A Bookseller's Responsibility

Bookseller Abby Wong writes an interesting piece in today's Starmag about how Malaysians :

... are reading more and better books but are still dependent on booksellers’ recommendations and unbiased selections.

And she talks about an role of the bookshop, beyond just having the products available :

Indeed, booksellers – or rather, the book buyers who work for the booksellers – are readers’ readers, and they have a responsibility to love books, to read them and to make sincere recommendations to the public. ... Furthermore, I feel it is the lesser known books that bookstores must bring to their customers’ attention because while their authors might not produce commercial best-sellers, they are often better writers than those who shift thousands of titles at a time.

And then she goes on to list some reads that may well have slipped beneath the radar of local readers (and there is a 30% off voucher in the print edition, in case you decide to check them out.)

Her message to booksellers in general :

Instead of dreading the competition, why not start buying passionately to make Malaysian bookstores as attractive as candy stores to customers of all ages?

Sufian Sambal and The Art of BiblioStalking

Although he doesn’t write specifically for adolescents, I think Sufian Abas has the sort of weird and wonderful imagination needed to create the sort of romantic fantasies teenagers would be only too eager to lose themselves in. They would most certainly identify with Sufian’s love-sick characters, his delusional young men and wide-eyed young women, all wandering through a world lit by fluorescent strips and filled with dusty roads, stuffy LRT coaches and gaudy fast food joints. ... It’s a world that smells, sweetly and sharply, of rotting garbage and paint-stripper; a world where ceilings leak and the plumbing is jammed with blood and guts and broken hearts. A horrific world, a romantic world, a world swollen with unrequited love and lost dreams. Just the sort of landscape hyper-sensitive, melodramatic young adults like to pretend they inhabit.

Daphne Lee recommends Sufian Abas' new collection Matanya Teleskop, Hatinya Kapal Dalam Botol Kaca (The Eye is a Telescope, the Heart a Ship in a Glass Bottle)* as a teen-read in Starmag today, and says the stories are (and don't you just love this analogy) :

... delicious – like washing down extra spicy sambal with fizzy Fanta orange.

Abby Wong also writes a very enjoyable column about her bookish family. And how important it is to make sure that a future spouse is bookishly compatible!

(Incidentally, on the topic of judging compatability via the bookshelf, you might like to check out Rands in Repose on the topic of being a bookstalker.)
*Available at Silverfish Books, or email Sufian Abas at dvinecomdy@hotmail.com.

Yasmin's Poetic Heart

Nothing is more beautiful than the written word ...

In today's Starmag, Abby Wong pays tribute to Yasmin Ahmad and her love of poetry, which she says :

... was endearing because it was a passionate, pure, spontaneous, crazy kind of love. Whenever she came to Kinokuniya Bookstores in Suria KLCC, where I used to work, she would look for me and read me a stanza or two from poems such as Nobel Prize-winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz’ The Tale of Two Gardens. ... As she read out loud uninhibitedly, the words would waft through the air and roll between shelves, intoxicating unsuspecting customers. She had a lilting voice, one that was filled with zeal and intelligence, but that was by no means ever pretentious. ... Some customers, the curious ones, would trace the words back to their source and find her in the poetry section.

Noisy Books

... every time I walk into a bookstore, stacks of newly published titles warmly greet and cajole me with their shiny grins and lilting chirping, making them impossible to ignore. ... The entrance is, naturally, where bookstores tend to display their latest titles, which makes this area the most “deafening”. Attractive and bright in colour, these new books tweet and cheep energetically, each attempting to outshine one another. It is rather vexing to have to ignore Charlaine Harris’ Dead and Gone, but my heart yearns for crafters of beautiful sentences and weavers of enchanting stories. Stride on! ... The purring, barking, roaring, and quaking start even before I get to the children’s books section. From afar the animal characters can smell me, a sucker for picture books who will buy anything that makes my daughter laugh.

Phew I'm not the only person who thinks that books are very noisy things - but what Abby Wong fails to mention in her piece in StarMag today is that the cacophony doesn't stop when the books are back home and sitting on your shelves.

It's only those that you actually read that sit there quietly with a satisfied smirk.

Sunday Shorts

I'm willing to admit this to you, my dear reader. I am such a voracious consumer of books that I used to steal in order to satisfy my need.

Former book buyer with Kinokuniya Abby Wong starts an occasional column of things book related in Starmag and begins by telling us about her obsession. Another avid reader, Christine Jalleh tells a heartwarming story about how a stranger in a shopping mall turned Book Angel. (And, you know, we could do with a few more of those!) Elsewhere, Kuan Guat Choo hobnobs with ghosts. Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin reiterates the message that Malaysians don't read enough, as he launches the Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair 2009. (But there's no word about where his statistics about reading are taken from. Perhaps it is the mythical National Library Survey?) And Datuk Lat gets orchestrated.

Things to Look Forward To

There I really enjoyed in the ReadsMonthly supplement of Starmag today was the piece written by Abby Wong of Kinokuniya looking forward to some good reads in 2009 after a "barren" 2008. Among the novels she's looking forward to - Tash Aw's Map of the Invisible World, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck (out April) and Yiyun Li's The Vagrants which has already been spotted on the shelves of Kino and is worth a journey into town!

(I must add here that I miss Abby now she has moved to Sydney.)

And among the reviews is Janet Tay's take on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald which is a must-read, as do the two stories that are published with it. (And I so want to see the film ... will it get an Oscar tomorrow?)

And again, there are tasty vouchers to clip giving substantial discounts!!