April 15, 2013
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month. It’s a smallish list this time round, mostly because I have several projects going on that require a lot of reading, and at a very slow pace. I’m also very late in posting my March reading list!
Hits
- Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
- War Poems (Carl Sandburg)
- When Dogs Cry (Markus Zusak)
- The Hidden Reality (Brian Greene)
- Other Voices, Other Worlds (Bruce Boston)
- No Exit (onstage)
Along with the most recent issue of In Other Words
Misses
Neither Hit Nor Miss
So how was March reading and viewing for you?
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March 21, 2013
Celine Garb did this sketch of me earlier this week. I liked how she framed it with my three poetry collections.
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March 3, 2013
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month. It’s a smallish list this time round, mostly because I have several projects going on that require a lot of reading, and at a very slow pace.
Hits
- Spectre (Verena Tay)
- from within the marrow (Yong Shu Hoong)
- Future Cop (movie)
- Twenty-One Novel Poems (Suzette Elgin Haden)
- Cloud Atlas (movie)
- Hiss of Leaves (T. D. Ingram)
Along with the most recent issues of Star*Line and Illumen
Misses
Neither Hit Nor Miss
So how was February reading and viewing for you?
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February 5, 2013
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month. It’s a smallish list this time round, mostly because I have several projects going on that require a lot of reading, and at a very slow pace.
Hits
- Blood of Heaven (Bill Meyers)
- Dreaming in the Days of Astophel (Lyn C. A. Gardner)
- Les Miserables (movie)
- Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
Along with some back issues of the magazine Knowledge
Misses
Neither Hit Nor Miss
- Flesh and Blood (Michael Cunningham)
(There was a lot I liked in Flesh and Blood, but also just enough that didn’t quite grab me to prevent it from landing on the Hit portion of the list.)
So how was January reading and viewing for you?
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January 1, 2013
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month.
Hits
- The Garden of Evening Mists (Tan Twan Eng)
- Unearthly Delights (Marge Simon)
- 《死亡赋格》（盛可以，Sheng Keyi)
- My Friend, the Poet (Terrie Leigh Relf)
- Fish Eats Lion (Jason Erik Lundberg, ed.)
- The Dragon Dictionary (Marge Simon and Mary Turzillo)
- The Japanese Haiku (Kenneth Yasuda)
- Dragon Soup (Marge Simon and Mary Turzillo)
Along with the most recent issues and several back issues of the magazines Illumen, Knowledge, The Martian Wave
Misses
Neither Hit Nor Miss
- Rising Sun (Michael Crichton)
- The Hobbit (movie)
- Men in Black II (movie)
So how was December reading and viewing for you?
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December 5, 2012
I’m pleased to announce that Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls has been nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize.
Congratulations, Sheng Keyi!
Time Out! Hong Kong’s coverage
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December 2, 2012
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month. (You can click on the links for short reviews or comments I’ve left elsewhere.)
Hits
- The Master (Colm Toibin)
- The Sun is Not for Us (onstage)
- The Craft of Gardens (Ji Cheng)
- Lao She in London (Anne Witchard)
- Continuous Growth (onstage)
- Interpreting Another Culture (an unpublished dissertation by Betty Barr)
- In the Company of Heroes (Verena Tay)
Along with the most recent issues and several back issues of the magazines Scifaikuest, Star*Line, Micro Art, The World of Chinese
Misses
Neither Hit Nor Miss
- The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
- 《驴得水》
(both of these two got mixed reviews from me)
So how was October reading and viewing for you?
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November 4, 2012
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month. (You can click on the links for short reviews or comments I’ve left elsewhere.)
Hits
- The Casual Vacancy (J. K. Rowling)
- Van Helsing (movie)
- Lust, Caution and other short stories (Eileen Chang)
- Finding Neverland (movie)
- Crossing Over (movie)
- The Other Side of Light (Mishi Saran)
- The Sheckley Trilogy
- The Master (Colm Toibin) – not finished yet, but really enjoying it
Along with the most recent issues of several back issues of the magazine The World of Chinese
Misses
- Friends with Benefits (movie)
Neither Hit Nor Miss
So how was October reading and viewing for you?
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October 26, 2012
Fish Eats Lion is an anthology of speculative fiction published by Singapore’s Math Paper Press. The anthology will include my short story “Rewrites.” Unfortunately, I won’t be in Singapore for the launch on Nov 4, but if you are there, perhaps you’d like to stop in on the event.
The launch will be a part of the Singapore Writers Festival, held on 4 November at 4:00 p.m. in the ilovebooks.com Pavilion. There will be five readers whose work appears in the anthology, Victor Ocampo, Andrew Cheah, Noelle de Jesus, Wei Fen Lee, and Marc de Faoite.
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October 14, 2012
Voices of the Elders will be launched in Shanghai on November 3. The event will be held at Wharf 1846, at 601 Waima Lu. The reading will begin at 4pm.
Feel free to come and bring your friends. The event is open to everyone.
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October 1, 2012
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month. (You can click on the links for short reviews or comments I’ve left elsewhere.)
Hits
- Zoheleth (J. Francis Hudson)
- Northern Girls (Sheng Keyi)
- A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson)
- Icarus Airlines (Taylor Mali)
- Vulcan’s Workshop (Harl Vincent)
- The Plague (Albert Camus)
- Hachi (movie)
- From the Cables of Genoside (Lorna Dee Cerventes)
- Source Code (movie)
- Moneyball (movie)
- Player Piano (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
- White Deer Plain (movie)
- Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (onstage)
- Orlando (Virginia Woolf)
- Edgar Allan Poe Collection
- Six Degrees of Separation (John Guare)
Along with the most recent issues of several magazines, including: Beyond Centauri, Star*Line
Misses
Neither Hit Nor Miss
- The Future of Ice (Gretel Ehrlich) – this one is hard to rate, because there were things I loved and things I loathed
So how was September reading and viewing for you?
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August 31, 2012
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month. (You can click on the links for short reviews or comments I’ve left elsewhere.)
Hits
- Winterflight (Joseph Bayly)
- Vamps (James S. Dorr)
- Falling Through Nothing (Scott Nicolay)
- The Commentaries and The Gallic Wars (Julius Caesar)
- Edible Zoo (David C. Kopaska-Merkel)
- The City of a Thousand Gods (Marge Simon and Malcolm Deeley)
- Wild Hunt of the Stars (Ann K. Schwader)
- The Devil’s Disciples (George Bernard Shaw)
- 《独自上场》 李娜
- Self-Reliance (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Along with the most recent issues of several magazines, including: Beyond Centauri, Star*Line
Misses
Neither Hit Nor Miss
- The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
So how was August reading and viewing for you?
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August 19, 2012
Malcolm Campbell has posted a review of my new poetry collection, Voices of the Elders, at his blog Malcolm’s Round Table.
I really appreciate the kind words he’s written. It’s nice to know someone’s read and enjoyed the collection.
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August 16, 2012
I’ve just ordered some books at Dark Regions Press, and they sent me a code that allows my friends to get a 15% discount when they order from the site. You can click on this link to get your discount: http://darkregions.refr.cc/KJL2R83
Enjoy!
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July 31, 2012
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month. (You can click on the links for short reviews or comments I’ve left elsewhere.)
Hits
- A Distant Shore (John Houghton)
- A Prisoner of Birth (Jeffrey Archer)
- The Amazing Spiderman (movie)
- The 2012 Rhysling Anthology
- Signs & Wonders (Jennifer Crow)
- How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction (J. N. Williamson, ed.)
- Virgin of the Apocalypse (Corrine de Winter)
- The Tortilla Curtain (T. C. Boyle)
- The Poetry Home Repair Manual (Ted Kooser)
Along with the most recent issue of Dreams & Nightmares
Misses
Neither Hit Nor Miss
It’s always a good thing to post an all-hit list!
So how was July reading and viewing for you?
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July 23, 2012
I just finished reading Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, a book that has been on my TBR list for a while, but somehow kept getting pushed to the back of the queue as other things demanded more immediate attention. When I first got back to Singapore from my most recent stint in Shanghai, I had put it back on the top of the stack, intending to read this summer. That was more than a month before Bradbury’s death. His passing perhaps made the reading of the collection all the more special to me, but I know I would have enjoyed the stories in this volume at whatever time I read them. But it just happened in such a way that the reading of The Illustrated Man, coming when it did, felt like a celebration of the man’s life and work. It is a masterful collection of short stories, with a framing story that pulls them all together into a tidy bundle. There are 18 tales in all, several of which are chill-inducing. All are enjoyable.
Another perk of this reading experience grew out of the particular copy of the book that I happen to own. I cannot remember where I picked it up, but it is an old beat up book I got second hand somewhere. This Doubleday edition was printed before I was born, in its 9th incarnation. The feel of the old volume, the crisp pages lying between battered covers, seemed like an especially appropriate treat with which to celebrate the lifetime of writing it represents. It was a clear reminder of just how accomplished Bradbury was, drawing particular attention to the longevity of his outstanding career.
There are many Bradbury books that get more attention than The Illustrated Man, but this one is a good one. I’m glad it was the book that turned out to be the one with which I was able to have my own private celebration of his life’s work.
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July 1, 2012
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month. (You can click on the links for short reviews or comments I’ve left elsewhere.)
Hits
- The Cyberiad (Stanislaw Lem)
- The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
- Shakespeare in Love (movie)
- Puss in Boots (movie)
- Black Maria (Kevin Young)
- 《我的心中每天开出一朵花》畿米
- The Personifid Project (R. E. Bartlett)
- Snow White and the Huntsman
- Legends of the Fallen Sky (Marge Simon and Malcolm Deeley)
- The Civil Servant’s Notebook (Wang Xiaofang)
- The Phantom World (Gary William Crawford)
Along with the most recent issues of several magazines, including: parABnormal Digest, Scifaikuest
Misses
- There were no all-out misses
Neither Hit Nor Miss
- 《贴身感觉》张小娴
- American Empire: Blood and Iron (Harry Turtledove)
So how was June reading and viewing for you?
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June 30, 2012
My third poetry collection, Voices of the Elders, went on sale today at Sam’s Dot Publishing. You can order a copy through their online shop.
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June 8, 2012
I stopped by the Penguin sale at Singapore Expo this morning, having a couple of hours free before I went to meet some friends in the afternoon. I was there at opening time (10 am), and in the 2 hours I could allot to book shopping, I got through 3 rows of tables. It looked to me like this was about one quarter of what was available in the hall. Digging through the boxes, I was not able to be nearly as careful as I would have liked, but I still managed to find 35 books that I wanted to buy. Most were selling for $4, though there were a few for $6 and a handful for $9. I steered clear of those that were more expensive than this. (I’m running out of shelf space and didn’t want to buy any really massive tomes, so that played a part in me ending up with some good prices.)
I found some really good deals, and came across a few titles that are not easy to find. I even had one fellow come up to me and ask, “Hey, where did you find that one?” (I think it was a Coetzee novel, if I’m not mixing it up with something else.) That made me feel like I’d come up with at least one needle from the haystack.
Overall, I have to say it was a morning well spent. Of the 35 books I bought, 5-6 were for friends, and the rest have already been put in place on my shelves.
The sale will last through this Sunday (June 10). It is in Hall 6B. If there’s a bibliophile in Singapore who hasn’t heard about the sale yet, this counts as your notice. I think you’ll find making your way to Expo this weekend worth the time.
Next up… the National Library Sale (sometime late July or early August).
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June 1, 2012
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month. (You can click on the links for short reviews or comments I’ve left elsewhere.)
Hits
- The Mark of a Christian (Francis A. Schaffer)
- The Avengers (movie)
- 《下面，我该干些什么》（阿乙）(What Should I do Next, by A Yi)
- Beast (Erin Donahoe)
- Selected Poems (Tony Harrison)
- Through the Woods (Erin Donahoe)
- Big Shot’s Funeral (movie)
- Stellar Possibilities (John Dunphy)
- Up is Down (Mikal Trimm)
- Contemporary Haibun, vol. 13 (Edited by Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, and Ken Jones)
- Pitch (Todd Boss)
- Men in Black 3 (movie)
- The Case for Working with Your Hands (Matthew Crawford)
Along with back issues of several magazines, including: Scifaikuest, The World of Chinese (x2), Star*Line (x2)
Misses
- There were no all-out misses
Neither Hit Nor Miss
- 《1988： 我想和这个世界谈》韩寒 (1988: I Want to Talk with the World, by Han Han)
- The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (George Frederick Kunz)
So how was May reading and viewing for you?
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May 23, 2012
I’m about halfway through Matthew Crawford’s The Case for Working with your Hands. I picked it up several months ago, but have been out of Singapore for most of the time since buying it. I am glad I’ve finally gotten to start reading it. It’s exactly my kind of book… smart, critical, and actually saying something.
Crawford’s book deals with the changing world we live in, a world that disconnects us from the way our devices operate and making us less able to manage and maintain them, even as we become more dependent on them. He starts out by focusing on the separation of manual and mental work, with the manual work having slowly become devalued over time. Crawford’s argument is that the manual work that is often looked down on often involves a great deal of mental work, though this is often overlooked when discussing manual labor. I think it is a very valid point — the mental effort it takes to solve problems and the creativity required to solve them is one of the most important aspects of manual labor of professionals such as auto mechanics, plumbers, electricians, and so forth. The “automization” of our devices has only served to make these jobs more and more important and valuable in today’s world.
I did not expect it when I bought the book, but I’ve found that The Case for Working with your Hands share something important in common with Mary Midgley’s Science and Poetry. I read Midgley’s book several years ago, and loved the message of it so much that I bought copies for several friends. Something about it seemed so revolutionary, even as it seemed so obvious / self-evident. I was really blown away by that book, with its deconstructing of the mind/matter binary, and I find that Crawford’s writing seems to be continuing that process.
It’s always exciting to find a good book, and that is only magnified when you realize that it is continuing a process of recalibrating your thinking that was unexpected initiated by another, seemingly unrelated, book you’d read before.
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May 13, 2012
On my way back to Singapore from Shanghai this past weekend, I had a little delay at the airport. It was not nearly as long a delay as some of my previous experiences with this same airline, but certainly quite long enough.
I did find there was a good side to the deal, though, which almost made up for the achy body and lack of sleep once I got to Singapore (though I don’t think the friends who were waiting for me at the airport will agree that the good side was worth their wasted time). The good bit was that I finished most of A Yi’s book 《下面，我该干些什么》, which was a very gripping read. And I made some headway in Tony Harrison’s Selected Poems. I even came across one of his poems that dealt with one of my current obsessions, the Vulcan myth. (That obsession is evidenced by my reading agenda for this year.) It was one of those poems that made me think, “Why didn’t I write that.”
As I said, it doesn’t exactly make up for the inconveniences caused by the delay, but if you are the sort who likes to look on the bright side of things, I think this qualified as more than just a tiny glimmer. At least for me.
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April 30, 2012
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month. (You can click on the links for short reviews or comments I’ve left elsewhere.)
Several were close calls for me, with a few of the things I ultimately ranked “Hits” being fairly borderline calls, and one of the “Neither Hit nor Miss” reads being a good candidate for an all-out miss.
Hits
- The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)
- David Copperfield (onstage)
- Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy)
- 四世同堂 (onstage)
- 贾宝玉 / Awakening (onstage)
- Oleanna (onstage)
- The Empty Family (Colm Toibin)
- Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (Walter Isaacson)
Along with back issues of several magazines, including: Chinese Newsweek, Aoife’s Kiss
Misses
- There were no all-out misses
Neither Hit Nor Miss
So how was April reading and viewing for you?
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April 14, 2012
I picked up the first batch of copies of Northern Girls from the Penguin office this week. I’m really excited to see them available in shops in mid-May.
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April 8, 2012
Since I will be making this my new blogging home, I will be using it as my main site for keeping up with my Fill in the Gaps List. If you are not familiar with the idea of the Fill in the Gaps list, it’s a list of 100 books that a reader will read over a 5-year period (it began a few years ago and is supposed to end in 2012). The books on the list should be those that fill in gaps between one’s regular reading responsibilities for work or school. I’ve been keeping up with the list for a few years now, and think I will be on track to complete it by 2015. I thought it wise to move the list over here to be able to keep track of it better, since my old site will fall by the wayside before long.
So, here’s my list. I will move items up as they are either in progress or completed. Those still to be read are on the lower part of the list. Those on the Completed list are numbered according to the order I finished reading them.
Completed
- Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse)
- Woman to Woman and other poems (Agnes Lam)
- The 8th Habit (Stephen Covey)
- Mortician’s Tea (G. O. Clark)
- Poemcrazy (Susan Wooldridge)
- Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Velocity (Dean Koontz)
- The World is Flat (Thomas L. Friedman)
- A Princess of Mars – Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Rip Van Winkle – Washington Irving
- Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
- Anansi Boys – Neil Gaiman
- Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
- Ancient Skies – oino sakai
- House of Many Ways – Diana Wynne Jones
- Attack of the Two-Headed Poetry Monster – Mark McLaughlin and Michael McCarty
- Sweeney Todd and the String of Pearls – Yuri Rasovsky
- Relativity: The Special and General Theory – Albert Einstein
- Catch Me if You Can – Frank Abagnale, Jr.
- Streamers – David Rabe
- Marco Polo Sings a Solo – John Guare
- The Romance of Tristan and Iseult – Joseph Bedier
- Le Morte D’Arthur – Thomas Malory
- Bush at War – Bob Woodward
- The Consolation of Philosophy – Boethius
- Wings – Arthur Kopit
- Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
- Holy Ghosts – Romulus Linney
- The Waters of Babylon – John Arden
- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
- Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You – C. Durang
- Looking Backward – Edward Bellamy
- A History of the Middle Ages – Crane Brinton, John Christopher, Robert Wolff
- Atlantis – Greg Donegan
- A Descent into the Maelstrom – Edgar Allan Poe
- The Thorn of Lion City – Lucy Lum
- The Lake of Dead Languages – Carol Goodman
- Six Characters in Search of an Author – Luigi Pirandello
- The Castle – Franz Kafka
- Daughter of the River – Hong Ying
- Tomorrow When the World Began – John Marsden
- The Dragons of Eden – Carl Sagan
- Paul – Walter Wangerin, Jr.
- Walden – Henry David Thoreau
- Inkheart – Cornelia Funke
- Prisoner of Zenda – Anthony Hope
- The Stolen White Elephant – Mark Twain
- Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
- The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
- The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Truth About Jesus – M. M. Mangasarian
- Crimes of the Heart – Beth Henley
- Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
- The Twelve Caesars – Seutonius
- Nanjing 1937 – Ye Zhaoyan
- The Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman
- Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
- Benjamin Franklin: An American Life – Walter Isaacson
- The Mark of the Christian – Francis Shaeffer
- The Illustrated Man – Ray Bradbury
- The Commentaries – Julius Caesar
- The Plague — Albert Camus
- Startling Moon – Liu Hong
In Progress
- The Dining Room – A. R. Gurney
- Journey to the Center of the Earth – Jules Verne
The Rest
- The Kite Runner – Khalad Hosseini
- The Sayings of Jesus – Anna Wierzbicka
- A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson
- Special Topics in Calamity Physics – Marisha Pessl
- Catch – 22 – Joseph Heller
- A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
- Candide – Voltaire
- Ben Hur – Lew Wallace
- Toilers of the Sea – Victor Hugo
- Finnegan’s Wake – James Joyce
- Life of Pi – Yann Martel
- Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
- Paradise – Toni Morrison
- Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman
- The Decameron – Boccaccio
- Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
- The Human Comedy – William Saroyan
- The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Scenes of a Clerical Life – George Eliot
- A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
- Ragged Dick – Horatio Alger, Jr.
- The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Bedknob and Broomsticks – Mary Norton
- Deltora Quest – Emily Rodda
- When the Gods are Silent – Jane Lindskold
- The Pickwick Paper – Charles Dickens
- Brazil – Annette Haddad, ed.
- The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
- Painting Churches – Tina Howe
- The Orthodox Way – Father Kallistos Ware
- Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – August Wilson
- The $30,000 Bequest – Mark Twain
- An Ideal Husband – Oscar Wilde
- Zhao the Orphan – Ji Junxiang
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April 1, 2012
Here’s what I’ve been reading and viewing for the past month. (You can click on the links for short reviews or comments I’ve left elsewhere.)
Several were close calls for me, with a few of the things I ultimately ranked “Hits” being fairly borderline calls, and one of the “Neither Hit nor Miss” reads being a good candidate for an all-out miss.
Hits
- The Red Room (H. G. Wells)
- Kylie’s Kiss (Delia Latham)
- Nanjing 1937 (Ye Zhaoyan)
- The Dream of Reason (Anthony Gottlieb)
- Becoming Madame Mao (Anchee Min)
- The Apartment (Greg Baxter)
- Much Ado About Nothing (onstage)
Along with back issues of several magazines, including: The World of Chinese, Newsweek, Aoife’s Kiss
Misses
- There were no real misses, though “The Ice Palace” came close.
Neither Hit Nor Miss
So how was March reading and viewing for you?
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March 19, 2012
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February 13, 2012
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Shelly Bryant 
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