What Are You Reading Now?

So what are you reading guys ... anything good you'd like the rest of us to know about?

After I blogged about the shortlist for Romantic Novel of the Year Award, one of the nominees Linda Gillard was kind enough to put a copy of her book, Star Gazing into the post for me. And looking for a lighter read, I picked it up a few days ago.

Now I've always had certain preconceptions about romantic fiction, based on the one-and-only Mills and Boon novel I read years ago on a fishing boat from Tioman (there being no other reading material at hand), but Gillard manages to very nicely shatter them, and to keep this fussiest of readers with her throughout.

Marianne is in her forties, and has been blind from birth. She was widowed in her twenties when her husband was killed in the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster. She's long given up on love, and now, living with her sister finds her pleasure in attending concerts and long walks. She's fiercely independent, and so stubborn you sometimes want to shake her. But her courage comes through time and again.

Of course, the author places a bloke in her path. She encounters Keir literally on her own doorstep when she accidentally drops her shopping and he comes to her aid. Later, she agrees to visit his home on the Isle of Sky where he lives an almost hermit like existence when he isn't on the rigs. (He's another oilman, yes, and there are for Marianne disturbing echoes of the past throughout the novel.)

Keir's the kind of hero I would fall for myself in two shakes. Never mind the tall, dark and handsome (which Marianne of course can't appreciate in the same way, of course) he loves classical music and nature, is involved in conservation work, and is able to paint the beauty of the island for Marianne through words alone.

I loved though the second love-story in the humourous sub-plot - Marianne's sister Louisa writes vampire novels set in Edinburgh and falls for her much younger goth assistant.

The writing is good, the charcters well drawn and the dialogue realistic. An interesting theme of ways of seeing and perception runs through the novel, and Gillard helps the reader to inhabit Marianne's blindness.

The pacing of the novel just right and (quite cleverly because you always believe romance novels are written to a formula) the reader is led to a point where the happy ending no longer seems a safe bet. One of the main events that propels the plot, Keir's misadventure in Kazakhstan, and its aftermath could have done with a bit more space (but then, I suppose, Gillard would be wandering into the territory of the thriller and away from the romance).

So, yes, there are love stories that steer clear of all the mush and the cliches and heaving bosoms and provide even a jaded old cynic like me with an enjoyable read.

And now I've wandered into genre fiction of a different kind - caught up in the darkness of Irving Welsh's Crime.

Am also savouring Alina Rastam's new collection of poetry All the Beloveds ...

And you?

Some Romance for Valentines

It's been a long time since anyone's written a great love story, Literary writers are failing to address the subject. I sometimes think that they are more interested in 'writing' than in understanding the human heart – they've lost touch with a fundamental element of what it is to be a writer. I don't really buy into it any more; I go and watch an episode of The Shield or something. I look to drama, TV and film. Literary writers have lost their mojo when it comes to this subject.

So says Tim Lott, the president of the Le Prince Maurice Prize for romantic fiction in a piece in The Independent on romantic fiction by Katy Guest who lets us have a list of her own romantic recommendations :

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (1813)

Often copied, never forgotten, Austen's Mr Darcy was the prototypical romantic lead who would raise women's expectations to unrealistic levels ever after.

Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (1847)

The brooding hero, the tremulous heroine, but perhaps not the happy ending that would make it classic romantic fiction in the Mills & Boon manner.

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (1877)

'Anna Karenina' was praised by Fyodor Dostoevsky as "flawless as a work of art". Not a good Valentine's gift for trainspotters.

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway (1940)

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' saw a young couple falling in love against the unromantic backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. The earth moved.

Gigi - Colette (1944)

'Gigi' could have fitted perfectly into the Mills & Boon stable, featuring a young Parisienne glossily groomed and then married by a wealthy man.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernières (1993)

This book gave us the lines behind many a modern wedding ceremony: "You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is."

Inconceivable - Ben Elton (1999)

'Inconceivable' was possibly not written with romance in mind, but it fulfils all the criteria, according to the Romantic Novelists' Association.

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent - James Meek (2008)

Last year this became the first winner of the Le Prince Maurice Prize for literary love stories to have been written by a man. "Compellingly authentic," they said – and set in Afghanistan.

East of the Sun - Julia Gregson (2008)

The winner of this week's RNA Romantic Novel of the Year award – "A model of a romance, well written and memorable with a clever plot featuring a lovely heroine and a gorgeous hero."

The Prince's Waitress Wife -Sarah Morgan (2009)

'The Prince's Waitress Wife' is the first in a new series of rugby-inspired romances from Mills & Boon. Moral: enough wild sex can make a man love you.

Put Some Romance in Your Life ...

Valentine's day is coming up soon and ... well, do you need a little more romance in your life? Forget hoping for some of it from the significant other, and curl up with a novel instead.

The finalists for the UK's Romantic Novel of the Year Award 2009 have been named. They are :

• Star Gazing - Linda Gillard
• Sophia's Secret - Susanna Kearsley
• Before the Storm - Judith Lennox
• The Last Concubine - Lesley Downer
• Thanks for the Memories - Cecelia Ahern
• East of the Sun - Julia Gregson

Michelli Pauli in The Guardian looks at the nominees and explains how they were chosen by a panel of members of the Romantic Novelists' Association from a longlist selected by 80 members of the public.

You can read extracts from all of these novels here.

Anyone being sniffy about romance in fiction should take judge Fanny Blake's words to heart :

Love is central to all our lives ... yet romantic literature is often dismissed as secondary to great fiction despite the fact that most classic literature we love features romance in all its guises, from Jane Eyre through Howard's End to Atonement. Well-crafted romantic fiction is eternally relevant and I'm excited to be a judge for this prize that draws attention to the best of the best.

The winner will be announced Feb 10th which gives the guys just enough time to track down a copy to present to their loved one with some nice roses, a box of chocs, some sexy lingerie ...

Rugby and Romance

Who said romance (a la Mills and Boon) and rugby can't go together? The publisher is apparently teaming up with the Rugby Football Union to produce a series of books which will feature :

... tall, dark and handsome rugby heroes - minus cauliflower ears - and their glamorous love interests.

Series editor Jenny Hutton is quoted as saying :

Our mission statement is to do for rugby what Jilly Cooper did for polo - to give it an air of sexiness and glitz and glamour.

I wonder how anyone could not think rugby dead sexy!

In the Mood for Love

Are you in the mood for love?

The Times has six very good short short stories on the theme written by Matt Thorne, Lionel Shriver, James Meek, Jilly Cooper, Adele Parks and Tim Lott. Best of all there's the invitation for you to write your own love story in 300 words.

If you want something a bit more substantial, over at the Boston Globe there's a list of ten great novels to read when you feel like some literary romance - prepare to be surprised! The list is drawn from Haille Ephron's 1001 Books for every Mood which sound like another book about books I must add to my collection.

Write Something Beautiful, Win a Gold Ring

Sophie Briquet of French on-line advertising agency heaven wrote to tell me about a writing competition which you might like to enter. The agency works to promote luxury brands and in particular the well known place Vendome Jeweler, Boucheron.

Sophie writes :

Following the “delits d’initiés” (literally insiders trading) evening organized at place Vendome during the which Boucheron invited a few privileged french bloggers, Boucheron is organizing a literary contest called “Quatre” . The contest invites one to write about precious moments of lives. Unforgettable moments or memories or simply dreams.

Here is the concept of the contest in a few words :

• Write a text where you reveal a moment of intimacy that you consider to be precious
• Any form is accepted (song, poem; dialogue, short story, simple prose, haiku…)
• Your text is limited to 2,500 characters (spaces incuded)
• You can write in French, English or Japanese
• Duration of the contest : 15th May - 30th June

The most beautiful texts will be published on the website alongside interviews of well known French luxury celebrities such as Inès de la Fressange , Aïssa Maïga, Isild Le Besco. The jury will select the most beautiful testimony (one for each language) of precious moment and the winners will receive the precious ring from the Quatre Ors collection.

Further information and the rules cn also be found on the website.

200, 000 Books and Counting

Quick quiz question: who is the most published author in the history of the planet?

The New York Times reports that it's actually ... one Philip M. Parker, who has ... wait for it ... 200,000 books to his credit, all selling on Amazon.

A couple of examples of his titles : The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea, and The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India. True, these aren't going to be best-sellers, but we're talking long tail here.

Parker who is a professor of management science couldn't of course have done it without a little help. In this case from his computers. 60-70 of them.

He has in fact developed algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject and then turns the results into books which are available to customers via print-on-demand publishing.

He has has also extended his technique to crossword puzzles, scripts for animated game shows ... and get this, rudimentary poetry :

“Do you think one of them is Shakespeare?” he was asked.

“No,” he said. “Only because I haven’t done sonnets yet.”

and :

... he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

How does he do it? Mr Parker has been kind enough to put together a video to show us :

Romance Deromanticized

There's discussion of the romance novel - of both the Mills & Boon and the local variety in the New Straits Times today. Here are the local stats :

In Malaysia alone, distributor Pansing brings in 72,000 copies of Mills &Boon annually. To get a context of how significant this is, rival distributor Penguin Books says that any title that breaches 1,000 copies in Malaysia is considered a bestseller.

But even this giant is trumped by Malay romance novels, where individual titles can breach 150,000 copies. Local publishing giant Alaf 21, part of the Karangkraf group, sells 600,000 of these books a year, which general manager Norden Mohamed states makes up 60 per cent of its total turnover.

Some of our local literary luminaries toss in their opinions ... mostly disapproving. They might like to glance at the comments to my previous post on Mills & Boon and take note of the great affection many of my blog readers (book-lovers all!) feel towards these romances.

The worry though is that there must be a very large number of readers who don't move far beyond these books to discover what else fiction can do for them.

More about local romance novels here.

Gauging Compatibility ... Through Books

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast.

Rachel Donadio in the New York Times writes about how we might seek out a compatible partner based on the stuff he or she reads. Social networking sites like Facebook also make it easy to check out tastes, and my much beloved Library Thing, let's you walk around someone's entire collection ... and give them a thorough checking out.

Postscript :

I liked Francesca Steele's comment on this in the Times :

It's not so much the books you read as the way you talk about them. Give me a man who can explain his Harry Potter addiction with real enthusiasm and originality over a Nietzsche appraisal swiped from the Literary Review any day. And, FYI, Paolo and Francesca ended up together for ever, floating aimlessly around the second circle of Hell. You have to hope that they had something more in common than a book club.

(Thanks Dina for sending me the link.)

A Hundred Years of Happy Endings

I've only ever read one Mills and Boon romance, and that was out of desperation.

I was on Pulau Tioman and about to face a long trip on an uncomfortable fishing boat back to Mersing. Damn it, I needed something, anything to distract me from the pain of my sunburned limbs and would have read a cornflake packet if I could have made it last the whole voyage. This was the only novel I could find, left behind no doubt by another traveller. I can't remember the story, but I do know that of course there was a tall dark handsome hero and a happy ever after ending of the kind that real life just doesn't do. (Tell me about it!)

It's the 100th anniversary of Mill & Boon which, according to Karen Robinson in the Sunday Times, publishes 50 new titles a month and is selling a book every five seconds in the UK alone.

The stories are translated into 26 languages and sold in about 100 international markets, with at least 1,300 writers pounding the word processor to keep up with demand.

There can't be that much to writing a formulaic romance novel, can there? Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian muses on her own rejection slip, and the way the novels have evolved in changing times. The formula has apparently changed a bit:

... there are now 12 distinct strands to Mills & Boon (in literary publishing, they'd be called "imprints"), ranging from the kind of classic romance I tried to write 20 years ago to ones set entirely in hospitals, or in crinolines. And then there is the Desire series. The Desire brand comes as the biggest shock to anyone who lazily thinks they already know what goes on in Mills & Boon land. In these books, the hero has an erection by chapter three and isn't afraid to use it. In fact, he "thrusts" and "explodes" so often in the course of exactly 55,000 words that it's amazing he finds time to run a finance company/a ranch/a whole desert kingdom.

The heroine in a Desire book, meanwhile, won't be a virgin because that would be weird (if no one else fancies her, then how can the thrusting, exploding hero?), but she will be a born-again celibate. Some trauma - the death of an earlier love, even a divorce - will have left her in sexual limbo for months, if not years. It's the hero's job to guide her back into a full erotic life, which ends, if not with marriage, at least with something that feels very like it. And if this still doesn't strike you as quite saucy enough, then you're probably a candidate for Mills & Boon's latest addition to the stable, the Blaze imprint, in which the hero and heroine barely have time to swap a bit of witty banter before getting down to business in a variety of locations culled from a reading of Hello! magazine.

Mills and Boon have plans for expansion the Indian market which they believe will be their biggest after north American. There is also a plan to create a new imprint with Indian characters in Indian settings and the first title The Virgin for the Billionaire's Taking featuring a billionaire property dealer hero who happens to be the brother of a Maharaja will be released later this year.

In Malaysia, Mills and Boon appears to be pretty popular judging by the racks of them in local bookshops. But we also have our own local romances, written in Malay and along similarly formulaic lines, although perhaps without the steamier versions. (Although, yes, I have seen some of those too! They did my command of the written language no end of good.)

As I once told readers on this blog before, we also do have a very successful Mills and Boon author living in KL, and I must try to persuade him (yes, him) to appear at Readings sometime.

Anyway, if this post has whetted your appetite for more, Mills and Boon have generously put some of their novels online for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

And if you feel a rabid attack of book-snobbery coming on, you might like to read Amanda Craig's very interesting defence of it, published some time ago in the Telegraph.

The Greatest Love Story?

What's the greatest love story ever written? UKTV Drama commissioned a study to find out what British readers considered the best literary romance ever written, Martin Wainwright reports in the Guardian.

Here are the top twenty stories that get the British female hearts beating fastest:

1 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë, 1847

2 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen, 1813

3 Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare, 1597

4 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë, 1847

5 Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell, 1936

6 The English Patient Michael Ondaatje, 1992

7 Rebecca Daphne du Maurier, 1938

8 Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak, 1957

9 Lady Chatterley's Lover DH Lawrence, 1928

10 Far from The Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy, 1874

11 = My Fair Lady Alan Jay Lerner, 1956

The African Queen CS Forester, 1935

13 The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

14 Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen, 1811

15 = The Way We Were Arthur Laurents, 1972

War and Peace Leo Tolstoy, 1865

17 Frenchman's Creek Daphne du Maurier, 1942

18 Persuasion Jane Austen, 1818

19 Take a Girl Like You Kingsley Amis, 1960

20 Daniel Deronda George Eliot, 1876

(*Sigh* I'm still in love with Captain Corelli.)

The UKTV site lets you also check out who is your ideal hero/heroine with a fun quiz and sets out some useful rules for writing your own effective love story.

Winners and the Rest

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Robert McCrum quotes "the laureate of literary failure" Samuel Beckett in this Guardian piece about the value of literary prizes and how most literary endeavors are doomed to end in failure ...:

First, there are the countless manuscripts completed, but never published, and the hours of frustrated composition tossed into the wastepaper basket. Then there are the thousands of books published, but not reviewed. These, in turn, are matched by the scores of titles reviewed, but scarcely sold.

So ... erm ... why are you still writing?

McCrum notes that this is the season for the longlists and shortlists for all kinds of awards, and I've been very slipshod missing some of the news, so this is a catch-all catch-up!

Remember I posted the shortlist for the Ondaatje Prize the other day? Well, Hisham Matar walked away with it for In the Country of Men. (Am applauding for a book I love.)

Remember I mentioned the National Short Story Prize? (Of course you do - after all the argument about whether Kureishi's story being pulled by the BBC was censorship or not.) Anyway it was won by Julian Gough with David Almond being named as runner-up.

And I thought you might like to know that Rosie Thomas (right) won the 2007 Romantic Novel of the Year award for Iris and Ruby!

But the pleasantest award surprise has to be that a Malaysian won a Pulitzer Prize!

More award news to come ...

I Luv U!

Terri found this lovely snippet in the Gulf News and passed it on. The annual text poetry competition was initiated by British mobile phone operator T-Mobile, and this year asked for romantic poems written in in txt speech of less than 160 letters.

Text messaging is not only the province of the young, it seems, and this year the second prize was scooped by "a love-struck pensioner"!:

Eileen Bridge, 68, a grandmother, from Accrington, Lancashire, won £350 in the "txt laureate" competition, after she took second place with an ode to her husband of six months. The entry read: "O hart tht sorz, My luv adorz, He mAks me liv, He mAks me giv, Myslf 2 him, As my luv porz." The retired teacher was only beaten by London law student Ben Ziman-Bright, 23, who scooped the top prize of £1,000. He wrote: "Not even the wet rustle of rain can dampen today. Your text buoys me above oil-rainbow puddles like a paper boat, so that even soaked to the skin, I am grinning."

A T-Mobile survey carried out in the UK discovered that:

40% of us cherish mobile love messages by keeping them on their handset, and nearly half of us (46%) crave flirty SMSs and poems. Under 24s are the most sentimental - 49% keep more than 20 romantic texts on their phone, while only 16% of people over 45 years keep that many. Women (40%) and under 24s (62%) find it easiest to communicate feelings via text rather than face-to-face, while one in five men (19%) find poetry the most romantic form of communication.

So why not send your loved one a romantic txt message in poetry today ... and so we can all enjoy it, post it here!

Your Personal Romance

How about a romance novel in which you and your beloved are the main characters? One Canadian publisher Book By You has made it possible. According to an article in the Age:

Customers answer 20 to 30 questions about themselves and their beloved, ranging from body type to pet names. Then the details are woven into one of the company's eight pre-formatted novels. Clients can even have their photos added to the book jacket. ... One customer had a marriage proposal included at the end ...

How sweet!

Happy Valentines!

When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.

Erica Jong

Happy bookish Valentine's Day to you all!

Go and buy your books a Valentine's present - a fancy bookthong, a plastic cover, a new shelf to sit on.

Because remember, while others will break your heart ... or at the very least demand flowers dinner a cuddly teddy ...

... a book never lets you down.

Here's how Animah and I celebrated with red roses in Kino last year. Why don't you have a go?

Pic nicked from skybluepink website.

Passion in the Personals

I hate to admit it, but the part of the London Review of Books I've always enjoyed most has been the personal ads. Literary types looking for their soulmates come up with some pretty creative bait, and offer an insight into the self-deprecating British pysche.

Now David Rose the magazine's advertising director (below) has compiled some of the funniest of what the publisher's blurb calls "surreal haikus of the heart," in They Call me Naughty Lola noting that:

... while hopes of finding a suitable mate remain low, the column has produced a handful of marriages, many friendships, and at least one divorce.

James Button picks out some of his favourite LRB ads in the Age. (And there's another very enjoyable review of the book by Jonathan Player in the New York Times.) Don't you just love this ad which almost amounts to a short story?:

You'll write. I'll probably enjoy your letter and write back. After corresponding a few times, several phone calls, we'll arrange to meet. We'll meet again and become more intimate, eventually dating regularly.

We'll form a relationship, start leaving things at each other's apartments. We'll spend weekends together. Sometimes whole weeks. We'll have lazy Sundays lying naked in bed together, reading the supplements and not leaving the house.

Sometimes we'll disagree. The disagreements will become rows. We'll see each other less in the week. You'll come round one evening to 'collect some things' - we both know what it means. You'll go back to your place and cry like you used to do on cold wintry evenings. I'll drink more … We'll regret six lost months - possibly a year - wasted on yet another emotional cul de sac.

Let's save us both the pain - just send me a Christmas card and a nice gift (cash preferred, donations of £20 and above) and we'll call the whole thing quits now. (M, 43).

Button says:

How very English they sound. Clever, diffident, seemingly modest, given to gloom, and probably not as good at making love as at making laughter. As one personal advertiser in the Review put it: "Romance is dead. So is my mother. Man, 42, inherited wealth." ... I say seemingly modest, because the English are as interested in self-promotion as anyone else. But as the anthropologist Kate Fox shows in her book Watching the English, one must boast modestly - to the point of putting oneself down. It is for others to graciously contradict. ... Self-deprecation is an iron law of the national character.

If you'd like another helping of the LRB personals, why not check out those in the current issue?

And if anyone wants to post their own personals, I offer you space in the comments section!

(Pic from the New York Times)

Buyers of Books

Daphne Lee comes up with another very nice book related article in StarMag. How do the big bookshops actually select their stock? She interviews the buyers of Kinokuniya and MPH. (What a nice job! Need any help?)

Ramji Rabi of MPH (a very personable young man who did my creative writing course last year and pictured left with Yvonne Chau) says:

Malaysian authors like Tash Aw (author of the The Harmony Silk Factory) tend to be popular in all the stores. And Devika Bai (The Flight of the Swans) is especially popular in Johor Baru because that was where she lived.

He goes on to say that Malay romance novels are also extremely popular, along with religious books. Malaysians seem to be paying increasing attention to literary award winners. The most popular of which have been Life of Pi by Yann Martel and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

I was happy to see this letter by Julianne Leow from Penang. Yes, we do need more books reviews. I'd go further. We desperately need a proper literary supplement in at least one of the Sunday papers! Bookstores can sponsor articles, and Daphne can be editor-in-chief.

Love Stories on the Beach

Imagine a literary prize that offers no cash but an all-expenses-paid two-week retreat at a luxury resort on a tropical island.

Le Prince Maurice prize is sponsored by the five star hotel with the aim of raising the profile of Mauritius as a holiday destination, and it is awarded to the best literary love story and recognises "writers of the heart" as well as literary merit. Author Tim Lott who set up the prize in 2003 explains:

Many literary prizes are prejudiced against those who have the skill to capture emotional rather than intellectual realities. The Booker, for example, rewards technical ability, but neglects humour and love stories. ... I wanted to make this a prize that was about quality rather than genre, and about the tone of the books. The variety of literary love stories is incredible and there will never be clear boundaries - the book could have a tender voice or be about family love as well as romantic love.

The prize is also unusual is that it is for novels in English one year, and novels in French the next. The defintion of love is interpreted very broadly, the Guardian reported back in February:

It includes Louise Dean's touching, tragic-comic debut Becoming Strangers, about two married couples in their 50s and 80s, and Joanna Briscoe's dream-like tale of a love triangle, Sleep with Me. They are joined by Rachel Cusk's domestic drama In the Fold, Nicholas Bloncoe's pacy historical novel Burning Paris, Cris Freddi's moving tale of friendship and ornithology, Pelican Blood, and Ben Markovits's Either Side of Winter, a series of linked stories. Also on the longlist are Zade by Heather Reyes, Clare Sambrook's Hide and Seek, a tale of a missing child told through the voice of a nine-year-old, Kamila Shamsie's Karachi-set Broken Verses, and Tricia Wastvedt's suspenseful novel The River.

The writer who finally got to pack her suitcase for the award ceremony on May 27th and a well-deserved holiday (er, sorry, writer's retreat) in the sun is Louise Dean for her tragic-comic first novel Becoming Strangers which was also longlisted for the 2004 Booker Prize and carried off the Betty Trask award.

Local Authors Outsell The Da Vinci Code!

Dzireena Mahdzir charts the incredible rise of the popular Malay novel in Starmag today and the sales figures speak for themselves. (Dzireena points out that the Da Vinci Code sold just 10,000 copies here in comparison):

Sharifah Abu Salem sold 70,000 copies of her novel, Pesona Rindu (Enchantment of Longing), last year. And she had company: Sepi Tanpa Cinta (Lonely Without Love) by Damya Hanna also sold 70,000.

In fact, in little more than half a decade, just one publisher of Malay novels, Alaf 21, has sold more than half a million copies of seven titles, including Sharifah and Damya’s books. Tak Seindah Mimpi (Never As Wonderful As a Dream) by Sharifah Abu Salem sold 70,000 copies in 2000; Kau Untukku (You Were Meant For Me) by Aisya Sofea, 80,000 in 2001; Kau Yang Satu (You Are the Only One) by Nia Azalea, 75,000 in 2002; Bicara Hati (Discussions of the Heart) by Damya Hanna, 100,000 in 2003;Sehangat Asmara (In the Heat of Love) by Aisya Sofea, 70,000 in 2003; Pesona Rindu (Enchantment of Longing) by Sharifah Abu Salem, 70,000 in 2004; and Sepi Tanpa Cinta (Lonely Without Love) by Damya Hanna, 70,000 in 2004.

Apparently a big reason for the rise in popularity of Malay fiction is that publishers decided to use everyday language in their books rather than the more poetic form of the language used for literature, making it much more accessible to the man on the street. Romance is the staple fare (although there are also thrillers, sci-fi and historical novels) but in its culturally acceptable version:

... in keeping with our culture, passion is restrained to eyes meeting, and love is seen as something more emotional than physical. And you don’t declare love in an unseemly manner ... when a character declares his love, he does it poetically. ... Religion, good values and love are all tied up together, and this strongly influences the overall flavour of the stories.

It's nice to see local writers doing well, and reading encouraged. But - dare I ask - is the fiction any good?

Roses in Kino!

Evidence, if any is needed, that Animah hit Kinokuniya this lunch-time in pursuit of elusive romance among the bookshelves. Sadly there were no clandestine encounters by Sufi poetry (Where were you guys?) but I am so grateful for the copy of The Garden Of Heaven: Poems of Hafiz that she bought for me.

There was one surreal moment though when an extremely handsome young guy (dressed in black, long dark-hair tied back) materialised out of nowhere with a whole bag full of roses, presented one with a florish to a very stunned young lady standing just a few feet away from me ... and then fled the scene before she could protest. He wasn't an employee of Kinokuniya. Was it one of you? If so, well done.

I gave my rose to Arthur, a very nice young man on Kino's management team who stopped by to chat and ask how we thought the store was doing. (I have no complaints, just that I spend too much time and money in there.) Then Animah and I consoled ourselves with a cup of hot chocolate in the cafe upstairs.