The Malaysian Reader

Empire in Black and Gold (Tor, 2008)

January 29th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Well colour me disappointed. I hardly read any fantasy nowadays (the last one was The Song of Ice and Fire but George Martin is taking his time finishing the series I just don’t give a damn anymore) mainly because I think the genre has been played out. The medieval European setting, the Dark Lord, the orphan boy/girl destined to save the land with a big ass sword, the motley crew of friends to help him/her. Yeah, it’s been done. But occasionally boredom hits the soul and I think, “what the heck, let’s read some fantasy today” only to have the book crush my hopes like a salivating wolf crushing the neck of an injured raccoon. Empire in Black and Gold is such a book.

This book was the debut for Brit author Adrian Tchaikovsky and he has since written at least six books in the ‘Shadows of the Apt’ series. I won’t be there to enjoy the ride. You want to know what this book is about? Go read about it at the Fantasy Book Critic blog. I dropped it like a hot potato after it failed the 50 page rule. After 50 pages, I still didn’t care about the impending crisis faced by the protagonist. After 50 pages, I still didn’t care about any of the characters introduced in the second chapter who probably would play major roles in the story. And after 50 pages I still didn’t care about the concept of the insect totems most of the characters had which gave them special abilities (Ant-kinden can operate in a hive mentality, Wasp-kinden can fly, that kind of thing). That concept seemed interesting until one is reminded that it’s been done by another author in another fantasy series (Steven Erikson, Malazan Book of the Fallen if you must know). This book has 600+ pages and the first 50 could not grab my attention? To the reject pile it went.

Is the fantasy genre today strictly for teens and young adults? Aren’t there any written for jaded, approaching middle-age dads like me? I want to be challenged, intrigued, entertained, grabbed by the collars and refused any reprieve until I’ve finished reading the story. The closest is Martin’s series I mentioned above but I dislike reading an ongoing series whose author is taking his time to finish (and no, I’m not going to watch the HBO adaptation). The only ones I have enjoyed were written over 50-60 years ago. Robert Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser adventures remain favourites among fantasy fans. And of course JRR Tolkien but that’s a given.

But today’s fantasy novels? BAH!

A Short Review of The Hunger Games (Scholastic Inc., 2010)

January 23rd, 2012 § 3 Comments

Yeah, comparisons to Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale are inevitable (and when that one first came out, it was compared to Golding’s Lord of the Flies, so you know, the premise isn’t actually original) but since I’ve only heard of Battle Royale and its many adaptations and have not actually bothered to read the darn thing, I won’t say which one is better. As young adult novels go, Hunger Games is tightly plotted enough for this ‘old’ guy to read it all the way to the end. It’s set in a dystopian future where the 13 Districts of North America are ruled by the Capitol and when the Districts were defeated in a failed rebellion (with District 13 reduced to ashes), the remaining 12 have to send a pair of teens every year to the Capitol so these kids can compete in a televised match to the death in the Games. All in the name of entertainment and to remind everyone not to ever mess with the Capitol ever again.

The violence is competently written, something that I did not expect from a modern young adult novel, and impressed this reader enough to make him want to read the rest of the series.

Azan In A Church.

January 19th, 2012 § 3 Comments

This won’t happen in Malaysia. We don’t call people to prayer in churches. We just burn churches. Shame on us.

I’m Still Waiting For A Good Book On Tun Perak

January 17th, 2012 § 2 Comments

Since Professor Khoo Kay Kim argued that Hang Tuah and Princess Hang Li Po probably never existed (see here), I guess I’ll file this book under historical fiction then, shall I? Tun Perak: Pencetus Wawasan Empayar Melaka by Muhammad Yusof Ibrahim is, as the title suggests, about Tun Perak the most famous adviser to the Malaccan Sultanate in the 15th century. But since it’s about Tun Perak, of course Hang Tuah appears in the book.

Written in the style of a biographical novel, it is not a bad book but it didn’t rock my world either. The most glaring omission I felt was the lack of details. Very little is spent fleshing out the characters. Tun Perak, his father Tun Perpatih Serdang, his mother (unnamed), even the bad guys like Raja Rekan were not given much space to explain their motivations. It is simply, “here are the cast, this what they did”. It is as if the author takes it for granted that the reader already knows Malaccan history and the politics of the era. After a few chapters of this I lost patience and just skimmed the pages to the end.

Could have been better.

The Annotated Sandman Is Here!

January 16th, 2012 § 1 Comment

Oooh, look what the nice man from the post office delivered to me today. It’s volume 1 of Annotated Sandman, collecting the first twenty issues of the comic book, sorry, graphic novel featuring Neil Gaiman’s ‘dreamboy’ but now with asides by Leslie Klinger who also did a wonderful job annotating the complete Sherlock Holmes and Stoker’s Dracula.

They took out the colours for this edition. For some people that’s a deal breaker. I tend to stay away from those people.

On the left is the first volume of the ABSOLUTE Sandman for size comparison. Click on the pictures to embiggen.

The ABSOLUTE edition on the left is thicker but the Annotated edition is wider.

It juts out in my Sandman shelf but I’m not complaining. I have Annotated Sandman! Why the heck should I complain?

I’ve Got Nothing This Week…

January 14th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

…which is why I haven’t been posting anything. But there’s this new site called Oh, Videogames which is all about box art for games from the 1980s. Really horrible box art. This one’s my favourite:

I love the ’80s.

Blast From The Past: Gamebooks

January 8th, 2012 § 2 Comments

During a recent futile attempt to organize my shelves and make them more streamlined, I came across some books that I have not flipped through in over 30 years. These are gamebooks which I used to collect and were all the rave back then with kids my age.

It all started with the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ (CYOA) series. These were fun slim volumes of, well, adventures. Each book had about 30-40 different endings. You begin the book as you would any other book but with CYOA you will be presented with at least a couple of options (sometimes more) at the end of the opening pages and you turn to the corresponding page to see what happens. For example, a story has your character hiking in the woods and the path forks to the right and left. Which direction will you choose? Right, turn to page 10. Left, turn to page 25. And then you continue from there. To a pre-teen in the 1980′s this illusion of choice in my reading was something unheard of and I devoured the CYOA books. Since the books had many endings, the stories were very short but obviously encouraged multiple readings. If I had challenged myself to read a certain amount of books in those days or if they had the NILAM program in schools back then I would have totally reached my target within a month because I persuaded my father to buy a bagload of these books.

Here are 54 of the 56 Choose Your Own Adventure books I have in my collection. My daughter was reading two of them at the time:

I don’t remember why I stopped at 56 since the series went for at least another 100 books. I either grew tired of them (unlikely) or the bookshops didn’t bring any new releases (most probably). It did seem that only a handful of us were reading them back then.

The popularity of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ prompted the publisher Bantam to create a couple more spin offs like ‘Be An Interplanetary Spy’:

and TIME MACHINE:

The ‘Interplanetary Spy’ series was more comic booky than the rest, relying a lot on illustrations that emulated the style of computer games of the decade. Also, it relied more on puzzle solving and visual games like mazes and fold-ins to advance the story. Good times were had but it also meant my books were filled with pencil doodles and folded pages.

The TIME MACHINE series as the title suggests takes you back through time to solve historical mysteries except for book 6, Rings of Saturn, where you went to the future. It was all (gasp!) educational, even book 6 which was a textbook on the solar system disguised as a space adventure. Unlike the CYOA books, TIME MACHINE was didactic. Since it was based on historical facts known at the time and it was meant to be educational, the books could only have one true ending and any wrong turns you make means that you go round and round until you make the right choice. Still the cover art was nice, the adventures were well written and the internet was still about 10 years in the future then so this linear series was my gaming experience and I loved it.

Other publishers jumped in on the choose your own adventure bandwagon but many weren’t very good. One series not published by Bantam that I collected was the fantasy series, Lone Wolf.

The protagonist is a young apprentice of a class of warrior monks and one day while out chopping wood, the rest of his clan was ambushed and killed. You play the ‘lone’ wolf and he seeks revenge. Oh, It is on, baby.

This one was more like playing Dungeons and Dragons except the book is the Dungeon Master. There are skills to acquire, weapons, endurance points, meals to buy and eat and all that stuff. This was to make the role playing as realistic as possible. I just found it a chore. So I cheated a lot. Besides, by book 2 (Fire on the Water) the Lone Wolf acquires the Sommerswerd, a sword so powerful the enemy soldiers lay down their weapons and become farmers instead, that one can finish the books with little to no loss of points at all. The fun for me at least was not in the fighting but in the medieval fantasy setting which was always cool to someone who grew up reading Belgariad, The Hobbit and all that.

And finally, the other collection of gamebooks in my library are these:

‘Can You Solve the Mystery?’ was a series about two pre-teens, ‘Hawkeye’ Collins and Amy Adams, who solve crimes in their hometown of Lakewood Hills usually upon request of the local cops. How incompetent do you have to be that you need two pre-teens to help you do your work? I remember reading the comic strip version of it in one of the Sunday papers (I think it was the New Sunday Times) before stumbling onto the books. Yup, this website has some samples. The books were more prose than illustrations but like the strip it played fair with the reader as well. All clues were there to the observant reader. Sometimes the clues were so obvious, a blind person who didn’t understand English would still notice it. Difficult, they were not. Then the solution would be presented at the back of the page in a mirror image. I enjoyed ‘Can You Solve the Mystery?’. It did not ask the reader to make choices like TIME MACHINE or the Choose Your Own Adventure books but it did not talk down to the reader either and instead invited him/her to join in the crime solving and not just be a passive observer.

And what did a pre-teen wanted more than being included?

I’m Such An Ageist

January 6th, 2012 § 6 Comments

Ageism “is a set of beliefs, attitudes, norms, and values used to justify age based prejudice, discrimination, and subordination. This may be casual or systematic.” Thanks, Wikipedia.

I do that with my books. I totally discriminate them based on their looks. A dog ear here, a wrinkle there, yellowed pages, creased spine. Any sign of decrepitude and off to the ‘old books home’ otherwise known as the little corner of my library reserved for the OAPs. Sometimes I give them away. However, they will not be shoved off to the side or to some new owner until there is a newer, better edition. I’ve done these before with my Orwell books and I’ve done it recently with two more books.

The first one is William Shirer’s magnum opus The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:

The edition on the left has been thumbed through so many times the covers are falling off. By the way, if you need to read just one book about the Nazis let it be this one. Shirer was there when the idiots rose to power, he was there when war broke out and he was there again after they surrendered. After the war he was given access to practically all of the Nazi records and the result was this magnificent book.

The other book I upgraded was Joseph Heller’s Catch-22:

Catch-22 isn’t real. For years I thought it was but no, Heller invented it for this book. There is no such term in bureaucracy called Catch-22 but it has entered the lexicon because of this book. Not many people today ‘get’ Heller’s novel. It is the blackest of black comedies and pushes the absurdity levels so high it is no longer considered absurd. I first read it more than twenty years ago when I was all teenager-y and rebellious. I remember loving it but I don’t remember what it was about other than the flight bomber Yossarian finding out that anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t crazy. Fearing for one’s own safety in combat is a sign of a rational mind. A soldier who is declared crazy is excused from combat duty. Therefore Yossarian was crazy if he wanted to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t but if he was sane then he would have to fly more missions but if he flew then he’s crazy so he can ask for an exemption but if he asks then that proves he is sane which means he must fly more missions. Loop de loop, no end in sight. That’s Catch-22. It’s a wonderful absurd novel and must not be read by those who have no sense of humour or has a stick up their behind.

Anyway, the two new editions will take over the places on the shelves vacated by the older ones because I’m an ageist with my books. That’s just how I roll.

Comics Taught Me English, Dammit!

January 4th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

“We encourage you to bring reading materials to school but not comics”, said my daughter’s teacher during assembly today. While I think it’s great there is a lot more freedom to bring non-textbooks to school nowadays, I’d like to disagree about the comics ban. Actually I would like to poke the eyes out of the people who say that but apparently that’s illegal.

At least schools today allow the kids to bring buku cerita to school. Back in my time, we couldn’t bring anything not associated with school not even novels (but my friends and I brought them to school anyway, ’cause we were rebels like that). There was a kind of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy where you weren’t bothered with a spot check of your bags as long as you don’t get caught reading a story book in class. Heaven forbid. And comics? Fergedaboutit.

But why? What’s with this anathema towards picture books? Comics taught me English. Others helped as well, like Agatha Christie, but comics, usually Asterix or Tintin but more often than not a superhero comic, helped me understand this perfidious language. Well, okay I’ll concede that today’s mainstream superhero comics aren’t suitable for a nine-year old but it’s not like they are all bad. I wouldn’t give my daughter this:

Yes, that’s a woman vomiting blood. She’s a member of the Red Lantern Corps, you see, and to join the group you vomit out all your blood and replace it with hate. Yeah, even I find it ridiculous.

But I would totally give my daughter this:

Unfortunately, since it’s a comic book it is officially banned from school. So the kids bring Wimpy Kid or Geronimo Stilton or Horrible Histories which are technically not comics even though they have pictures in them, sometimes sequentially. Those are all right but Tiny Titan Robin isn’t? Darn you Malaysian schools! What do you say to that Doctor Doom?