the kraken machinist

[Machinist: you asked for kraken, you get kraken ]

This is the cover of one of the books I’m currently reading: The Kraken Wakes. It’s one of those books that draw you in the more you read. The suspense builds up with every page and sometimes the things mentioned are interesting enough to warrant a pause and a trip to the computer for further research i.e. the Mary Celeste and more Tennyson poems.

Another book I’m reading is Start Late, Finish Rich by David Bach. NY recommended it to me and we had a blast during a long lunch at Delicious thinking of grandiose schemes to make a shitload of money and retire before we’re 40. The book’s a fun read and full of common sense but I do wish there’s more books for our local financial setup. I’m tired of reading about 401Ks.

Nini, looks like we can add another money mad friend to our midst ;) 

the kraken swam

Meet my new trilobite fossil (pencil as scale). This critter originally swam in the seas near Morocco but ended up in a fossils for sale booth in San Antonio, Texas. I’m so chuffed. My first trilobite! Thanks TechBoss#1!

televisi

I dunno what kind of random surfing that enabled Dali to find this scary little article about Anomalocaris, but we had an interesting chat via MSN on how we’d shit our pants if we ever came face to face with one. Then I remembered that I had a book on Burgess Shale called Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould bought a couple months ago from Betterworld Books. Flipped through the index until I found the relevant monster chapter and scanned it for Dali. Click here if you too want to be a geek of prehistoric monsters. [I'm currently reading a 1950s sci-fi book by John Wyndham called The Kraken Wakes. You can bet that one of these days  I'll have a nightmare on kraken-y, square-jawed sea monsters and go nuts the next time I go swimming at night.]

On to more nerdiness: I had a fantastic time at the KL Alternative Book Fair (KLAB) last weekend. Met some very nice people and chatted about books in general. I related some of the conversations I had to MC and he almost crashed the car laughing. He just doesn’t understand

“So what are you reading? Do you like Maeve Binchy? She’s brilliant kan?”
“Oh, I love her too! What am I reading? It’s a book on dinosaurs. Specifically, the extinction during the Cretaceous. Exciting stuff!”

****************

“Eh come and say hello on the forum lah! Have you put up your library yet?”
“It’s on Librarything.com. OKlah, I say hello online tonight. Hehe.”

*************

I also offloaded some books I didn’t like and got myself a free one by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Not her best though. It had all the promise of being a great book: magic, Atlantis, the occult… but nah. I was disappointed. I was very tempted to get one or two books from the Bookcrossings people but it didn’t feel right. I think what they’re doing is great but I can’t bear to let go of most of my books. Sharing/lending is fine but I’d want them back and IMHO, that made it unfair for me to pinjam any of theirs.

Although confronted with a gazillion choices, I managed to restrain myself and only bought 1 secondhand book. Just as I was paying for it, a guy comes rushing up and asks if there was another one by the same author. He was a foreigner and I didn’t hear understand him very well but I gathered that a) it was a very good book, b) she was his favourite author, and c) it wasn’t in Kino. I was about to offer the book to him when it popped into my head that hey, this book must be freaking good for him to be making such a fuss. So I continued paying for it and wished him luck. Haha. Karma is soooo gonna bite me on the ass one day. MC asked why I didn’t offer to share the book with him after I read it so we could be nerd-lovers. Now why didn’t I think of that? I’m getting old. And kedekut

don’t knock

When mom was here last week, I wanted her to experience how nice the manicures and pedicures were at Sommerset. So after picking her up from the airport and a hurried sushi lunch, we walked over to Jln. Telawi and prepared to get some lovin’. I told mom I was gonna get my nail painted black and was expecting a lecture on what ladies did or did not do. Instead mom cooed, ‘Oohh…that’ll look fab with some white nail art!’

EH? WTF? DID I PICK UP THE RIGHT MOM?

When I was 15 and deep into teenage angst and all things Take That, Bon Jovi and Blur, I painted my nails black. I thought nothing of it, after all nail polish is kinda like makeup. I figured mom would be pleased that her tomboy was showing some girly signs. What I got was:

“What in holy hell is that? Are we trying to worship the devil now? Are you mixing with the wrong crowd?”

Of course this made black nail polish all the more attractive. Haha.

Fast forward 13 years later and there I am gaping like a fish while mom muses aloud whether I should go matte or sparkly. Awww… my mom has mellowed!

his hair was the colour of lemons

Last night I finished reading an incredible book. It took me a couple weeks to finish as I was distracted many many times by new Judith McNaught acquisitions (hehe *blush*). Maybe because it was one of those books you fall in love with the more you read and would like to draw out the inevitable end, maybe by the realisation early on that the ending was going to be shattering.

I must admit that the first couple pages of Markus Zusak’s ‘The Book Thief‘ wasn’t that great. I found it a bit confusing at first. Who was the bloody narrator? What were all those paragraphs in bold? Little by little though the characters were drawn out and you wished you knew someone like Liesel and Hans and that Rudy reminded you of your first boyfriend. I think this is the first book I’ve read about the Holocaust that shows what happened to ordinary Germans. Yes, ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas‘ was also about Germans in WWII but it was about a privileged little boy whose parents were in the upper echelons of Nazi society and where Hitler himself came to dinner. ‘The Book Thief’ is so much different: you feel Mr. Steiner’s anger and disbelief when government officials come to take Rudy away to be part of an elite school for Aryan children, you sense the town’s sorrow when Mr. Hubermann and Mr. Steiner get drafted as punishment for being ‘Jew lovers’.

Here’s a great review by John Green of the NYT.

I cried buckets at the ending. I cried so hard that Atti woke up and came to nuzzle my neck and lick my tears. It started slow but ‘The Book Thief’ has already clawed it’s way up to the top of my 2008 booklist.