Monthly Archives: May 2006

Al Gore on Fresh Air

31 May 2006

I needed to get out of the incessant Taipei rain for a while, so I checked out the streaming audio of several American public radio stations. One was running Fresh Air. Terry Gross is my favorite interviewer. She has a great, nuanced radio voice, which doesn’t seem to go with her photograph at all. She was interviewing Al Gore, who was supporting his new book and documentary. The segment is already in the archive, so tune in for a preview of Al’s environmental message.

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

28 May 2006

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Recommended with reservations.

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Hong Kong Shadows

27 May 2006

Reviewing White Ghost Girls, Judy Fong Bates writes:

“What can you give me?” is the opening line of Alice Greenway’s debut novel, White Ghost Girls . For Kate, the adolescent narrator of the story, this is a question with no satisfactory answer, one that resonates with urgency and vulnerability as she recounts the painful summer of 1967 when her world spun out of control.

Kate and her older sister, Frankie, are Americans, living with their parents in Hong Kong, a safe place for the family yet close enough for regular visits from their father, who works as a war photographer in Vietnam. Their beautiful but distant mother has chosen to follow her husband to Hong Kong, fearing that if she remained in the United States, he might find a mistress or become addicted to war itself.

Read the rest of the review at The Washington Post.

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100 Notable Books of the Year

26 May 2006

Of the one hundred books that made the list for 2005, I have read only four. Ten more I plan to read. It is always interesting to see how one’s take on the literary landscape differs from those of one’s contemporaries.

Read the list at The New York Times.

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The Crack-Up

25 May 2006

On Gatsby’s Girl Ron Charles writes:

Exhuming a character buried in a famous novel sounds like a late-night violation of sacred ground, but if someone talented does the digging, who can resist the temptation to see what’s there?

Read the rest of the article at The Washington Post.

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Kafka on the Shore

24 May 2006

I, like most bibliophiles, have a backlog of reading material. In something of a fever dream, I added a batch of Asian works that have recently been translated to the queue. Once I finish my current stack (with only Eastern Standard Tribe, Everyman, and The Sea remaining), I plan to push through it in marathon fashion. The first book in the queue is Kafka on the Shore by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. It was featured in The New York Times’s “The 10 Best Books of 2005.”

Resources:

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Concerned about Karma?

21 May 2006

Random House, the publishing company owned by Bertelsmann, the German media giant, announced on Tuesday that it would increase the proportion of recycled paper it buys for its books to at least 30 percent by 2010, from 3 percent now.

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

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An Inconvenient Truth

20 May 2006

[Book Cover]

I enjoyed Al Gore’s earlier book on environmental issues and railed against the mudslinging that unfairly tarnished it slightly (type ‘”al gore” unabomber’ into Google to see what I mean). I plan to pick up his latest, which by all accounts is a clear presentation of the scientific evidence for global warming, when I return to the States.

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