Tribute to Arthur C. Clarke

clipped from www.nytimes.com Among his legacies are Clarke’s Three Laws, provocative observations on science, science fiction and society that were published in his “Profiles of the Future” (1962): ¶“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” ¶“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” ¶“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I am ashamed to admit that I have not read his famous work, "Space Odessey 2001", save for an excerpt that I did as an unseen prose exercise with my Literature class. I did attempt to watch the Kubrick's film but fell asleep in the first 10min when the monkeys did nothing but remained motionless.

May he rest in peace.

New on the Shelves ...

For those of you who do not bother to subscribe to my goodreads ...

Needless to say, this is me setting a good example for doppy to keep an open mind and engage in dialogues with him about my faith.

Interestingly, when I was adding this book to my shelves, the search for the title turned up a counter-point to this book. I shall try to get hold of it and read that too.

Part of my effort to expand my reading interests.


Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2005.

Yep. I am a sucker for awards and prizes. I figured that since I would never be able to finish reading all the books in the world, I might as well read award-winning ones so that at least I can either affirm the award or disagree with the judges' tastes. :)


C'mon! Who can resist a title like that?

It helps that it has blurbs from The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Review etc etc.

I have never said that I am not a shallow reader. :P

I still have a long way to go

clipped from www.pickthebrain.com The 5 Types of Books that Increase Intelligence All books are not created equal, and it follows that all readers are not equal either. To read prodigiously and to read profitably are two very different things. A great amount of time is wasted reading books that are forgotten a short time after they’re completed. But time spent reading books that cultivate intelligence and wisdom is a labor that yields continuous benefit over a lifetime. Although it is certainly necessary, for the purposes of business and everyday life, to read about the latest news and trends, that type of reading is outside the scope of this article. My aim is to encourage the reading of books that permanently increase intelligence and, as a result, improve our chances of leading prosperous and fulfilling lives. 1. Science 2. Philosophy 3. Serious Fiction 4. History 5. Poetry

As usual, It was doppy who pointed me to this post. He said that it seemed like I was on my way.

Well, out of the 5 types of books that were listed, I read or rather own books on philosophy, serious fiction and poetry. I have not quite find any historical books that appeal to me and science books have to be written really simply and in layman terms in order to make sense to me.

Keeping a book journal (I started one last year) does help to keep track of one's literary diet. Yet unless doppy happened to have read the same book as I did, I hardly have any chance to discuss the books I have read with anyone. This is probably one of the reasons I signed up for my MA course too, hoping that it would provide one way for me to read more intelligently and apply the knowledge I have gleaned from the books that I have read.

The post has inspired me to broaden the types of books I read and I shall pamper myself this week with a trip to Kinokuniya. Anyone cares to join me?

The Meowmeow Family Writes

clipped from www.extremely.com A hilarious crash course in literature – 17 syllables at a time! Why spend weeks slogging through The Iliad when you can just read the haiku? In the sixteenth century, Zen monks in Japan developed the haiku, an unrhymed poem consisting of 17 syllables arranged in three lines of five, seven and five syllables respectively. Now, in One Hundred Great Books in Haiku, published by Viking/Penguin, David Bader has applied this ancient poetic form to the classics. From Homer to Milton to Lao Tzu, the great books are finally within reach of even the shortest attention spans. Avoid eyestrain and show off your literary prowess at cocktail parties! It's the perfect gift for today's busy reader.

I picked out this book from one of Border's shelves. I was tickled pink by the haiku on Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift:

Thus I was first great,
then small, and much vexed to learn
that size does matter.

And since doppy had a 25% discount voucher, he bought the book for me.

We just spent the last 20min or so in bed reading the book together and laughing at how insightful and succinct the haikus were. When Homer's Iliad can be told in three lines, you will be kinda of bemused that Bader could summarise what you took a couple of months to plough through into a few seconds' read.

Doppy was most inspired by this book and decided to start a blog for us to start writing haikus to reflect our Singaporean experience. It is our hope that one day, our works will be good enough to be published.

In the meantime, do pop by when you are free and let us have your comments. Remember to bookmark it or subscribe to its feeds along with this blog.

Enjoy! :)

The Canon

clipped from www.nytimes.com A baby sucks on a pencil and her panicky mother fears the child will get lead poisoning. A politician argues that hydrogen can replace fossil fuels as our nation’s energy source. A consumer tells a reporter that she refuses to eat tomatoes that have genes in them. And a newsmagazine condemns the prospects of cloning because it could mass-produce an army of zombies. These are just a few examples of scientific illiteracy — inane misconceptions that could have been avoided with a smidgen of freshman science. (For those afraid to ask: pencil “lead” is carbon; hydrogen fuel takes more energy to produce than it releases; all living things contain genes; a clone is just a twin.) Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it. People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics.

After reading this NYT review in the loo on my Avantgo while taking a dump, I was sufficiently shamed to want to purchase .

Indeed, doppy has never ceased to be shocked by my lack of scientific knowledge and one of his most heard refrain to me is, "Haven't you learnt this in your secondary science lessons?"!

To be honest, apart from knowledge of literature (and even that, I am woefully ignorant!), my literacies in other areas are appallingly poor. From science literacy to financial literacy, my constant gripe is, "but I am hopeless with figures and lousy in maths!". Increasingly though, I find that it is merely an excuse for me to refuse to try to comprehend. Afterall, if I have received a basic 10 years education, and have passed Elementary and Additional Mathematics, surely I must be able to make some sense of the world I live in beyond the ethical issues or the human condition.

This shall be my first brave attempt to try a new genre that on any other day, I would never have picked the book up. It also helps if you are married to a geek who would love nothing more than to expound on his scientific knowledge. And he's pretty good with drawing analogies to help me make sense of complicated scientific concepts.

If you are interested too, here's a first chapter of the book.

Don't Panic!

I have never been a big fan of science fiction or rather I was a pretty latecomer to the scene.

I must admit that Doppy was the greatest influence on me, expressing his shock and horror every single time when he asked me if I had read one the classic titles and I had to admit my ignorance.

He bought for me a couple of years back as a birthday present (yes, yes, my husband strongly believes that my literary diet needs beefing up. That explains why I always get a new book for my birthday!) and despite my best intention, I always fall asleep when I read it in my bed.

It is not like the story is dull or anything. In fact, its sardonic sense of humour appeals to me and though I do not get all the references (like how Arthur Dent proclaimed that he never saw the notice for the demolition of his house as it was pasted on a notice board in a dungeon of sorts where no one would dream of checking! is a reference to small English towns doing precisely that whenever they have to make a public announcement!). However the book is too large (he bought the omnibus version) for me to lug around and the only time I would ever settle down to read it is when I crawl into bed.

Fortunately, I found an ebook version of it on the internet thanks to my trusty googling skills! And though my iSilo reader is a trial version, it allows me to read it just fine as long as I scroll down the pages faithfully without jumping to chapters.

I am looking forward to meeting . I just hope that I will get to finish the book before the holidays end! :)

Night

Doppy will probably never pick up this to read as it is one the books in Ophrah's Book Club. Then again, just the other day, when he ran out of programmes to watch, he was actually catching Martha Stewart on T.V. so there might just be hope yet.

I bought this book some time back when Kinokuniya was having their 20% sale. As usual, I read about it in the papers or in the NYT Book Review channel on my Treo and jotted the title and author's name (Elie Wiesel) down. It has been sitting pretty on my book shelf for a while (as usual) but since I was going for a conference at NTU where I would have plenty of waiting time before keynote speeches or during lunch break, I decided to get started on it after I was done with Kite Runner.

If Kite Runner gave me a peek into Afghanistan, this book allowed me to experience the full terror of Auschwitz. It brought to mind the few lessons I attended for my MA module (the one on Writing in the Aftermath) where we discussed if it was even possible for literature and poetry to be written after Auschwitz when such atrocities have been committed against humanity. We also discussed whether it was possible for survivors of terrible events to ever be witnesses for by virtue of their survival, they have missed the trauma and so how can they ever accurately represent it?

I must say however Wiesel managed to pull it off. Meepok has already read this book and she definitely agrees with me. Though the prose is simple and direct, it is the precise simplicity of the writing that conveys the trauma of being separated from one's family members and being sent to a German concentration camp so effectively.

I shall end my post with a paragraph that brought tears to my eyes when I read it. The author was a deeply religious boy and these were his thoughts about his first impressions of the German concentration camp for Jews:

"Let us try to imagine what goes on in his mind as his eyes watch rings of black smoke unfurl in the sky, smoke that emanates from the furnaces into which his little sister and his mother had been thrown after thousands of other victims:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never."

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night

clipped from www.readinggroupguides.com 2. It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears' house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.

I believe that this book does not require any further introduction.

Doppy beamed it to me and I started on it one night when I had difficulty falling asleep.

Despite the simple prose and the complex mathematical solutions that I can't appreciate, it was a very good read. Though the plot was hardly a page-turner, seeing the world through the eyes of an autistic child was very engaging. Christopher's inability to interpret the world and process all the information his brain is presented with, makes me both sympathise with him and also marvel at his detailed observations.

The ending of the book is guaranteed to tug at your heartstrings. Tis pretty light reading too so one can read it while standing in line or taking a dump.

Do pick up the book if you have not done so. I want to get a hard copy of the book as my e-text version does not have all the illustrations and pictures!

Enjoy!