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The much celebrated novelist, essayist and poet has passed away at the age of 76, after a battle against lung cancer.

Updike was widely regarded as a writer who chronicled the American experience, particularly small-town rural America, and especially through through the turbulent changes in the1950s, 60s and 70s.  The most ambitious, and sucessful of these efforts, were through his quartet of “Rabbit” novels. The Guardian described him as a writer who captured America in all ”its idiosyncrasies, its foibles, and its passing glories“. Besides the Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom series, some of his other famous works include the Witches of Eastwick( 1984), and Brazil (1994 ).

He was also a prolific writer, churning out some 30 novels, 10 volumes of essays and criticisms, and 14 of short stories over a 50-year career. But he was not always without his detractors – Norman Mailer once famously described him as the kind of writer loved by readers who knew nothing about writing. He came in for criticism as well for his support of the Vietnam War, and liberal readers have accused him of harbouring misogynist attitudes. In the “culture wars” of America, John Updike became both a landmark as well as divisive figure.

He was most famous for his descriptions of sex, and in fact was awarded the “lifetime achievement” award by the Literay Review magazine for Bad Sex in Fiction in 2008.

Some notable works:

Rabbit at Rest
London : Penguin, 2006.
Call No.: UPD

Rabbit Redux
New York : Fawcett Columbine, 1996.
Call No.: UPD

Licks of love : short stories and a sequel
New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Call No.: UPD

The witches of Eastwick
Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1985, c1984.
Call No.: UPD

Dear Friends,

We are privileged to have author Thomas Chua to discuss his book “Beyond the Fall”. Meet Thomas who will share with us his inspirational comeback story.  The details:

Date/Time:  4.00pm,  Friday 30 January 2009
Venue:  The Activity Room, Bukit Batok Public Library
Facilitator:  Mr Kweh Soon Huat
Author:  Mr Thomas Chua Chee Siong
Title:  Beyong the Fall.  Call no.:   SING 362.43092 CHU

About the book:  Thomas Chua tells of how his life changed after a fall at a drinking binge in 1998. The fall left him paralyzed from chest downwards and bound to a wheelchair for rest of his life. There are 3 parts in this book which provide insight into a) medical procedures and treatment on a patient’s body; b) author’s response to the accident and his disability and c) insights into the character and personality of the author.

Despite the author’s personal tragedy, he has led a meaningful life by acquiring new skills in public speaking and painting. The account of the story is written with frankness and humour.

Please reply to this email if you wish to participate in the book discussion.

With best regards

Soon Huat
Librarian
Adults and Young People’s Services
Bukit Batok Public Library

If you are interested in participating, please email Soon Huat at Soon_Huat_KWEH@nlb.gov.sg.

Dear Readers,

Changes to NLB Library Policy
From 1 April 2009, the following policy changes will be implemented:

Disruption of Borrowing Privileges
Members with unpaid library fines and fees will have their borrowing privileges disrupted. They can immediately start to borrow again once they pay up the outstanding amount. With this policy, members can no longer accumulate unpaid library fines and fees.

Removal of Renewal Fee
The $0.50 renewal fee will be removed for each borrowed item to encourage members to renew their borrowed materials when necessary. The current policy of allowing each borrowed item to be renewed once will remain unchanged. Audiovisual materials also cannot be renewed. All borrowed items can only be renewed before or on the due date. Items which have been reserved by other patrons cannot however be renewed.

“Members who return borrowed materials promptly will not be affected and the policy changes will not cause any additional burden to the general public financially.”
(source: NLB press release:
OR
http://tinyurl.com/8ebsud

Free reminder services – http://www.pl.sg/page/PlJustCheckAcctService/ReminderService&_nfls=false

The Uncommon Reader / Alan Bennett
London : Faber and Faber : Profile Books, 2007.
Call No.: BEN

“The Uncommon Reader” is a deliciously hilarious novella by Alan Bennett, wherein he imagines what would happen if the Queen of England were to suddenly become an avid reader.

The uncommon reader in the title is none other than the Queen herself, who discovers a traveling library near the palace one day and picks up a book to read, something which she has not done in a long time. She soon gets into the habit of reading, and promotes a boy (Norman from the kitchens, whom she met at the traveling library) to become her “amanuensis”, or a literary assistant of sorts, to help her pick out books from various libraries as her obsession with reading grows.

Her hobby soon affects other parts of her life in amusing ways. For instance, she soon “got quite good at reading and waving, the trick being to keep the book below the level of the window”. She also questions clueless foreign diplomats about writers from their respective countries, tries to start conversations with the common folk about the books they have read, and even chastises her private secretary, Sir Kevin, for suggesting that a briefing might be a sufficient substitute to reading:

“Briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.”

Her newfound craving provokes many, causing Norman and the traveling library to be sent away without her knowledge. Dismayed but undeterred, the Queen continues on her journey of reading, realizing that she should have picked up this hobby earlier, and regretting not having read the books of numerous authors whom she had met in person before. Reading more and more brings her further down the rabbit hole, and she soon decides to write as well, leading to an unlikely but interesting conclusion to the book.

The story deftly alternates between the perspectives of the Queen and her subjects, imaginatively telling the comic tale of her enthusiasm to read and the numerous reactions that follow. In chronicling the Queen’s reading, the book also comments on the experience of reading itself, its tendency to completely occupy the reader, and its ability to bring new insights into the reader’s life. 

Author Alan Bennett has certainly been able to recreate these experiences in myself as I flip through “The Uncommon Reader”, crafting a short but fine story that would definitely be worth the time to read.

~ Contributed by Yeo Shang Long

Have you read these books? Do you have something else to recommend?
Post your comments, or send a longer book review to HBeditor@nlb.gov.sg

WHO’S READING WHAT . reader’s recommendations

City of glass / Paul Auster ; adaption by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli ; new introduction by Art Spiegelman.
London : Faber & Faber, 2005.
741.5973 KAR -[ART]

This graphic novel adapted by David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik from a novel written by Paul Auster is what one might call as a confusing work and yet, it compels the reader to re-read it in desperation to gain some understanding of what actually happens.

Thankfully, the black-and-white art by the comics artist, Art Spiegelman makes it easier to do so.

The plot is interestingly…confusing.

The combination of the art & the plot is perhaps what makes City of Glass as one of 100 Most Important Comics of the Century by the Comics Journal.

Here is a detective-fiction writer named, Daniel Quinn after receiving a phone call (actually twice) late at night asking for a detective called Paul Auster, deciding to be a detective.

He meets the client, Peter Stillman and amidst the confusion of what the client rants about (the client during his childhood is the subject of a strange experiment as his father, also named Peter Stillman, believes that his son can learn the God’s language if he just stays away from knowing the everyday language).

The client’s wife, Virginia tells Quinn/Auster that the father is sent to jail (apparently there is a fire in the apartment & the firemen rescues the younger Peter out from his locked room where he’s locked for 9 years) & will soon be released after 13 years. She requests Quinn/Auster to do something to protects the client.

Quinn/Auster offers to keep a constant watch on the older Peter.

As he waits for the older Peter to arrive in a train station, he is faced with a two look-alike Peters. One looks frail & rugged whereas another strong & refined. At first he decides to choose to trail the latter, but then he changes his mind & changes his target. He follows the frail, rugged Peter.

(I am not sure the significance of this part, but I believe if he were to choose to follow the strong & refined old Peter, the story would have turned out to be different–like in the movie, Sliding Doors).

Anyway, he watches the old man day after day & follows his habit of seemingly wandering around the town & collecting all kind of stuff he finds during his walk.

Eventually Quinn/Auster talks to the old Peter. In fact he meets him three times. In the first meeting, he introduces himself as Daniel Quinn, in the second as Harry Dark (which happens to be a character in the book written by the old Peter Stillman) and in the third, he claims to be Peter Stillman (the son).

During all these meetings, the old man doesn’t seem to recognize Quinn/Auster.

After the third meeting, Quinn/Auster loses track of the old man. In his frustration, he decides to look up in a phone directory for Paul Auster the detective. Strangely, there is one, but he is a writer.

Quinn/Auster-the-detective meets Auster-the-writer & the former tells the writer the story & passes him the cheque as a proof (Previously the $500-check is issued by the client’s wife to Paul Auster).

Quinn tries repeatedly to contact the client’s wife that he is giving up on the case. He fails. The busy signals greet him.

He takes it as a sign that he must continue to protect the younger Peter from his father. He now decides to keep watch of the entrance of the building where younger Peter & his wife live. If the older Peter visits, he can be there & prevent the old man to punish his son.

He waits.

And he waits.

And he keeps on waiting.

(Here he is believed to lose grip of his sanity. I love how the panel shows the blurring image as it tells about it. Check it out at page 107!)

Till his money runs out & he calls Auster-the-writer for the $500. The latter tells him that he tries to contact Quinn to inform that the check is not valid. He also informs him that the old Peter commits suicide (Which is in the news, but Quinn does not realize it as he spends his time committed to stay guards waiting for the old Peter to visit his son).

He later calls his client, and is told that the phone no has been disconnected.

Confused, he walks home to his apartment & finds out somebody else is living there. He leaves & walks towards the building where his client stays. The doors are open, but somehow he is not surprised seeing the place deserted.

He spends his time staying in the bare room writing in his notepad. The very same notepad which he buys earlier for the case, for him to write down his observation.

That notebook is later discovered by Auster-the-writer & passes it to the ‘unknown’ narrator of the story. Quinn’s whereabout is not known. He just simply disappears.

Okay, so that may sound a SPOILER for you?

Fret not, you’ll enjoy the artwork. You’ll be amused to notice how the ‘unknown’ narrator tells the story with a different ‘font’ from that used by the characters in the book. And more importantly, you’ll enjoy interpreting the story on your own.

Have fun reading & be prepared to be confused…

Contributed by Thomas Robertus Salim. The review first appeared here.

Have you read this book? Do you have something else to recommend?
Post your comments, or send a longer book review to HBeditor@nlb.gov.sg

Dear friends,
Christmas comes early for our book discussion in December.  We are having it on the 19 December, instead of the last Friday of the month, due to our members’ consensus.  The choice of book is John Grisham’s “Skipping Christmas”.  The details:

Date/time:  4.00pm,  Friday 19 December 2008
Venue:  The Activity Room, Bukit Batok Public Library
Facilitator:  Ms Clara Chow
Title of book/author:  “Skipping Christmas” by John Grisham.  Call no.:  GRI

What the book is about:  “Luther and Nora Krank are fed up with the chaos of Christmas. The endless shopping lists, the frenzied dashes through the mall, the hassle of decorating the tree… where has all the joy gone? This year, celebrating seems like too much effort. With their only child off in Peru, they decide that just this once, they’ll skip the holidays. They spend their Christmas budget on a Caribbean cruise set to sail on December 25, and happily settle in for a restful holiday season free of rooftop snowmen and festive parties.

But the Kranks soon learn that their vacation from Christmas isn’t much of a vacation at all, and that skipping the holidays has consequences they didn’t bargain for…

A modern Christmas classic, Skipping Christmas is a charming and hilarious look at the mayhem and madness that have become ingrained in our holiday tradition.”
(Synopsis taken from Barnesandnoble website:  search.barnesandnoble.com/Skipping-Christmas/John-Grisham/e/9780440242574)
This Christmas discussion is the time for sharing and festivities.  Please bring along a small gift for lucky dip exchange after the discussion.  We will also have food with your generous contribution of potluck on this day.  Please email me to let me know what you are bringing for potluck for better coordination to avoid duplication of the food spread

Regards,

Soon Huat
Librarian
Heartlands Book Club
Bukit Batok Public Library

If you are interested in participating, please email Soon Huat at Soon_Huat_KWEH@nlb.gov.sg.

Dough : a memoir / Mort Zachter.
Athens, Ga. : University of Georgia Press, c2007
Call No.: 305.89240747 ZAC

Money is a very strange thing.  It is totally extraneous, an abstract and invented notion, as some would insist, and yet its grip over people’s lives can be as extreme as any primal drive.  As Mort Zachter unveiled in his plainly written, elegant memoir, “Dough,” the grip is by no means just to people who don’t have money. 

Zachter’s uncle Harry was both the tormented and the tormentor in this money vise.  For decades, Harry ran a resale bakery store with his brother Joe in a working class neighborhood in New York City.  The store seemed to be the beginning and the end of Harry’s, and Joe’s, whole being.  Joe and their sister Helen, Zachter’s mother, labored at the store for free.  (Harry did not believe in paying family members.)  He drove a junk car and lived in a squalid apartment with Joe.  To all appearances, he struggled with money woes constantly and was never too far from financial ruins.

Then, one day, Zachter got a phone call from a broker.  It turned out Uncle Harry had been sitting on a fortune of over six million dollars in cash, bonds, and stocks.  By then Joe had passed away and Harry was suffering from Alzheimer’s and living with Zachter’s parents.

How did Harry manage to amass so much money?  Why did he live like a pauper while he could have afforded a life of a prince?  Why did Joe and Helen go along with Harry and tolled away their lives without protest?  And perhaps the most perplexing and frustrating to Zachter, since he’d been the only one left in the dark, why didn’t anyone tell him about it?

With the help of voluminous financial records (Harry and Joe could not bear to throw away a thing), Zachter sort of pieced together the money puzzle.  For the matter of heart and guts, however, he only had sepia memories and faded old letters to ponder with.

It’s tempting to label Harry as a control freak and scheming miser and Joe and Helen his reticent accomplices cum victims.  But the truth might be more complicated.  One needs to look no further than Zachter himself for proof.  Raised to understand the family simply could not afford better things, Zachter had to make do and get by all his life.  Then at age 35, stuck in a job he disliked and burdened with two mortgages, he became the heir to this windfall of family fortune.  Most people would have jumped at this opportunity and celebrated with some exhilarating moves, like, say, buying a fancy car or embarking on a three-month world tour.  Not Zachter. 

It took another six years and a world-shattering event to finally compel him to seize the day and make good use of the money.  He quit his job and pursued his true love – writing.  One of the results is this book. 

Uncle Harry would have approved.

Would you like to send us your contribution?
Post your comments, or email to HBeditor@nlb.gov.sg

Have you read these books? Do you have something else to recommend?
Post your comments, or send a longer book review to HBeditor@nlb.gov.sg

Dear friends,

Our November book meeting will be discussing one of this year’s short listed books for the Singapore Literature Prize – “Lions in Winter” by Wena Poon . 

The details:

Date/time:  4.00pm, Friday 28 November 2008
Venue:  The Activity Room, Bukit Batok Public Library
Facilitator:  Mr Paul Fitzpatrick
Title of book:  “Lions in Winter” by Wena Poon. 

Call number SING  POO

About the book: 

The model student who breaks his parents’ hearts when he drops out of medical school to study fashion design in London. The shampoo girl who leaves Singapore for the hustle and bustle of New York’s Chinatown. The schoolteacher whose anxiety about white people cripples his dream retirement in Toronto.The mother who dreams of an old world amidst changing landscapes, and an unlikely Singaporean family in Nevada cut off from the rest of the world by an obsessive patriarch.

In this collection of 11 stories, Wena Poon examines the quiet lives of displaced Singaporeans living abroad and those in Singapore who are often torn between two worlds in their search for an imaginary homeland. Poon’s portraits of various lives share a common, constant yearning to belong in a place made foreign by time or space.

Occasionally humorous but always with compassion, she captures the rich inner lives of individuals who form part of the kaleidoscopic yet wistful modern history of Asian migration.

Wena Poon, a Singaporean by birth, resides in the US.
(Taken from Publisher Select Books Online at   www.selectbooks.com.sg/getSelList.cfm)
Please reply to this email to confirm your participation in the book discussion.
Best regards

Soon Huat
Librarian
Heartlands Book Club
Bukit Batok Public Library

If you are interested in participating, please email Soon Huat at Soon_Huat_KWEH@nlb.gov.sg.

WHO’S READING WHAT . reader’s recommendations

The serial killers club : a novel / Jeff Povey
New York : Warner Books, 2006.
Call No.: POV -[TH] 

The Serial Killers Club is a suspense, yet comedic fiction written by Jeff Povey.

The book starts with telling how the narrator after accidentally kills his attacker, realizes that the latter is a serial killer. Curiosity being such an irresistible force, the narrator just has to check the dead man’s wallet. Inside the wallet, he finds out a newspaper ad by Errol Flynn inviting him to join a Club.

Errol Flynn is a famous Australian film actor who has long been dead. The narrator is aware of that and is curious as to who is this Errol Flynn who invites him. He decides to go to Chicago & presents himself (taking an identity of the dead serial killer) in the Club.

He is terrified when he finds himself that the members of the Club are all serial killers. At the same time, he is excited and soon becomes hooked with the Club. He chooses a membership name of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. or in short, Dougie. (Yes, all members in the Club takes a membership name of famous movie stars’.)

Dougie is so addicted to the Club that he is willing to kill other members who are getting suspicious about him. After all, the narrator refuses to kill innocent people and gives an excuse of suffering a killer’s block (Think about writer’s block). The membership soon declines from 18 to 10.

The hilarious part begins when one FBI agent, Kennet Wade observes that Dougie has been killing the Club’s members & mistakenly thought that Dougie is in “crusade” of ridding the country of serial killers. The FBI agent forces Dougie to finish the job within 2 months.

More complication begins as Dougie falls in love with one of the members & another mysterious serial killer is introduced in the story. The latter being nicknamed a KFC killer as the victims are always found with a KFC bucket on their heads.

This KFC killer seems to target the members of the Club as well. Why this is so and who this KFC killer is–Dougie must solve the mystery before he too is killed. (He is suspicious that agent Wade is the KFC killer whereas agent Wade is suspicious that Dougie himself is the killer.)

You will love the book because it is light-hearted despite touching on a grim topic of serial killers (Interestingly to note, all serial killers in the novel blame their mothers for making them who they are.) I finish reading the book within 1 night. It is like watching a movie with you eagerly turn pages after pages to see what happens next.

Contributed by Thomas Robertus Salim
This review was first published here.

Have you read this book? Do you have something else to recommend?
Post your comments, or send a longer book review to HBeditor@nlb.gov.sg

Drop Everything And Read (DEAR)

The National Library Board will be launching its D.E.A.R promotion once again from 1 Nov 2008 to 31 January 2009.

During the D.E.A.R promotion, we encourage you to Double Up on Your Reading – basic members can borrow up to 8 items* and premium members up to 16 items**.

* The 4 extra items can comprise of books and magazines.

** The 8 extra items can comprise of books, magazines, audio-visual materials as well as music scores.

Please note the loan periods for library materials: 21 days for books, 14 days for audio-visual materials and magazines.We hope that our library customers and Singaporeans alike will recognize that reading is as important to the mind as exercise is to the body and that it is a meaningful activity worth setting aside time for.

Come down and experience D.E.A.R at the libraries.For enquiries, please call 6332 3255.