Always in Wonderment by Lewis Carroll

This is a book about a child’s trials and tribulations. However, it is not a children’s book.

Forget about the picture books or the abridged versions. Dodgson’s chaotic, nonsensical creation is meant for adult reading as a jolt to our ordered consciousness. Growing up is hard. It becomes more difficult to stumble upon rabbit holes, much less have the courage to slip into them. But we all need places/ persons that contain our projections of wonderment. It is the only way that growing up can ever make sense as a process.

To Dodgson, it was Alice; to Alice, it was Wonderland. Whatever Alice’s adventures can be interpreted to be allegorical of, it cannot diminish what I find to be the most essential takeaway from Dodgson’s creation: our need for wondering. Do not try to read too much into the riddles or apparent anarchy of plot lines. Treat every invented turn (of phrase) with the same curiosity a child would with the strange. Only then can we continue to retain the child in us. Somehow, this thought always makes me smile.

Contributed by: s.t

ThisIsAboutMe

I spent a good part of my weekend writing about a subject I don’t often write about – myself. You think it’ll be easier now, with all the practice on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, but there’s still nothing scarier than trying to put yourself down on paper.

I’m talking about writing a CV. What is the first thing that people should know about me? Should they even know that? How should I segue to the next paragraph and who’s reading this anyway? There are just too many things to think about for just one page (if you haven’t heard, it should be kept to just a page, and two at most). Thankfully, I had a little help. Here are three excellent sites that helped me with the many, many drafts:

1. CampaignJobs

Great site for fresh grads. It helps you generate a simple CV which you can then build on later. If you really don’t know where to start, this is a good place to begin.

2. Monster

I wish I had found Monster earlier. In my opinion, it is seriously the most organised jobsearch website available. Apart from advertising new job opportunities, it has fantastic resources that will help you write that perfect CV.

3. Ambition

This recruiter is serious about making sure you nail it. Pretty good stuff, but best if your potential employer is in the Finance and IT sector.

My advice? Screw the online samples. You know yourself best. Getting someone or some agency to draft one for you takes the fun away the job search. Trust me.

Contributed by: D.C

love is destruction is love

When I was 6, one of my favourite books was a black hardcover that had 5 different Secret Seven stories. I read it till it the spine fell off and the hard cover was bent and dog-eared and the brown cardboard showed through. I took it everywhere with me, including once to a restaurant where we were having dinner with another family. They had a boy my age, and he was carrying an identical copy of my book – pristine in a ziplock bag.

I don’t particularly enjoy new books. The spines aren’t creased, and the pages smell too clean and chemical. It doesn’t feel like it’s yours. My favourite books have shredded covers barely hanging on, and the entire middle section of my staple bedtime book fell out a few weeks ago. You know exactly what to expect on the next page. You know that the joke about asking a glass of water what’s unpleasant about being drunk is on the left-hand page, about a third of the way down. The alignment of the words and paragraphs are familiar, and the footnotes take up the exact amount of space you know they do on each page. You’re familiar with the size of the font, the font itself, the spacing between the lines, the width of the margins, how each new chapter is introduced, and the indentation of the first paragraph of each new section within a chapter. The books smell warm and inviting like an old pillow, and the pages are comforting and yellow and curled.

Books are primarily about the words, but for the books you no longer read for the plot but instead for how they make you feel, it’s more about the familiar experience. Rather than the excitement of a new crush where you eagerly wait for what comes next, it’s the contentment of coming home to that specific book you feel comfortable enough to throw around and to accidentally crush under your pillow when you fall asleep with it. For each new crease you discover, and each new torn-off piece of the cover you’re forced to discard, it’s a step in cementing your relationship. The more ruined it is, the more you love it.

When I was 8, I picked up my mother’s copy of W.S. Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. I read and loved her copy until a few years later the sticky tape couldn’t hold the covers on, it broke in half down the spine and I wasn’t allowed to touch it. It’s now too fragile to be actually read. I bought my own copy a couple of years ago, but it wasn’t the same book and I didn’t feel connected to it. Last month I finally opened it and started re-reading it, more than a decade since I last read about Philip Carey. The book feels and smells different from the one I grew up with, but I’m guessing in five years time when this cover is ripped and the spine creased and it’s stained with greasy fingerprints, coffee stains and tears, I’ll have a new experience to treasure.

Contributed by: Pam

Good Book by David Plotz

Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible is the published collection of David Plotz’s Blogging the Bible series for Slate.com, with a few additional chapters and more importantly, an excellent collection of appendices (My Favourite Prostitutes and The Bible’s Twelve Best Pickup Lines, among others).

Plotz hasn’t just written a hilarious recap of the Old Testament along with amusing comments. It brilliantly highlights the gap between religious spirituality and religious culture, and Plotz reads the bible not as a religious text but as an aesthetic and flawed history of his ancestors. The pleasure of the book comes less from a non-religious reading of the Bible, and more from a culturally Jewish interpretation of his own community. He notes, for example, the argumentative way in which the early prophets communicated with God, humorously pointing out its connection to the high status law has within the American Jewish population. Writing about holding a family Shabbat dinner, he touchingly writes: “It’s unsettling, in a good way, to find that the very words I am speaking to my son are those that my fathers and forefathers have been speaking to their sons on Friday night for 3,000 years”.

I’ve had this book for nearly 2 years (and followed his column when it first came out in 2006), and each time I read it I’m still struck by the fascinating connection between religion, ancestry, and culture. Plotz doesn’t encourage his readers in any specific theological or cultural direction, but through his personal and non- religious opinions as he recaps each chapter of the Bible, it reminds me that religion, and Judaism, is so much more than just a belief in one God.

David Plotz is the editor of Slate magazine, and contributes to the weekly Slate Political Gabfest (a podcast I highly recommend).

Contributed by: Pam

Para Graphs

Reading is topographical, where every word as a grain of sand culminates in a series of indicative landscape features, swooping where terraces fall into valleys, or exfoliating just before the tundra ends. Lay a piece of writing on its side and you cannot help but notice the uneven emotional/intellectual altitudes spilling out, like the scalable bars of a murmuring heart/mind. And these graphs, while measures of the pulse of the writing intention (the author’s blood pump), are more importantly the basic punctuating units of the sensory journey taken whenever the author decides to take the reader’s hand. These mighty distillers, my friend, are the para graphs.

Contributed by: s.t.

Wit by Margaret Edson

From its opening line, ‘Wit’ took me by the jugular and never really let go. It is a compact and wickedly funny tour de force – both intellectually engaging and emotionally immediate. But make no mistake: its bite is really a kiss; an essentiality which somehow atomizes the world, so that it may reconstruct itself in a slightly improved way.

It asks the most compelling question I find, of whether the quest for humanity in mortality is best cerebral-led or compassion-driven. Having this inquiry into Cartesian dualism occur amidst a highly-rationalized medical system challenges the reader to continually dissect the many sides to what the human ‘condition’ entails, to no real end.

Medical or interactional, lines of offense and defense are often drawn up by the hearts and minds. These lines keep our emotions and rationality at bay, but collisions will still happen. There will be times when we apply them inadequately, and in wrong doses. All these while in the stream of life, death, life. Mortality (towards immortality) continues to happen. ‘Wit’ is one of the most humanistic plays ever written to so elegantly surface these almost-taboo issues, without being self-important. And as a first play, Edson’s achievements are quite awe-inspiring.

PS: There is a HBO film adaptation of the play directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson.

Contributed by: s.t.

The Witches by Roald Dahl

The allure of this beloved book is that it keeps our empathy for the children at bay. They are not sympathetic victims, but if you ask me, mere irritating mice. Through imaginative anthropomorphism, Dahl makes cruelty to children at times, justifiable. Characters here defy their traditional (read: man-made) stereotypes. The witches are enigmatic creatures of wondrous powers, speech and nature. They are not really women, don’t you find? Strangers are not necessarily always dangerous especially when silly obnoxious (grand)parents are more shackles than saviors. So forget about Dahl the misogynist or pessimist. Dahl was a magician, an illusionist; every child’s best mate. Last I checked, I do not have square ends for toes or purple irises. Like any child mesmerized, I went wherever my instincts wanted to go: to the delightful transformations Dahl conjured. And what shimmering smoke and mirrors!

PS: Quentin Blake’s penchant for fuzz in his lines enhances the crookedness of the tale, and adds that extra “kazaam”.

Contributed by: s.t.

Every Unfinished Book

There are unfinished books, both written and read.

Then there are books that are meant to be unfinished. By “unfinished”, think of a dog chasing after its tail. In a time of headlines, bottomlines and overstatements, we all still need some kind of footnoting. Postponements in our reading experience shave an inch off the dog’s tail: beyond reach, it becomes the perfect incomplete circle. Even if language is an archetypical structure, it must still navigate the formless unpredictability of communication. The art of giving and receiving, writing and reading, is the art of ‘unfinished businesses’. The circle is an open one. Total immersion in the enjoyment of a book, a painting, a song, someone’s company, a situation or an emotion will always face premature or premeditated departure. It is not that nothing lasts forever. Rather, it is because everything can last forever, that we must seek to postpone the interaction between writer and work; book and reader, in order for us to have another go at it. This goes on, because we go on.

In the end, every book will remain unfinished.

Contributed by: s.t.

The Man Who Ate The World by Jay Rayner

 

 

If there were an activity I love more than reading, it would be eating. And if there is any activity that combines the both together so very well, it’ll be reading about food. Lucky for me, so many people have ventured into writing about food: from the preparation of it, to the stories behind it, from the cooking of it and right down to the eating of it. 

Before I talk about Jay Rayner’s “ The Man Who Ate the World”, let me first state that food writing is an art, and it is an art that not many people do well. So what if you are JK Rowling? You can’t depend on an excellent word bank or good amount of imagination to write about food. It takes a skilled writer with plenty of guts to write about food in the most glorified detail without sounding like Nigella Lawson. You can’t be so explicit that your reader gets too hungry to go on reading, and you also can’t be too cursory that your writing becomes something you find in the lifestyle and cooking section of the newspaper.

Which is why I quite enjoyed Rayner’s book. I gravitated to the book when I saw it in a book sale because from the cover I figured it would make me laugh. It did, at the preface, when he warned me to read this in a café with no obstructing glassware and snacks within reach. As a food critic, you would think he might be pretty adept about all things food, but then he gets himself in strange places (Sushi in Moscow?), eating even stranger food (lamb cooked in sour milk?) and meeting the strangest people (descendents of Stalin’s chefs?). I liked that he didn’t make me that hungry – I wanted to relish the next story as much as I wanted to savour the garlicky escargot and the foie gras terrine buried beneath a leaf-fall of summer truffle shavings.

Jay Rayner set out on a quest to see if those fabled Michelin-starred restaurants are really something to shout out about. And he tells us what we already know, and that is the perfect meal can’t be found anywhere with Baroque fittings or a €200 degustation menu. It just can’t be found.

Contributed by: D.C

Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis

It takes a really gifted writer with the precise recipe of unabashed honesty, wicked intellectuality and sly wit to make an autobiographical memoir truly readable. De Assis (1839-1908, Brazilian) achieved this feat in 160 intentional chapters, each illuminating luminously the trials and tribulations of his (alter) ego. Reflecting an astute style-choice (he opts for the posthumous route from the get-go since the dead could always only have fun!), these disparate tracks re-create the digressive nature of consciousness-in-being by skipping lithely between life’s predominant polarities both across and within chapters: objectivism and subjectivism (or depiction and conversation; reflection and refraction, reality and philosophy). The result is an intimate reading experience facilitated through an embracive literary structure. There are many addictive and attractive things about ‘Epitaph’, the greatest of which would be the reader’s desire to eventually obtain a fragment of Assis’ bravery in his ability to reminisce a life’s worth in glee. I affirm that this is quite possibly one of the ‘greatest novels you never heard of’.

Contributed by: s.t