1.
Yet again (and truly for the last time unless something absolutely miraculous arises), Donna Tartt's The Secret History...

I do find it intriguing that people continue to dissect this novel with such regularity. I don't think it's just algorithms. It doesn't happen with other books...

Anyway, this time it's Natalia Titova, who argues that the book, at its heart, is an exploration of the dangerous business of pursuing your passion too -- well, passionately. It extrapolates various guiding principles: Beware of excessive devotion (to anything); beware of over-powerful teachers; and be aware that knowledge can be dangerous... She concludes that the book is actually "one big warning": However compelling something is, we need to keep our heads.

And yet this distillation somehow fails to capture the ecstasy of the novel... As she points out, the original title was The God of Illusions (this is also the title that was used for the Italian version). And Bacchus wants nothing to do with people who keep their heads. Conversely, those drawn to his rites are rarely interested in good judgement... It's the excess that's the attraction...


Oxford, 2024

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2.
Still in academia, this blogger savages John Williams's Stoner...

In a nutshell, she argues, Stoner is terrible with regard to women... In slightly more detail: "The misogynistic elements in the novel operate on two levels: within the narrative, exemplified by Stoner’s treatment of his wife, and without it, exemplified by Williams’ treatment of all his female characters, who are underwritten fantasies. Edith, the fantasy of martyrdom, and Katherine, the fantasy of sex, standing opposite each other as pillars in Stoner’s life, where his daughter is an afterthought, unseen, unheard, a footnote buried within the pages."

She's by no means the first to advance this critique. And many of her points are pretty much unanswerable. Indeed, in my own post, I noted that we need a countervailing novel written from the point of view of Edith...

And yet, as I read this book, I felt deeply for Stoner, with all his limitations. He did not appal or repel me. I felt his struggles, and identified with many of his battles. I found it a profoundly moving novel.

At the end of the day, books are written by imperfect human beings about imperfect human beings. Writers with limited vision work their magic for readers with limited vision... When we read, we always need to juggle: Compassion and judgement; judgement and compassion.

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3.
The message of Marian Keyes's This Charming Man is needed more than ever...

According to this recent article by Hannah Al-Othman and Geraldine McKelvie on domestic abuse in the United Kingdom: "The number of women who are driven to suicide by domestic abusers is being under-reported, and their cases overlooked by police, in what has been described by experts as a 'national scandal'. Domestic violence suicides are already growing at such a rate that a woman in an abusive relationship is now more likely to take her own life than be killed by a partner. But research into the number of women who take their own life in such circumstances has suggested official statistics could track as few as 6.5% of the true number of cases."

Horrific.


Madrid, Museum of Romanticism, 2020. What lay ahead?

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4.
Susan H. Kamei looks back at the 84th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066.

This was the move that began the wartime incarceration, in the United States, of people with Japanese ancestry. Nearly 127,000 were detained, among them the family members commemorated by Kimi Cunningham Grant in Silver Like Dust.

Kamei writes: "When the prisoners were transferred to long-term detention facilities run by the War Relocation Authority later in 1942, they brought with them what Delphine Hirasuna, an author and descendant of people who had been incarcerated during the war, calls the 'art of gaman.' 'Gaman' is a Japanese word meaning the dignity and grace to bear the seemingly unbearable. With this philosophy, they created objects of both utility and beauty...

"Eight decades after Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, researchers are delving into the traumatic intergenerational impact that the incarceration has had on the camp survivors and their descendants... On Feb. 19, known annually as the Day of Remembrance, Americans can honor them by appreciating their 'art of gaman,' testaments to their resilient spirit as they found and created beauty in their wartime environments."

Interestingly, Julia Shiota, whose perceptive review of The Memory Police I quoted extensively, cites this mass internment as an example of an event that was "forgotten" -- not as a result of the natural passage of time, but on account of a "conscious decision": "The incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII has only relatively recently become a critical historical event taught in schools; for many white Americans, this was considered 'forgotten' history. Yet, the Japanese American community never forgot."


Okinawa Peace Memorial, 2017

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5.
Kate Jones unpacks the writing habits of Octavia E. Butler, author of Parable of the Sower.

As I discovered when I was reading that book, Butler was one of the first female African American science fiction writers, and a leading light in a subgenre than became known as Afrofuturism. But what were the trade practices she adopted?

"She fully believed," says Jones, "in the role of habit as being far more dependable than inspiration, and that to continue learning one’s craft was more reliable than talent. Her consistency of habit led her to write every day, usually in the early morning, long before any distractions of the day could persuade her otherwise. She aimed for a minimum of four hours' writing every morning, which she would treat like shift work. Getting up between 3am and 4am, which she found to be her best writing time, she worked these hours around her other jobs, finding that after work she was just too tired and too full of other people to write." That is impressive, to be sure...

Another interesting point: "Butler referred to herself as 'comfortably asocial' saying that she enjoyed people best when she could be alone much of the time. Speaking frankly in 1998, she stated: 'I used to worry about it because my family worried about it. And I finally realized: This is the way I am. That’s that. We all have some weirdness, and this is mine.'" Ah good, there's hope for lots of us, then...

Her advice for aspiring writers? Study subjects such as history and anthropology, which help us to understand our own species...

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6.
Enjoy Agatha Christie (1890-1976), says Nicholas Bareit, but nurse no illusions as to her liberal credentials...

Christie's books, says this French scholar, are a window onto her worldview, and they convey very clearly her philosophy of punishment: "In her work, criminal justice is resolutely retributive. It is even, in some of its aspects, reactionary... For Agatha Christie, vengeance is a form of justice, and indeed the most effective one. In her view, in fact, murder calls for the death of the murderer. There is no room for forgiveness, nor for corrective behavior. She is very clear: It is there, in black and white in her autobiography, that criminals must either be executed or agree to be guinea pigs for science, when 'the mark of Cain will finally be erased from their foreheads.' This was written not in 1930 but in 1977."

Good stories, though... Must tackle another one soon...


Southwell, 2012. Would Christie have approved of workhouses too?

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7.
Here's all you need to know about reading in Malaysia, from a range of people in the know:

Mahi Ramakrishnan, president of PEN Malaysia, first tries to answer the question of WHAT Malaysia is reading: "The answers are as fragmented as the nation itself. In Malay-language markets, shelves groan with self-help, spiritual reflections, and translated thrillers. Romance novels travel from pasar malam or night markets to friend-to-friend exchanges. In English-language shops, BookTok darlings like Colleen Hoover sit beside Sally Rooney and Murakami. Malaysian writers try holding their own -- Tash Aw, Tan Twan Eng, Yangsze Choo, Hanna Alkaf -- while graphic novels and manga continue their quiet conquest. Tamil-reading homes still return to Bharathi and Kalki Krishnamurthy, especially after the novel Ponniyin Selvan’s cinematic rebirth. That said, young Indians -- including those in Tamil schools -- have turned away from Bharathi, dismissing the work as boring. Chinese-language readers devour Keigo Higashino and blockbuster crime, romance, or fantasy fiction. This literature is really a mosaic of many tongues, converging only occasionally."

She then turns to the road ahead: "The future of reading in Malaysia feels precarious yet luminous. Precarious because of censorship, digital distraction, economic strain. Luminous because one book can still ignite a revolution of spirit. Malaysians are still reading: in trains, in cafés, at Sharon Bakar’s readings, in whispers about banned titles, in secret PDFs. Reading here is resistance, refuge, and, sometimes, joy."



Amir Muhammad, who heads up publishing house Buku Fixi, and is also a filmmaker, has had four of the works on his list banned. That's only 1 per cent, he says, philosophically... Since the 1950s, over 3,100 books have been banned in Malaysia: "I have come to think of bans as an occupational hazard; it’s a price of entry for publishing here. They’re annoying and disruptive but akin to having a piece of half-chewed taugeh stuck between one’s teeth: inconvenient, but hardly the end of the world."

Translator Pauline Fan describes the fascinating career of books as physical objects, and the joy of book quests: "Books rarely die in Malaysia. They live on in afterlives both physical and virtual, crossing thresholds of time and technology... My own journey into this afterlife was as a literary translator searching for the lost short stories of Fatimah Busu, one of Malaysia’s most fearless and inventive writers. Her stories -- often centered on the lives of Malay women -- are fierce, satirical, and unsparing in their critiques of hypocrisy and patriarchy. But by the time I began my search, most of her collections had long gone out of print. I turned to the improvised, vibrant world of secondhand Malay books, which now thrives online. Facebook has become the nerve center of this underground literary economy... What began as research became something more intimate: an act of recovery, a kind of listening. Each rescued book carried not only Fatimah’s voice but also the echoes of an era when Malay literature burned with idealism and defiance...

"Each exchange reminded me that books in Malaysia survive, not through institutions, but through individuals. In this archipelago of afterlives, secondhand booksellers form an unseen network of memory keepers -- a living web of exchanges, part marketplace, part archive. It is through them that we continue to read together, across time."

Writer and sociolinguist Dipika Mukherjee sums up, pointing out the rich multilingual backdrop of Malaysia, celebrating the "enormous strides" that have been made in reading culture in the last few decades, but regretting the dampening effect of certain laws. She concludes: "Only by confronting the uneasy balance between creative freedom and social regulation can Malaysian literature fully claim its place as something daring, honest, and resonant."


Seremban, 2010

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8.
And, from the other focal point of our now divided time, it was a nice surprise to see Manx featured in the latest edition of Words Without Borders!

Emyr Wallace Humphreys's introduction speaks of his ambition to "show a global community of readers how Celtic-language literature is extant and vital", and to "reevaluate the Celtic languages’ often fraught relationship with the majority languages and cultures they coexist with".

Manx is represented by three stirring poems by Mona Douglas (1898-1987), translated by Robert Corteen Carswell.

Here's a bit from the one called Rise Up:

When the English were coming amongst us,
Saying that our old tongue was not good—
"Dead it is, put it under a grave stone,
Speak English in church and home!"—
Still were there some amongst us,
Striving to keep their heritage free,
Calling on the Gaelic people,
"Hold on to language, hold on to country!
Rise up! Rise up!"

Yay!