Why is it that every time I finish a book after a looooong period of not reading, I realise that reading is a most satisfying activity and regret that I’ve wasted the last few months not reading?

It is horrendous how the night passes so quickly sometimes. Now it is past midnight and a brand new day in a series of other impending new days. And new days, new days, they only sit around waiting to become history.

Good things:

- Tokyo Magnitude 8.0
I haven’t watched any anime in the longest time, but this caught my attention and held it. This is Tokyo, post a Richter 8.0 earthquake, and it unsettled me a tad more than I thought it would.

- Blade Runner
Finally got around to watching this. Quite ace, save for the presence of Harrison Ford. The eyeballs scene was tmd scary.

- The Brain that Changes Itself
Despite the title, this book is not a self-help/improvement book, even if it reaffirms the importance of positive thinking etc. I’m not done with it yet, but so far, it’s been a very fascinating and insightful read on our brain (brain!). There was also an article on one of the neuroscientists V.S. Ramachandran and his work on brain plasticity in an earlier issue of the New Yorker, which was equally interesting. (There’s hope for Homer, maybe.)

Thought a bit about rewriting the last entry, since it was written half-asleep and half-thinking, but a few days on, it didn’t read so wrong anymore and I don’t really know how to fix it (erm, I changed my mind about that). Fixing stuff seems counter-productive somehow, so I am here with a spanking new entry about nothing that really deserves to be written about. Dance dance dance.

Saw ‘Ice Age 3′ yesterday. The whole Singapore was watching the movie too, it seemed, seeing that most of the screenings were sold out. ★★ It is half a star lower from yesterday’s initial impression, but it isn’t that good really. Predictable laughs, and the same old plot from two sequels ago. No wonder the animals became extinct. If you have to recycle gags all the time, sooner or later suicide will seem like a very viable option.

Dance dance dance.

Also saw ‘I Love You, Man’, which was a lot better. ★★★☆ (3.5 stars) At least, it got some real chuckles out of me.

Watched ‘Bashing‘ a little earlier on on The Auteurs. ★★★☆ (3.5 stars too) Some parallels with another Japanese flick I saw last month, which I guess are quite telling about the societal norms (and expectations) in the country.

Movies Entry Sunday. I can’t believe it is midnight aka Monday already. The weather today has been quite perfect. Was trying to finish a book earlier this afternoon, and that proved to be quite the impossible mission. It is an excellent book, but every time I read it, I can feel my brain die a little from the over stimulation, which is quite the exact opposite desired reaction that I’ve been hoping for. Yes, I fell asleep.

Saw a Facebook ‘15 books in 15 minutes’ meme a few days ago, and since then, it’s been kinda on my mind. Mostly because I like to look at my new bookshelf and imagine it bigger. And more filled up. And in mahogany. I’ve also been slacking on my reading this week, and instead like to stare into space on train rides than stare into pages of make-believe worlds. However, much to my credit, the book-buying mood hasn’t ceased. What’s with these books-related entries, you ask (you don’t ask), and I shrug my skinny shoulders and blame a lack of good movies (and my present addiction to ‘Word Challenge’).

Random Youtube video.

Anyway, about those elusive 15 books that changed my life. I doubt I have 15, because I like to think that my life has been a well deliberated one and takes maybe 4-5 slow gradual turns around corners rather than 15 (fifteen) sudden life-changing shortcuts through dark alleys with leaky water pipes. Now, that is a shabby excuse.

1. The Faraway Tree Stories – Enid Blyton

My favourite Blyton series. I was a fan of the Famous Five and Malory Towers books too, but nothing tops the magic of the Faraway Tree. Gosh, I really feel like rereading the books now. Once while visiting a friend in her super suburb place in Brisbane (zone 4 and beyond!), we took a walk with her dog in the woods behind her house and I had several ‘it-is-this-tree!’ moments. Sadly, those were just ordinary trees and I doubt any land, good or bad, had ever stopped atop them. And yes, the woods was really in her backyard. Or five amazingly short minutes away. It was certainly an eye-opener for this HDB dweller.

Fansite!

2. The Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

I think I might have a more optimistic and less cynical outlook in life, if I have never read that book. Damn glad I did though.

3. Nine Stories – JD Salinger

A Perfect Day for Bananafish. Beat that.

4. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Read this once when I was way too young to understand it. Read it again early last year, and it was brilliant. For a very long time, I was not reading any novels / books at all, instead favouring short stories and magazines; not that there was anything wrong with that, but I had missed those days where I could immerse myself in a book for days and days on end and inhabit its world completely. This book reassured that I could still do so, if I so wished to.

5. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? / Short Cuts – Raymond Carver

Read ‘Are These Actual Miles?’ during a short story writing class in university, and that started my Carver reading spree. His stories, bleak as they come, for some reason always fill me with a certain optimism. Maybe it was through his stories that I realised that it was possible for people to behave without histrionics. And well, that evolution has got to trickle down eventually to the actual human race.

6. Goodbye Tsugumi / Kitchen – Banana Yoshimoto
 

7. A Wild Sheep Chase – Haruki Murakami

Hmm, just in case it hasn’t been obvious, I quite adore the author. I probably need a little more time to fully digest and reread some of his works so that my assessment of how I feel towards his books will be more accurate. For now, only this is on the list because it was my first Murakami book and a great introduction to the myriad worlds of ambitious sheep, vanishing elephants and talking cats.

8. Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers

This is a collection of writings by erm, Japanese photographers (just in case you missed the title). This is on the list because it provided me with invaluable insights on the work and thought processes of these photographers, and elucidated that writing and words can play an integral part in understanding and creating photographic works, which was something I had always known but had never believed.

8 for now. Sleepy and distracted.

Nothing significant to report, except that we’re fast approaching the mid-year and if you are still thinking that the year has barely begun, you only have a fortnight left to be obnoxious about it. Indexing the internet, aka things read and things to read:

- How David beats Goliath, When underdogs break the rules
If their strengths are your weaknesses, you gotta stop playing to let them win.

- The Squint Test – How to protect fashion designers like Jason Wu from Forever 21 knockoffs

- Objection, Dear Leader! – How do court trials work in North Korea?

- 19th-Century Pregnant Dolls

- How Not to Photograph

Bored. Four minutes to Monday.

Come on brain, work with me here. It is Thursday, just one more day to the weekend and one more work day before I go on holiday next week. Nine full days of idleness await you, so there is really not much point in getting sleepy now. You have an itinerary to plan, accommodation to book and countless decisions to make. What cameras and film to bring, and how much. What time to wake up on Sunday morning. Whether to go for driving lessons this weekend. Buy batteries. Tidy up the room before the new bed arrives tomorrow (this, I suspect, is a lost cause). What books to bring. Which character to like. Futures to plan for. Contacts or spectacles. Why is my part 5 of Project Runway Canada episode 3 taking so long to load? Why has the clock just passed 12? Shit, all these things that do themselves before I have time to notice them. Why isn’t my iTunes playing a song to which I know the lyrics to? My internet connection has gone back to impersonating a snail. Buy dog food. Learn cycling. Move on. Yesterday night, after seeing Wendy and Lucy, J. and I were attacked by the wind who demanded, with threats to turn over chairs and send beer bottles to the ground, that we not do anything but bear witness to its prowess. We agreed, but chairs were still toppled and grown men were sent scuttling for shelter. We lost four fishballs and half a can of Coke, then stood around agreeing that it didn’t feel like we were in our country anymore. But across the road from where we stood was a big Hotel 81 (special rates from 89$), so of course we were still in our safe little country. Today was hot as hell. (I liked the film; it wasn’t as fulfilling as I would had hoped for it to be, but there was a honesty/unpretentiousness/rawness about it that I enjoyed. Plus, Lucy the dog was wicked cute.)

Youtube is still loading that damn video. Yawn. Time for my regular indexing of the internet then.

Bookarmy.com. Literary version of Last.fm. I like books.

Kottke: Media packaging mashups. Packaging for popular culture re-imagined and Penguin-ified. These movie posters are great, and I would like these Harry Potter books, please.

My Google Reader is possessed.

Slate: Would You Like Your Cable Company More if It Were Quirky and Hip?. Actual effectiveness aside, I quite like the ad and the campaign website (very well done; and I like decorating rooms if it doesn’t involve actual manual labour).

Luis Mendo’s Tokyo Diary

My First Dictionary. The best dictionary, ever. Well, the most honest at least. Proof as follows:

This evening, I was trying to test and make full use of my powered-up internet connection so I watched a few videos, which, rather coincidentally, had a similar theme – data. Access to data, interpretating it, presentation of it et al. I’d bet good money on that there has never been so much raw information available publicly than there is now. Tomorrows will, most undeniably, bring more information, so I guess my definition and usage of ‘now’ is pretty much tagged to the ever-changing present, rather than a static time frame (i.e. ‘now’ being forever midnight on 22nd April 2009). But anyway, the following from TED are very insightful videos.

Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data
Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen
Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world

Am especially charmed by Hans Rosling, haha. Midway through the second talk, he demonstrated Dollar Street, which appears to be a very interesting interactive tool for presenting statistical data in a more palatable format than graphs and charts, and then correlating that data with more familiar / practical benchmarks (i.e. the presence of certain furniture in a room versus daily income). And he swallows swords too. Wicked.

Sigh. Spoke too soon. Connection just went ‘Local only’. Knn.

It is slightly worrying that if I don’t have some tea after dinner, my eyes play hide-n-seek with each other. I am, however, quite aware that it is probably my mind hoodwinking the rest of me into believing that I deserve a nice cold pearl tea or an ice cream every evening. Yesterday ended at 10pm, and I dreamed of having to pack, within an absurdly short 30 minutes, for a trip. To where, I don’t remember, but the ship (ship!) was leaving in half an hour and that was all the time I had to pack, which included having to decide what DVDs and CDs to bring. It was a rather stressful dream, so today when I woke, I decided that I should start planning for the Siem Reap trip next weekend. I should start planning an itinerary right about now, but somehow writing about it has absolved my worries a little and I had some tea earlier, so I should still be awake for a few more hours.

Comments on an earlier entry led to a Favourite Haruki Murakami Books list. I am yet to be done with all of his books, and I am dreading that rather inevitable day. It is funny that barely a month ago, all I had read from him was The Elephant Vanishes and Underground and now, just a little over a month since then, I am rather well-versed in his lands of all-knowing sheep, wind-up birds, wells (covered and uncovered ones), alternate universes, enigmatic girls with great ears, and late-night whiskey drinks. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind packing for a trip to those worlds.

Sad as some of his stories may be, I think I would like a short stint in the following places:
- Midori’s bookstore/house in Norwegian Wood
- the Dolphin Hotel and the Sheep Man’s house in A Wild Sheep Chase
- the love hotel in After Dark

Yours?

So leave her.
Let her be their spoils, go wrap
Your head in the snowy rivers
Of the Brooks Range. Cover
Your eyes with the writhing airs
Off the Nullarbor Plains. Let them
Jerk their tail-stumps, bristle and vomit
Over the symposia.
Think her better
Spread with holy care on a high grid
For vultures
To take back into the sun. Imagine
These bone-crushing mouths the mouths
That labour for the beetle who will role her back into
the sun.

The dogs are eating your mother, by Ted Hughes. Looked that poem up after reading an article on Nicholas Hughes in NYT earlier this week. “Bloody sad,” a friend had said, and bloody sad it is. Not exactly sure why I am posting this here (and seemingly out of nowhere); I don’t read a lot of poetry but I, like all, know what I like. And this is just heartbreaking, and I can’t quite get it out of my head.

Updated

I haven’t been reading a lot of manga of late, but after reading this, I do want to read more about the first manga mentioned. I think a lot of people have this mistaken idea that a lot of manga either have 1. fighting, 2. supernatural stuff, or 3. romance/love, which isn’t untrue at all (far from it), but there are so many, many manga that aren’t all that. Some are really quite educational and are excellent primers on the niche or specialised topics/themes they deal with. Some are poignant slice-of-life stories. Some are pure (good) entertainment, which isn’t a bad thing too.

- Nodame Cantabile, by Ninomiya Tomoko

“The series depicts the relationship between two aspiring classical musicians, Megumi ‘Nodame’ Noda and Shinichi Chiaki, as university students and after graduation.” Classical music! Don’t know your Bach from your Beethoven? Well, I’m still pretty clueless most of the time, but reading this has cultivated a deeper appreciation for the genre, however superficial it may sound.

- Iryu, by Nagai Akira and Nogizaki Taro

About the healthcare and hospital system in Japan, with an added emphasis on the Batista procedure. This manga is heavy going, but very educational too, if that’s your thing. I read a couple of volumes, and each volume took forever (they were in Chinese, and my command of the language does not include medical jargon) so I gave up.

» Continue reading “manga”

Things that irk me:
- Signs that say “We are close”
- Signs that say “We are opened”

I’m slowly getting the idea of making a three-point turn. Slowly. Somehow, the mind ceases to function intelligently when its vessel is behind a wheel. I quite enjoy driving though, but only if it is on a straight road and there is no fellow traffic. Jaywalkers, stay home! I say this out of pure altruism, and also, because it seems to rain whenever (or is it wherever?) I drive.

Things that irk me, part #2:
- People who ruin books
- Borders

(I’m going to whinge.)

» Continue reading “hold your breath, breathe in”