By the books

Ever since I was a kid, I've always kept a book in tow when I knew I was going anywhere that might afford me a chance to snatch a few sentences.  When I travelled to Japan, I settled on the biggest books I could take for fear of running out of things to do.  Probably not the greatest idea when travelling from city to city, but I was a novice back then.  This time around.  I took one long book and made the most of it.  In fairness, it lasted through 4 countries before I had to go and find a new read.

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

It was a gift given to me last Christmas from one of my volleyball teammates who also reads.  I was glad for it because while I'm always on the hunt for good books, I never write down the good recommendations when I'm given them and then I forget what I was told by the time I get to the bookstore.  However, in this case, when I got the book, I remembered it as being on "the list" and was happy to have received it.  

For another little while, the book was put to the side due to me being too busy to finish the current behemoth I was working on (I'm pretty sure it was the SUPER BIASED biography of Mao Tse-Tung) and therefore not yet ready to move onto something else.  Finally, it was departure time for us to traverse the world.  I scooted into our library and scoured the shelves - I needed something long, substantial, but GOOD to read and shortly my eyes landed on this gifted book. 

And then I was in.  At first you have no idea who's going to be your hero or where the book is leading you.  But page after page you soon get wrapped up in the story that doesn't really have a hero, only a whole score of villains who plague the lives of the characters you follow.  Everyone that I met who learned I was reading A Fine Balance and who'd read it themselves were all concerned about how heavy the story was that I had chosen for a travel companion.  But I thought through and through that it was a good choice.  I was looking for a good story - a great read - and sometimes those stories are not always the happy ones.  

While I never claim that novels (especially works of fiction) to be great records of history (heck, the Mao bio I read was sooooo biased it was hard to believe fact was fact at all), my favourite part of reading anything at all is the glimpse that it affords you into the life and/or time of someone else that you would otherwise never knew existed.  The poverty, the slums, the jobs, the people, the food, the ways of life - without reading this novel, I never would have guessed.  Call me ignorant, but now I'm a little less so.  

Mao: The Untold Story - Jung Chang & Jon Holliday

This is the super biased biography of Mao - not that I know any better.  But you can't help but hear the scathingly accusatory tone that Chang takes through the entire novel.  I was originally interested in reading this behemoth of a bio after I finish Chang's previous work, Wild Swans, a memoir of the lives of her, her mother and her grandmother spanning the distance from Revolutionary China to North American San Fransisco.  Wild Swans was riveting--especially to me as the North American daughter that knows so little of where she came from or what made her grandmother and mother who they were.  After devouring the novel,  I made that infamously forgettable mental note to try to pick up her next book, Mao to see what other glimpses it offered into the life I never knew and the past that my grandmother never spoke about.  Thank goodness I happened upon Malcolm's copy of it when unpacking our new house.

While in the novel, Chang offered reasons as to why Mao's policies were so effective and how the brainwashed mindset of the people may have been so susceptible to them, in the biography she gets wrapped up in the numbers and discrepancies of Mao's government that she forgets to tell a story at all.  I could probably just scan the whole book into MS Excel and it'll pop out pretty charts and graphs as a response.  You get to hear about what he does, the [supposed] reason he does it, and the consequences of his actions, but you don't hear about what others think about it or about how the general public acts.

Maybe that's what makes up a good biography - what do I know, I just read fiction and memoirs - but it was a chore to complete the book.  And interesting to note was while I lugged the book around, more than one person touched by Mao's governance themselves commented positively that they were pleased I was reading it (though they had no idea how scathing the words were about him).  As one of them said after I told them about all the bad things I was being told by the biography,

   "Well that's just her opinion.  He did a lot of good too. He must have - otherwise they would have ousted him long ago."

True...unfortunately, though, due to Chang's tedious paperweight, I was not inspired to go out to learn more...not even via Wiki.


Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume 1 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I needed a break from the serious and what better way than to delve into the stories behind the latest movie that I wanted to see but was denied the opportunity to due to the short running period in the theatres?

First of all, I learned something just from making my decision to find this book to read: the author's name is First Name "Arthur", Last Name "Conan Doyle," NOT just "Doyle.  For the first 10 minutes of my search through the bookstore (in Malaysia) I could not find any Sherlock Holmes under "Doyle."  It was only by accident that I made the "Conan Doyle" discovery.  Anyhow, I digress.

So Sherlock did not fail to entertain.  It was fun to read and then try to beat the famed, arrogant, drug-addicted detective at his own game - which I have to say IS possible, but there's always something to mix things up.

And now, currently, I'm riveted by a new read...something non-fiction and an award winner, and one that I'd committed to the infamous mental list, but that became reality really fast when Malcolm needed to buy a second book to get an awesome discount.  But I'll tell you about it when I'm done.