Miscellany — May 2010

Yes, it has been a long time; so long in fact that I will not be able to catch up by reviewing all the books I have read since the last time I really posted.

So what I'll do here is talk briefly (as usual) about the few books I have read in the last few weeks that would be of any interest to my few readers. Is that OK? Anybody?

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1. Guy Adams's The World House is the first part of an epic. It is like Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman slammed together in the death throes of a maniac. There's a mysterious box. People who look for it end up in a house which is also a universe. And it seems to have been designed to keep someone in. At this point, I went all retro and started thinking of Sapphire and Steel and Doctor Who. But this book is perhaps more horrifying in some ways. It is an excellent read, and some parts are genuine comedy. That makes it worse.

2. Ender in Exile is Orson Scott Card's official sequel to Ender's Game, and in some ways, it fills a lacuna that has always existed between that book and Speaker for the Dead. It is a good read, especially if you have already read the other Enderverse books and can thus make sense by fragment recognition. I am not so sure it stands well as a novel on its own.

3. Garry Kasparov's On Modern Chess: Part Three — Kasparov vs Karpov 1986-87 is a really good chess book. It covers the huge double-match after the inconclusive war of attrition fought between the two earlier. With glimpses of chess politics and excellent analysis, especially in places where Kasparov mourns his own poor analysis (which is probably still a lot better than 99.5% of most chess players), it is worth working through. I think Anand (who recently defended his own title as World Chess Champion) might have benefited from Kasparov's analysis of the Gruenfeld as a championship match opening.

4. I reviewed the late Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in October 2008 or thereabouts. Since then, I have consumed The Girl Who Played with Fire and the final volume, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. They're excellent Scandinavian versions of John Grisham novels, but with greater emotional intensity. Elisabeth Salander is not only a quirky heroine, but she is something darker and a lot more powerful. While the trilogy makes a great 'individual vs establishment' story, it isn't that. It's more than that; it's about the costs and rewards of liberal democracy, while not descending to polemic.

5. Pride of place must go to Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet: A Novel. This is my singular best novel of 2010. It's about a boy growing up in a ranch in the Midwest. But his mother is an entomologist searching for the elusive (illusive?) Tiger Monk. And his father is a laconic cowboy who doesn't seem to value the scientific approach. Our hero, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, is a cartographer by nature; he maps everything, and he is mystified by many things. Then one day, the Smithsonian contacts him, and his life will never be the same. Except that it was already not going to be the same when his elder brother got killed by a shot to the head...

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That's it for now! I won't inflict the rest of the reading on you. I will only just quickly plug one more book for the very few of you (and even fewer now, perhaps) who might be interested in diasporic communities.

Leo Suryadinata has edited and collected a bunch of essays on Peranakan Chinese in Globalizing Southeast Asia. There's a chapter in it by me. Enjoy!