Read a good book lately?

In an age where getting things done quickly is important and being entertained at the touch of a button is de rigeuer, it’s far too easy to forget the simple pleasure of reading a good book. Can’t afford the latest releases? Try a library. There are plenty of well-stocked libraries in Bangkok, and most aren’t…

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A tough climb

Soul Mountain By Gao Xingjian, translated by Mabel Lee Soul Mountain, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, is not a compelling read. Meandering and self-indulgent, the novel simply fails to truly engage the reader, despite covering many issues and landscapes that provide ample opportunities for insightful and provocative writing. There are occasional…

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The ringmaster

From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965-2000 By Lee Kuan Yew If Singapore has been Asia’s most successful tiger, then Lee Kuan Yew has been the region’s greatest ringmaster. The second volume of Lee’s memoirs further consolidates Lee’s singular view of the world and Singapore’s place in it, making for compulsive reading. Lee…

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Poking fun at Thailand’s cliches

Yawn: A Thriller By Collin Piprell Chloe and Waylon are living a quiet married existence in suburban Vancouver, Canada, along with Chloe’s sister Meredith. Insurance man Waylon is neurotically tidy and conservative, and lingers housebound at the weekend asking questions like "Sorry, but who put the can of three-in-one oil on the condiments turntable?" Chloe,…

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Analysing terror

Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison By David Chandler Some 1.5 million Cambodian people were killed or died as a result of policies implemented by the Khmer Rouge during its reign of terror between 1975 and 1979. How do you get your mind around something like that? By making analogies…

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Toward quality fiction

Like the Gaze of Statues: Selected Short Stories By Karen Schur What a refreshing book to find published in this city crying out to be captured by a competent fiction writer’s pen. But Karen Schur’s Like the Gaze of Statues ventures much further than Bangkok: this collection of twenty quietly-spoken short stories takes the world…

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Girl, Interrupted

By Susanna Kaysen When Susanna Kaysen is 18 years old she makes a feeble attempt to take her own life. After a single session with a psychiatrist she is diagnosed as having a ‘borderline personality’ and is sent away to McLean Hospital, the private psychiatric centre that treated Sylvia Plath and Ray Charles, among other…

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When We Were Orphans

By Kazuo Ishiguro Christopher Banks was born in Shanghai to British parents in the early 20th century while opium was all the rage. His father’s apparent kidnapping is followed shortly afterwards by his mother’s disappearance, and thereafter he is sent back to England. He becomes a successful detective, and eventually returns to Shanghai just prior…

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A Star Called Henry

By Roddy Doyle This punch of a novel traces the first twenty years of Henry Smart, born into the slums of Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century. The young Smart competes with his dead younger brother Henry for the attention of his spirit-broken mother, while his father is out being bouncer and occasional…

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Not pure, just determined

Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography By Richard Branson Are you ready to be humbled into admitting that you have, after all, been a pretty lazy git for most of your life? Are you ready to be energised into vowing that you will achieve what you want to, however many years ago it was that you…

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