perdido street station

China Miéville is a genius. When Bossman told me enthusiastically how Perdido Street Station is his favourite book of all time, all I could picture mentally was the cover of the Tom Hanks DVD which sounds eerily similar to the title.

It's not an easy book to read at all. I almost gave up at the second chapter because of the complexity of characters, setting with no explanation or flashbacks whatsoever. Who is who, where is where, what is what... my sleepy morning one-hour tube rides and exhausted evening ones didn't take well to the story. But like a soldier that I am, I trudged slowly through; word by word, sentence by sentence. I began to doubt if I share the same taste as Bossman in books after all. Which, should be the case because I've enjoyed six of his recommended books tremendously.

Then something shifted and I got sucked into New Crobuzon, smelling the pollutant-rich air (ok ok it could be London's public transport), walking among khepris, garudas, Remades, vodyanois, cactus people and sharing their ripe dark fear of the slake moths and nightmares, plotting together and against each other to survive.

I subject myself to two delicious hours of new words, new beings and new dimensions of existence every day... and now that I'm at the final quarter of the book, every paragraph is painstakingly precious. I don't want it to end! But I'm also dying to know the final outcome. Ah, this is what a beautiful book does to you. An empty sense of loss (and longing) and few minutes of displacement when you disengage mind from story.

I challenge you to read Perdido Street Station and not fall in love with it.

catch-22

I have to really start packing and clearing out junk from the room (and also file my income tax return, but hey I still have a week) because ohmygoodness June is speeding towards me in full throttle and I'm panicking. So I took baby steps and started with the book cabinet... and discovered Catch-22, the book I borrowed from a cousin during Chinese New Year. I know this book is supposed to be a classic satirical history fiction, one of the great literary works of the 20th century, but dammit it's so hard to read. Very, very different from my usual Stephen King and the likes.

I'm still stuck at the first quarter. I don't feel like reading it at the toilet (too heavy), I don't wanna read it to wind down after a hard day's work (too much concentration required)... just can't find the time and mood. And my cousin has since flown to India for her dentistry course. But hey, now I know what's a catch-22. It's an idiom meaning "a no-win situation". Perhaps an excerpt from the book (yay I've read the most important part!) would be more enlightening:

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr [a character] was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian [the story's hero] was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle."

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Now you know why I say it's hard to read this book, right?

Of course, there're still the 24 books I bought at Payless's sale last year. And more from Bangkok. So many books to read, so little time... ah life!