Books read, 2024

30 Dec 2024

In my early twenties, I worked for a lit mag in London and wrote about books. When I was at Esquire magazine (the Malaysian offshoot) in my late twenties in Kuala Lumpur, I loved that reading books and watching movies actually made up part of my work, in a way that made life and work and leisure feel seamless. Outside of these two periods of my life, I’ve otherwise found myself hankering more to be out in the world, to be inside the world, to see it firsthand—reasoning that I could go back to the world of books when I grew older (though, yes, both worlds are to some extent porous), when I became less inclined to roam or less fit for discomfort or for living out of hastily, painstakingly stuffed backpacks.

I’m not necessarily saying that that time is now—hey, still fit, still young-ish, all things considered!—but I have been finding myself wanting to fold myself into books again, to live in their worlds, to pick apart how they were brought alive… because I’m trying to write something different, trying to write more loosely. That’s quite hard for me, to be honest, as I’ve become so used to always reaching for maximum clarity in journalism, to reduce the range of reader interpretations possible in order to avoid being misunderstood, or avoid my sources being misunderstood. I wouldn’t have said so in my twenties, but I really am a control freak 😅

But oh books, books! I’ve loved coming back to reading less intentionally again: reading for pleasure, not just to learn something.

A book that has rewired my brain in a small but perceptible way is Kate Zambreno’s Drifts (which, like more books I’ve come across lately, feels the need to say on its cover: “a novel”). Like the protagonist, I was similarly feeling like I was in a writing rut, had started taking comfort in the minutiae and little animals, and didn’t know if what I wanted to say was necessary compared to what is happening in the world. It’s not like I haven’t read books like this before: novels that don’t read like novels, that read like memoir, or a journal—taking the author’s own life as a starting point for “autofiction”. But it’s this book that has unlocked something cerebrally and emotionally for me at this moment in my life, in a way I don’t think it could have at a different time.
Listened to The Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham, read by Vanessa Kirby, which I put on every night before bed for a week or two, setting the timer to 15 or 30 minutes. I love audiobooks! Especially when read by performers with a certain timbre of voice that evokes an aura of mystery (Kirby’s really matches this material)… but they help me sleep. Because see, without someone else’s voice in my head, mine would keep running, keeping me awake. But this means I often have to replay chapters, since I invariably fall asleep before the timer goes 😅. I find Wyndham’s stories particularly well-suited to audiobooks. The first time I listened to him (well, Stephen Fry) was The Midwich Cuckoos, during my first round of Covid two years ago—recuperating from Covid really is most conducive to listening to audiobooks. Because honestly, I don’t focus so well listening to texts; I read them much better. I can’t get the most out of a podcast or audiobook unless I’m intentionally training my focus on it, best done when I’m on a roadtrip. Similarly, when I don’t have subtitles on a film, I sometimes have to rewind parts to better absorb what was said.
I’ve been to South Korea only once—on a family trip, some twenty years ago. Aside from that experience, a penchant for Korean flavours, watching Autumn in My Heart—it seemed like the entry-level K-drama when I was a teenager?—and more recently watching Bong Joon-ho’s movies, I’m not too familiar with Korean culture. Much of what I know are stereotypes I read about or skim off Instagram, especially pertaining to plastic surgery and the imperative pursuit of beauty. Picked up Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital by Elise Hu because it felt like it would be illuminating as to whether those generalizations are true, and it would seem they are. Their beauty treatments have also penetrated Malaysia’s skincare salons. Twice, I’ve been offered the same salmon sperm DNA injections(!) I read about in the book for my eczema- and acne-prone skin 👀—and no, I did not take it up. Call me old-fashioned, but the idea of injecting foreign matter into my body unless it’s for proper medical reasons still makes me squeamish.
I am trying to make rituals of things, such as reading outside in the shade somewhere, sipping coffee—or chilled coconut water as the days grew warmer in March/April!—while spending time with the dogs. Here’s “Ducky”, waiting for ruffles and pats as I finish Rachel Heng’s second novel, The Great Reclamation, which I went through very quickly. I had read her debut novel, Suicide Club, but this one resonated much more with me. It’s a really well-crafted portrait of a fishing village changed forever by the determined march of development—land reclamation and the construction of HDB flats—in a newly independent nation just coming into its own, with a lot to prove. (It’s an ongoing struggle in these parts: fishermen in Penang, Malaysia, are still protesting the building of new artificial islands, for one.) The novel is charted along a historical timeline I’m familiar with, having researched the history of Malaya for a series of TV documentaries years ago, and I think Heng has put in just enough here as scaffolding, without overwhelming. She skillfully weaves in the history of Lee Kuan Yew’s bid for power and for Singapore’s self-determination from the British, which, in a post-WWII world dogged by international pressure to decolonise as well as Cold War tensions, led him, critics say, to crack down ruthlessly on his political rivals—painted as “communists”—to clear the way for his ascent. The book comprehensively presents multiple perspectives in granular detail about Singapore’s trajectory towards modernisation and westernisation through its characters, though it felt at times like their motivations perhaps tracked too neatly. Actually, the book feels like a grand fable to me: the somewhat ominous opening sets up how it’ll end so there is a sense of the inevitable (though not predictable) in its narrative arc.
I’ve finished How to Hunger, a short story collection by Singaporean writer Grace Chia. It explores themes of longing and belonging through the many permutations that cross-cultural friendships, relationships, dalliances emotional/sexual, and rivalries—in one story: cousins, one who stayed and one who left, competing to prove who is more Singaporean 😅—can take, in cosmopolitan Singapore and abroad. I like that it refutes our often too facile ideas of what belonging to a place means, as if it were just about what you eat or how impervious your stomach is. It reminds us that there are multiple variations of belonging, depending on one’s class, race, religion, etc. I found her through Junot Diaz’s newsletter, and, without being presumptuous, I think I can see why he likes the book? There’s a similar energy to her writing, a similar spiky vulnerability to her characters. They feel alive, shot through with vigour, though perhaps some of them edge a little toward caricature—or is it that some of them have too-similar sounding voices on the page? I’m not sure. But I like how they never see themselves as without agency, including the women with men too myopic to appreciate them, and how their feelings and actions, like our own, don’t always cohere.
I’ve been interested in how the ideas behind veganism and animal farming are engaged with in literary works—in the sense that they are distinct from nonfiction primarily intended to impart information or persuade—and recently picked up J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello. The first book takes its title from two lectures in fictional form Coetzee (most celebrated for his writing on the sins of apartheid South Africa) gave at Princeton in 1997, delivered by a character he made up, Elizabeth Costello—also, like Coetzee, an esteemed writer. The lectures are published in full and form the crux of this book, followed by reflections from four scholars of various disciplines, including the animal rights activist Peter Singer. The second book, Elizabeth Costello, is a portrait of the character’s life, told in a series of lectures about storytelling and human-animal relationships, which includes the two lectures Coetzee gave at Princeton. Coetzee is vegetarian and Elizabeth Costello has been said to be his fictional stand-in, but it’s not that simple. Some might say it’s an evasive way of expounding one’s ideas without taking responsibility for it; I think it could be a vehicle to explore one’s ideas more deeply from different points of view. When Coetzee has written about our exploitation of animals in his fiction or literary essays, he often comes across as more ambivalent. Apparently, when he took questions from the audience at Princeton, he answered by prefacing, “I think what Elizabeth Costello would say is that…” When writing this op-ed, he was more straightforward.

In The Lives of Animals, the 1997–98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University, John Coetzee displays the kind of seriousness that can unite aesthetics and ethics. Like the typical Tanner Lectures, Coetzee’s lectures focus on an important ethical issue—the way human beings treat animals—but the form of Coetzee’s lectures is far from the typical Tanner Lectures, which are generally philosophical essays. Coetzee’s lectures are fictional in form: two lectures within two lectures, which contain a critique of a more typical philosophical approach to the topic of animal rights. Coetzee prompts us to imagine an academic occasion (disconcertingly like the Tanner Lectures) in which the character Elizabeth Costello, also a novelist, is invited by her hosts at Appleton College to deliver two honorific lectures on a topic of her choice. Costello surprises her hosts by not delivering lectures on literature or literary criticism, her most apparent areas of academic expertise. Rather she takes the opportunity to discuss in detail what she views as a “crime of stupefying proportions” that her academic colleagues and fellow human beings routinely and complacently commit: the abuse of animals.
— an excerpt from the introduction to The Lives of Animals, by Amy Gutmann

On the same theme, I picked up Living Things by Munir Hachemi. In this slim volume, a group of friends travel from Madrid to France to work the grape harvest, more for “life experience” than for money, but ended up working at an industrial chicken farm—culminating in a road novel that comments on the excesses of capitalism, mass production, and modern slavery. It could be thought of as “autofiction” (like Kate Zambreno’s Drifts, in the form of a diary), since Munir really did work on an industrial chicken farm with his friends. But in this interview, he said that what happened on the farm was in fact far worse in reality than he described in the book; he held back because he did not want this book to be didactic, the point was not to tell people to stop eating meat (he’s either vegetarian or vegan himself). Isn’t that always the dilemma of the literary writer? You don’t not want to be seen as a “mere” activist, a documentarian; there is a sense that you cannot, should not, write fiction to change the world? Yes, novels have changed the world, but one can’t start out wanting to do so because that would make a bad novel—because then message would trump narrative? At the same time, I find it a little disingenuous when novelists say they don’t hope to change people’s minds with what they write.
Feeling listless one day, I started watching the TV adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s 'His Dark Materials' trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), and I’ve now flitted through all three seasons of it. I think, in trying to get into a more “fiction” mode of mind for a short story I’m working on, I was looking for inspiration in more obviously imagined stories. I haven’t read the source material, so I don’t know if the shortcomings I felt of the adaptation (the motivations of the characters and the conflicts between them didn’t always feel convincingly built) are its own, but still, I liked the atmosphere of the worlds it created—the dark academia of Oxford, the mythical Arctic—and wanted to immerse myself in it beyond the end of the series. I found it particularly compelling that, despite the story being written for children, good and evil are not binary forces but co-exist in the same person: specifically, both of Lyra’s parents, and their expedient-over-good treatment of her and other children. I was also drawn to the idea of a person’s soul being manifest as a separate being, an animal, so that if you’ve learnt that you need to suppress your heart to live in the world, it shows in the animal, in how you treat it. I didn’t go on to read the trilogy of books the series is based on, the TV series still too fresh in my mind. But I did pick up the second book in the follow-up 'Dust' trilogy (The Secret Commonwealth), which begins roughly ten years after the conclusion of the original trilogy. I put on the audiobook (read by Michael Sheen) some nights before bed and was transported.
Listened to The List by Yomi Adegoke, a novel inspired by the real-life events of the “Shitty Media Men” list that leaked in 2018. I enjoyed it. The character studies and the surprises they still offer despite the topical proximity of the underlying subject to the current zeitgeist, though I felt that the material had perhaps been stretched too thin, drawn out too much in parts. At least, that was my experience listening to it; would I have felt differently if I’d read it instead, because I read so much faster? Also, I couldn’t help imagining the possibilities of other endings with this book, which could have been more unsettling, more interrogating. What if there were less certainty about whether Ola’s fiancee had indeed done what he was accused of in the list? What if there were just no way of proving, debunking, or knowing? How would she—or we, caught in the same situation—have chosen to go on? Would she have trusted the man she taught Michael was, or would the accusation, the mere fact of its existence, have made that completely impossible?
Finished George Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a short-story writing manual based on the work of the Russian masters—but also a life manual, honestly. I’ve been taking my time through it, trying to absorb its lessons more deeply. Funnily, while experimenting with changing points of view and adopting that of an inanimate object in a short piece I did as a writing exercise recently, I realised I’d adopted some of their influences: resulting in a pinch of fairytale-like whimsy with which I surprised myself. I want to add: if you’re looking for a short story to read: among the ones Saunders picked as teaching material for the book, “The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol is my favourite 👀