Kindle as hubby and I walked along Jalan Telawi in Bangsar.....

Book Review: Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Snow, "kar" in Turkish, is a story about Ka, a Turkish poet who lived in exile in Germany and who has now returned to Istanbul for his mother's funeral. He took the opportunity to travel to Kars, a city northeast of Turkey on the pretext of covering the story of the numerous suicides there. In truth, he had heard that Ipek, a beautiful ex-classmate was now divorced and he hoped to make her his wife. 

When he arrived, there was a snowstorm which cut the city off from the rest of the world for three days. So, in a nutshell, the plot is about Ka stranded in kar in Kars. And that's all there was to it, really. 

Yes, I know, those who have read the book would tell me about the secular state's clashes with the Islamist fundamentalists, about how a group of Muslim girls would rather commit suicide than remove their head scarves, and how the army staged a theatre act but fired five rounds of live bullets into the audience, killing some while injuring others.

They would be right. We read the same book. However, my gripe is not with the plot itself. Snow had a rather unique plot, one that broke the monotony of the plethora of bestsellers by Western authors. I'd be the last person to argue that the story wasn't interesting.

I only wished it had been written better. The story was told by an omniscient presence (the author's) who came upon Ka's notes years later and pieced them together. The 'layers' removed the reader from the story and as a result, I did not feel involved in the events taking place, nor did I feel any empathy for Ka. As a matter of fact, I felt that Ka was a drip.

If this were a movie, I would have said the wrong actor was cast in the male lead. But this is a book, so I guess it was the way the story was narrated. Orhan Pamuk could still keep Ka as the main character, but approached it differently. 

Operation Mincemeat by Ben Mcintyre

Upon finishing Agent Zigzag by the same author a month ago, I started right away on Operation Mincemeat. I usually take less than one week to finish a paperback of 600 pages. However, April and May have been particularly busy months, and the weekends were no different. There was always one obligation after another. I was surprised to note that I took one month to finish Agent Zigzag and another month to finish Operation Mincemeat. At the rate I'm reading, it's going to take me more than one lifetime to finish all the books I have!


Operation Mincemeat was the codename of a very bizarre deception carried out by the British Intelligence to fool the Nazis.  One of the person involved in the deception was Ian Fleming who was in Room 35 of the Admiralty, the nerve center of British naval intelligence. He later went on to write the James Bond spy novels.


And his colleague, Charles Fraser-Smith, was the inventor who provided Ian Fleming with equipments for his more outlandish plans. Needless to say, Charles Fraser-Smith was responsible for the character 'Q' in the James Bond novels while 'M' was based on Admiral John Godfrey.


The deception involved getting a corpse with no family and dressing it up as an officer and floating it off to the Spanish shores with planted intelligence documents to fool the Germans about the Allieds' invasion plans.


I particularly enjoyed the first half of the book. Stephen King couldn't have been more macabre. 

Bentley Purchase came up with a solution. "I've got it," said the coroner. "We'll get an electric fire and thaw out the feet only. As soon as the boots are on we'll pop him back in the refrigerator again and refreeze him."

 The mouth of the corpse has fallen open. The skin around the nose has sunk, and the upper part of the face appears discoloured. The fingers of the left hand are bent, as if clawing in pain.

......a person was formally pronounced dead without ever having been alive.

I don't normally quote paragraphs from the books I read, but those passages just stuck in my mind.


Read together with Agent Zigzag and The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva, one has a better understanding and appreciation of how a war could be won even before it actually began. History lesson has never been so interesting, dead bodies do tell tales. 


And now I'm going to start on a fiction that has nothing to do with war....time to take a break from history.  Should I read The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson or Snow by Orhan Pamuk, or......

Book Review: Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre

A friend who read a review that I wrote on The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva suggested that since I enjoyed reading about British double-cross espionage during World War II I might like Agent Zigzag, a true account of love, espionage and betrayal . And she was right. 


While I had learned a fair bit about how the British concocted a very daring and remarkable deception plan to deceive the Nazis, Agent Zigzag completed my 'education' and I knew all the spy masters by name now, if not their complete personality, on both the British and German sides. Well, almost, anyway. There is one more deception, a very famous dead body operation called Operation Mincemeat, which I will write a review on when I finished reading it.


Eddie Chapman was the most unlikely hero I had ever come across. He began his life as a criminal and was a member of the Jelly Gang who used chewing gum to stick the gelignite to the safes on their heists. 


And yet, he was also a gentle criminal. He abhorred the use of violence in his crimes. He was also a very charming young man, and made friends easily, both of the female and male gender. This was a man with two fiancées at the same time! 


He was serving a sentence in Jersey when the Nazis took control of the island. And so began a story that was more astounding than fiction. His British handlers codenamed him 'Zigzag' due to his erratic personality.


The book's account is taken from documents released by the British Secret Service MI5 to the UK National Archives in 2001 and is a must read for fans of espionage. 

Book Review: The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended to by a bodyguard of lies" ~ Sir Winston Churchill

When I accessed my blog today, I was shocked to see that the last post was more than a month ago. Time flies without the courtesy of a memo. And what have I been doing for the past one month? Well, I'm not going to bore you with the minute, mundane details of my life. Suffice to say, I was minding my own business, and perhaps a friend's or two's.....yes, I can be quite interested in my friends' lives, to put it mildly.  

Hang on....what has that got to do with a book review post? Nothing. I'm just rambling.

When I buy books, I tend to stick to authors I know. Reading can be a rather expensive hobby in Malaysia, if you are a voracious reader like me, so it makes sense to stick to what you know. However, when a book is given to you for free, you are less picky. And that was how I got my first chance to read Daniel Silva's works, a free Kindle ebook, courtesy of a friend S.

To be honest, The Unlikely Spy isn't his first book that I read. I read The Confessor, and liked it enough to take the trouble to google him and found that The Unlikely Spy was his first book, published in 1996, and which some of his fans think is still his best work yet.

While some of the characters and events are fictional, The Unlikely Spy is based on very real events during World War II. The very complex and detailed deception conjured up by the British Intelligence totally fascinated me. Imagine producing fake army tanks, fictitious army units, and so on. It's one big massive deception that rivals Hollywood blockbuster movies. 

The story was cinematic in its scope. I felt I was watching a Hollywood blockbuster instead of reading an ebook on the small Kindle screen. I was so involved in the story that I took the Kindle with me to the treadmill when it was time to work out at the gym. It's definitely a page-turner and if you would like to learn how the British fooled the Nazis and caused Hitler to make all the wrong decisions, pick up this book. The book is based on:-  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude

Book Review: Girl In Translation by Jean Kwok

Girl In Translation is a refreshing book, profound in its simplicity. Kimberley, the protagonist, migrated from Hong Kong to the U.S. with her mother at a very young age and lived in extreme poverty in the squalors of Brooklyn, with no heating in their roaches and rats infested apartment. To keep warm during the cold winter, they turned on the oven in the kitchen and piled layers after layers of clothes over themselves. They also did not speak much English and Kimberley struggled for a very long time in school. 


Although the characters and the plot are fictitious, nevertheless such extreme poverty exists. It's stark in its bleakness, but in the end, Kimberley triumphed and rose above her station to give her mother a better life, at the expense of her own love life.


In fact, when I read about the author's early childhood in her website, it was as if she had written a memoir in Girl In Translation, and just changed the name of the protagonist.


This book managed to transport me into a different world, and I was totally engrossed in the struggles of this young, brave, talented girl. I would not be surprised if some movie producer contacted the author for film copyrights. If a film is made based on this novel, I would definitely watch it. That said, I'm looking forward to more books from this author.

Book Review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Usually, I prefer to watch a movie first, then read the book if I like the movie. But in the case of Never Let Me Go, I read from the comments in IMDB that it is better to read the book first before watching the movie. One movie-goer even went so far as to say that if you haven't read the book you won't understand what the movie is about as a lot of the details were left out.


Well, I've read the book but haven't got around to watching the movie yet. It's still sitting there in my computer. Never Let Me Go is told from the perspective of Kathy, one of the three protagonists. They were clones though they were not sure if they were modeled from a real person. Their purpose for existing is to be organ donors, though Kathy and her two friends, Ruth and Tommy, yearned for a normal life.


Sounds familiar? Yes, it is along the same lines as the movie "The Island". But unlike "The Island", the clones did not escape.


They didn't have their freedom curbed like the clones in "The Island", but they never made any effort to escape. It made me think and wonder why. I guess perhaps they were afraid to leave the world they know and venture out into the unknown? So many opportunities were lost, and in the end, Kathy was left with questions like what if they had done something before it was too late.


It also makes me think deeply of how sometimes science chooses to ignore the obvious. A clone is also a human being, not a "creature" to be reviled like a spider. He or she has emotions, just like a real human. What right then, do we have for creating a sentient being only to ask him to serve his purpose for existence by donating his organs and when the critical organs were donated, the clone shuts down (the term is referred to as 'complete' in the book) and is only kept alive with the aid of machines until the very last organ has been donated? It sounds pretty inhumane to me. I hope in the real world, science won't get that far.

Night by Elie Wiesel

Books. Some are hard to put down. Some make you laugh. Some make you cry. And then there are some that make you think very deeply. Night by Elie Wiesel falls into this last category.


Although the first edition of this book was published in September 1960, and Oprah Winfrey selected the book for her book club in January 2006, hubby and I only came to know of this book a week ago by chance.


We were in our room at Resorts World Hotel at Genting, watching Vision Four, an in-house video channel, and it was showing an old documentary of Elie Wiesel giving an acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize for this book.


The book is about the author's experience in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschtwitz and Buchenwald at the height of Holocaust and toward the end of the Second World War. He was sixteen years old when the US Army finally liberated Buchenwald.


What got me thinking deeply was that in the book, every human value, every moral was destroyed. Would anyone dream of abandoning their parent, whom they had clung to tenaciously  for the past one or three years to avoid being separated suddenly wished that the parent would die so that they would be free to have a better chance at survival? Or would a loving child jump on the father and beat him to death so as to grab that piece of bread crumb from him? Would a child who would retaliate against anyone who so much as laid a finger on his father lie quietly in a bunk above the same father and listened to him being beaten to death by the soldiers for fear of attracting the blows upon himself?


These are not the unfilial, rebellious children. But circumstances, or to be more exact, the horrors of the concentration camps have changed them. The human survival instinct kicked in. It became a "each man for himself, there is no fathers, no brothers here".


I kept asking myself, would I become like one of them, too, if I am in that situation? I don't know, since I haven't been through any suffering. I really hope I can rise above that selfish human instinct to survive, but I sure hope I don't live to experience it to get the answer.


The book was written in an easy-to-read narrative, and if I have a Book Club like Oprah Winfrey, I too would select it for my club and encourage everyone to read it. If nothing else, at least the reader will learn something: When there's a conflict, we must take sides. To remain silent is not being neutral. Being silent is condoning the actions of the oppressor and further victimising the oppressed. The world was silent, and in being silent, a monster (Hitler) came into being.

The Obama Diaries - Fact or Fiction?

According to the author, Laura Ingraham, she saw a thick manila envelope lying on the bonnet of her car at the basement parking of Watergate Complex. As she picked it up, a mysterious stranger "hidden in the shadows of a stairwell called out in a deep baritone voice, "Just read it. You'll know what to do." She shouted back, "Who are you? What is this?!" The mystery man stood silent for a few seconds before vanishing......"(page 9)

When she opened the envelope at the W hotel about a hundred yards from the White House (she claimed she didn't drive home as she was afraid to), she discovered that the enveloped contained the handwritten diaries of President Barrack Obama, Michelle Obama, her mother Marian Robinson, Vice President Joe Biden, Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, and others who are involved in the Obama's Presidency campaign.


And so she decided that the rest of America deserves to know what their President, the First Lady, The First Grandmother, the Vice-President and the entire campaign team had written in their diaries. 


My first thought was, isn't that rather convenient? The busiest people in the world actually has the time to write a diary and they ended up in her hands? I also thought that the part about the mystery man in the shadows booming out to her to read it and that she'll know what to do with it sounds a little bit like a bad script out of a B-grade movie.


Anyway, I decided to continue reading. And I think those "diaries" are not authentic. Why? Well, besides the suspicions I expressed in the paragraph before this, Barrack Obama has worked very hard in the campaign. It just didn't make any sense that he would trivialize his own inauguration. But most of all, it is the language used in the "diaries". The language use is that of a gossip monger passing on a juicy, slanderous gossip to another. To me, the style of writing is not the type one would use when writing a personal diary. 


Based on the above, I think the diaries are either planted, or Laura Ingraham cooked up the whole thing on her own as a publicity stunt at best, or worst, as a hatred campaign against Obama. 


She certainly comes across as very anti non-Americans, and considers being American as an exceptional and special race, and that America has a right to dictate to the rest of the world. But this is just my personal opinion. I'm curious to know what others think. 


So, if you have read the book, please share your opinion with me. I'd love to discuss it, even if you disagree with me. In fact, especially if you disagree with me. I'd like to know why you disagree and see it from a different perspective. And if you haven't read the book, but would like to, please let me know, and I'll email you a copy.  :)

Under The Dome by Stephen King

I just finished reading this book last night. It was released in the US in November last year, and I only managed to lay my hands on a copy of the ebook last week. 


Under The Dome is definitely one of the better stories written by Stephen King. Don't get me wrong, he has written quite a few can't-put-it-down books, and I am a die-hard fan of his. But this book is really something else. It's not King's usual scare-you-shitless book, although I love to be scared silly (must be something seriously wrong with me). Rather, it is more like Carrie or Misery, a book on human characters and what they're capable of. If you have read Carrie/Misery or seen the movies, you would know what I mean. 


The story opens on a beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, a small town in Maine, with a population of 1152 when inexplicably, the town is cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crashed into it, animals are cut into half, cars imploded upon impact, people with electronic devices like pacemaker exploded when they got too near it, while families who went on errands in neighbouring towns are unable to return home.


That said, 90% of the story is not about blood and gore. Instead, it focuses on the townfolks, on how they react and change in the face of 'catastrophe'. 


I couldn't stop talking about the book to my hubby. I was sure it would be made into a TV movie, and this morning, the minute I woke up, I troll the net to see if there is any plans to make a movie out of it. And....I wasn't surprised to find that Steven Spielberg has already bought rights to Under The Dome to make it into a mini-series. Below is the trailer. 


P/s: Those who know me personally and would like to 'borrow' this ebook, please let me know. You know how to reach me.  :)

Dewey - The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World

Dewey The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World is a true story about an abandoned, tiny, bedraggled, nearly frozen kitten in the night drop box of the Spencer Public Library which grew up to be an inspiration to the townsfolk.

I just finished reading it yesterday and I must say, I really love this book even though the ending made me cry.

Imagine, me a grown woman, sitting on a bench at a public clinic waiting for my mum's turn to pick up her hypertension prescription, weeping openly as I came to page #258. I just couldn't stop the tears from rolling down my cheeks when I read that Dewey was about to die.

A little girl who sat on another bench to my left walked over to me and sat down next to me. She kept looking up into my face as I snivelled away. I couldn't help it. I tried to control myself but the tears refused to stop.

Thoughts of how one day Blackie has to go, too, careened into my mind. Followed by thoughts of losing my loved ones one day as age & death claim them. I cried for Dewey, I cried for Blackie who is stil alive, and I cried for living human beings......extremely silly, isn't it?

Anyway, I am glad Vicki Myron and her friends thought to publish some of Dewey's videos in their website. Check out this handsome, inspiring orange cat here - http://www.deweyreadmorebooks.com/deweyvideos.php

Updates (Aug 11, 2011):
If you had enjoyed Dewey, you might like Homer's Odyssey.

Robert K. Tanenbaum - Hoax

If you've never read Robert Tanenbaum's 16th book, HOAX, don't bother. This novel has the dubious honour of being the worst book I've ever read. To call it crap would be too kind to it.

I have heard of Robert Tanenbaum's books, and they are supposed to be really good. So, a few months ago, when I saw Hoax at a book warehouse sale, I grabbed it.

And boy, have I regretted that purchase. Three quarters of Hoax is devoted to rehashing after rehashing of Butch Karp, a New York Assistant District Attorney, and his wife's personal history that has no bearings on the plot, and the retelling of events from the different characters'  viewpoint that has no relevance to the story, nor do they move the plot along. It's amateurishly-written, something you might expect a Form Three student to write.

When I finally finished the book, I went on the internet to see if it was just me, or if others felt the same. What I found surprised me.

It appears that Robert Tanenbaum is not the real writer of the previous 15 books. The real writer was his cousin, Michael Gruber, who has since split from the partnership and branched out on his own. The general consensus was that either the real Robert Tanenbaum can't write, or the new writer hired to replace Michael Gruber can't.

No wonder it was such a torturous read. If you want to punish your enemies, make them read Hoax!! 

The Big Bad Book Sale 14 - 18 May 2009

Big Bad Wolf Books is having The Big Bad Book Sale, and the books are sold at rock bottom prices. All brand new (not used) paperback novels are going for RM8 each, with some as cheap as RM5. 

Although I still have 14 unread books from my last purchase at another book warehouse clearance sale, I went to this book sale as I heard from Vivien that Dewey The Small-Town Library Cat That Touched The World is going for only RM8. 

The book is a very touching tale of how a tiny, half frozen, frost-bitten 2-month-old kitten was found in the library of a small town, and how the town adopted it. I've been looking for this book at every book clearance sale, but unfortunately, it was always sold at its orignal price of RM34.90.

Dewey's face & colour reminds me of my late Brownie, Blackie's brother.

If you haven't been to the book sale, you might want to check it out.  It's really a bargain. More details at http://www.bigbadwolfbooks.com/