Book Review: The Humans by Matt Haig

The Humans by Matt Haig takes a fun, irreverent look at the human species, our appearances and way of life.  The novel revolves around the narration of an alien species called the Vonnadorians, in the form of a report to his superiors.

The author did not tell the readers what the alien looked like, but from the alien's horrified reporting of humans, one can allude that Vonnadorians most likely resemble a round ball with huge eyes. "Their faces alone contain all manner of curiosities. A primitive external auditory organs known as ears, tiny eyes and unfathomably pointless eyebrows." It went on to describe the "primitivenesss" of having external limbs, and the unfathomableness of the law requiring the human species to wear odd things called clothes.

This description of humans resonated with me as I had, between 2008 and 2010, written another blog from the perspective of my cats. I had wondered what my cats thought of us changing our clothes all the time, our activities, our going-in and going-out of the house and coming home with bags of groceries or new household items. So, from my cats' point of view, we were constantly changing our skins, we sometimes hanged our skins on coat hooks, put them into a square looking contraption that washed and tumbled-dried our skins and we went out to hunt for food at fixed hours daily, but were only successful at weekends.

But I digressed. Back to the novel, the nameless alien was placed on earth to take the place of a brilliant mathematical professor, Andrew Martin. It was hinted that the said professor was abducted and killed by the Vonnadorians for a breakthrough mathematical discovery that would threaten the universe.

The narrator alien's job was to find out who Andrew Martin had revealed the mathematical evidence to, assassinate those who knew, and destroy the evidence.

 

Book Review: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

 The Silent Patient opened with Alicia Berenson's diary. It began with "I don't know why I'm writing this. That's not true. Maybe I do know and just don't want to admit it to myself." And she went on to write about how much she loved her husband Gabriel so much so that she.....here she stopped and wrote "No I won't write about that. This is going to be a joyful record of ideas and images. No crazy thoughts allowed." 

With that, I was reeled in hook, line and sinker. With such an introduction, you knew there were going to be layers in the story, with plot twists.

At thirty-three years old, Alicia shot her husband five times when he came home one night after work and then went completey silent while her therapist, obssessed at finding out her motive, continued to work on her.

The story is told from the therapist's point of view and the silent Alicia's diary. At a certain point in the story, I started to wonder if one of the narration is reliable. Did Alicia kill her husband or did someone else do it? If so, why did she keep silent? Who was she protecting? Or who was she afraid of? Those were my questions as I kept reading. 

The answer wasn't what I expected, but it explained everything neatly. A well-written story, it kept me glued to the end.

Book Review: Tales From The Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

The only reason I read the second installment of Before The Coffee Gets Cold is my curiosity about the resident ghost in the cafe.

In the seat that takes you back to the past is a woman in a white dress. She had gone to the past to meet her dead husband and failed to return to the present. If you try to forcefully remove her from the seat, she curses you. You can only occupy the seat when she leaves the seat to use the toilet once a day. Yes, this ghost uses the toilet!!

While I did find out the identity of the ghost, it was just a few short sentences. The author did not explain why she failed to return. The reader is left to assume that she lost track of time and her coffee went cold.

I will not go into detail what the theme of the book is about. You can check out my review of the first book here. 

The second book has the same flaws as the first book, excruciating repetitive details of clothes, appearances and re-introduction of characters, with permanent thought bubbles above their heads. 

The method would have worked better with a play than a novel. The actors could step up to the front of the stage and whisper their thoughts to the audience.

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Book Review: Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Book Review: Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

 If you could go back to the past, who would you want to meet? That is what a basement cafe in a back alley in Tokyo offers. A chance to go back to the past to meet someone for the last time.

Before you think "oh, another time-travel book", let me tell you this is not your regular time-travel piece. There are four rules in this time-travel cafe.

First, no matter what you do while you're in the past it will not change the present. Even if you warned the person who had died in a car accident to avoid a certain route, that person would still die by some other means. 

Second, you may only meet people who had been to the cafe. 

Third, there is only one seat in the cafe that takes you back to the past. You must remain seated in that seat the entire time you're back in the past. If your butt so much as leaves the chair by just 0.001 millimeter you would be wrenched back immediately to the present. And since you have only one chance to travel back to the past in your whole life, you wouldn't want to waste that chance.

Fourth, you are transported to the past when the coffee is poured and returned to the present when you finished the coffee. You must return to the present before the coffee gets cold, or you would turn into a ghost.

Now, with those premises, the book sounds like fun, right? That's what I thought. Unfortunately, the author failed to deliver. I skipped through more pages than I could count. 

Before The Coffee Gets Cold has four stories that are interconnected. If I have to liken the stories to food, then the plots are mere side dishes. 

The main dishes are long narratives of repetitive description of the cafe, undue emphasis on the clothes and appearance of the characters and what everyone is thinking. It is like everyone inside the cafe has a permanent thought bubble up there in the air.

Now, if those thoughts help move the story along, fine, I can accept that even if it leaves out all the mystery. But they don't. Not all of them, at any rate.

But the worst is that each story re-introduces the characters, the cafe and how things are done in great detail. I felt insulted. It was like as if the author thought his readers have Alzheimer's and needed reminding. Either that or his readers are exceptionally slow and dim.

The only thing I was curious about in the book was the identity of the resident ghost in the cafe, a woman dressed in white. And it was that curiosity that compelled me to read the second installment, Tales of the Cafe. 

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Book Review: Tales From The Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Book Review: The It Girl by Ruth Ware

The It Girl is another whodunnit by Ruth Ware. Six Oxford University students became fast friends during their first term, and one of them is dead by the second term. Murdered. The story is told from two timelines, alternating between "before" and "after" the murder.

Unlike many of Ruth Ware's books which grips you from page one, The It Girl was a bit slow to build up. But once the pace picked up, it was hard to put down. I finished the book in two days.

Hannah, the protagonist, was hounded by the media over the murder of her best friend (it was her testament that put a suspect behind bars) but instead of taking a stand and telling them to buzz off, she went into hiding. 

A decade later, a reporter found her at her work place and convinced her to start recalling her memories of what she saw on the night of the murder.

As she dug deeper and deeper into the past, it began to look like one of her friends was the murderer. Or was it someone else? Ruth Ware is really good at the game of casting doubts on every character. :-)

Book Review: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jekins Reid

After the somber Midnight Library by Matt Haig I wanted something frivolous. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo seems to be as good as any. A Hollywood superstar had engaged an unknown reporter to write her authorized biography. How serious can a book about one's seven husbands be, right?

Wrong. A few pages in, and I realised my mistake. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is far from frivolous. Evelyn Hugo may be rich and successful but she could not be with the only person she was in love with. Not without losing everything she had worked for.

The narrative was rich in details without going overboard. Some people may find the LGBT scenes in the book uncomfortable, and if they do, they should just skip those parts. It didn't bother me as my principle has always been not to judge and to each their own. 

Throughout the book one question continued to raise its head, why did Evelyn Hugo choose an unknown reporter to tell her life story to? The answer wasn't what I had anticipated, I had imagined a variety of reasons but the author managed to surprise me. I like that. I've always liked unexpected explanations.

At the end of the book, I had one burning question: is this an unauthorized biography of Elizabeth Taylor? My mum was a fan of Elizabeth Taylor and I had heard all about Taylor's eight marriages to seven men. So I googled.

What I discovered was, the book was indeed inspired by Elizabeth Taylor's life. Reid, the author, said it was inspired by Elizabeth Taylor & Ava Gardner's life. Little wonder the book read like a fictionalised true story.

 

Book Review: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

In life, there are many choices, and within a choice, there are many other choices. It is like a tree with many branches within a branch, or a road with many forks within a fork. 

Once you have made a choice, do not look back with regret at the choices you hadn't made. Instead, make the best of it, without any expectations. For without expectations, you will have no disappointment. And without any disappointment or regret, you will have no depression. 

That is the lesson I took away from The Midnight Library. No expectation = no disappointment or regret = no depression.

In the book, Nora Seed was very depressed, she regretted all the choices she hadn't made as well as the ones she had made. Her life was not what she had expected it to be and she felt she could not do anything right, not even a simple thing like caring for her cat. She wanted to end her life.

In between life and death, she came upon a library. Within that library, the shelves of books went on forever. Each book contained a life that could have been hers had she made that choice. If she found a life that she liked, she could stay in that life. If she didn't like it, she would be transported back to the library to choose another life.

In that suspended state, Nora lived various different lives, trying them out to see if she would like to live one of them. And in doing that, she began to appreciate her original life. It is the book to go to if we ever need to be reminded to be content and happy with our choices and what we have.

Book Review: Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

Before We Were Yours is not only a gripping book from page one, it is also one of those profound, thought-provoking books that made me check with Mr Google if the events mentioned were true the moment I finished it. The narrative was so detailed and complicated that it couldn't have been born out of an author's imagination. It was too real. And it turned out that my instinct was right. 

While the book is a fictional work, it was based on the notorious scandals that involved the Tennessee Children's Home Society operated by Georgia Tann. 

On the surface the Tennessee Children's Home Society is an orphanage, but in reality it was an organization that kidnapped children from their homes to be placed for adoption by wealthy and powerful families. Newborn babies were also stolen from their mothers in the hospitals. The mothers would be told their babies were dead. Blond and blue-eyed children were targeted as they were in demand. (Google up both Tennessee Children's Home Society and Geogia Tann to read more about the true events.)

The story in the book is told from two timelines, one as a flashback to 1939, from the viewpoint of Rill Foster who was snatched from her shanty boat home together with her four siblings when she was twelve years old. The other is in the present day, told from the point of view of Avery Stafford, the daughter of a prominent Senator who visited a nursing home and was mistaken for someone else by a resident there.

The two timelines merged towards the end of the book as Avery dug into the past of her family.

Although Avery Stafford was the central character, the voice of Rill Foster was more compelling, and the events more poignant. One has to be made of rock not to be moved by the events that Rill and her siblings had to go through. 

That said, it is a book with a satisfactory ending, not one that left you weeping buckets of tears (I hate those). 

Putrajaya Floral Fest 2022

Launched in 2007, Putrajaya Floral Fest is held annually except for the two years' Covid lockdown in 2020 and 2021. 

Anjung Floria, the venue, was awashed with colorful blooms when a friend and I visited yesterday. This year's theme is orchids, with many unique varieties which yours truly haven't seen before. Apart from orchids, there are chrysanthemums, diasies, sunflowers and roses. But the majority are orchids and chrysanthemums. Even the bees and butterflies visited.

A cultural dance took place while I was there

Each year that the event is held, there are three winners in the theme categories. This year's winning orchids are the Rothschild's Slipper Orchid, Cattleya Orchid and Rhyncholaedia Digbyana, in the following order. (I'm not an orchid expert, it was Mr Google who informed me what the species are.)

1st prize - Paphiopedilum Rothschilddianum (Rothschild's Slipper)

2nd prize - Cattleya Orchid

3rd prize - Rhyncholaelia Digbyana

Date: 29 August - 4 Septemter 2022

Hours:  From 9am to 10pm

Entrance Fees: 

RM15 (Malaysian adults)

RM5 (Malaysian child 7 to 12 years old & senior citizen above RM60 years old)

RM100 (non-Malaysian adult)

RM50 (non-Malaysian child 7 - 12 years old & senior citizen above 60 years old)

Book Review: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

 

Outlander was first published in 1991 but I only came to know of it recently when a friend recommended the book. It is the first in the Outlander book and TV series.

Outlander is a story about time-travel romance between Claire Randall and Jamie Fraser. Claire is a military nurse who served in the World War II. When the war ended in 1945 she reunited with her husband Frank. They had married shortly before war broke out, and were separated for six years. They decided to take a second honeymoon in a village in Scotland where they were married.

It was in that village, up on a hill, where Claire was suddenly transported back in time to 18th century Scotland. There, she met and married Jamie Fraser.

That is the first issue I have with the book. Call it what you want, bigamy is still bigamy regardless of the time period. You can't argue that two hundred years ago Claire wasn't married yet. That argument is not valid because Claire wasn't even born yet at that time. However, the married Claire from year 1945 was the same person who married a second man while still being married. 

My second objection is the relationship between Claire and Jamie. Jamie is a guy who would be arrested and jailed today for domestic violence. But in the book, it was "normal" for a husband to beat his wife, and then get turned on by the beating and raped her. That is one SICK man, to say it's a normal in the 18th century is just a very poor excuse to glamourize domestic violence. 

My third grouse is that Frank, the legal husband, was not given more story-time. He was a gentle, affectionate History professor. I much preferred his personality to that of Jamie Fraser. But because the book was told only from Claire's point of view, there was no mention of a possibly distraught Frank searching for Claire. I wish the author had done a multiple points of view, I would have loved to know what went on in Frank's mind as he searched fruitlessly for Claire, and how the villagers took the disappearance of her, especially Mrs Baird, the nosy proprietor of the bed and breakfast where Claire and Frank stayed at.

Book Review: Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright & Bradley Hope

 

When Billion Dollar Whale was first published in 2018, it was hard to get a copy in Malaysia. It was not immediately available at local bookstores, neither could I find it online. If not for a relative in Australia who sent a copy to me, I would not have been able to read it. 

Wait....why am I reviewing a book that I read four years ago? That's because the law seems to have finally caught up with a few of the people involved in the financial fraud, and when I mentioned some details from the book to friends and acquaintances, I found to my surprise that many have yet to read the book. Neither were they aware of its existence.

Billion Dollar Whale is an account of Jho Low, a young Malaysian man who came from a relatively wealthy but obscure background to become one of Hollywood's high-flyers who mingled with the likes of Paris Hilton, Megan Fox and Leonardo DiCaprio, just to name a few. Well, perhaps "mingled" is a wrong word. He PAID millions in US dollars for them to hang around him at parties.

The book focused on how Jho Low siphoned US$4 billion out of Malaysian public funds. His flamboyance made the movie "Wall Street" looked like child's play. Unfortunately I do not remember enough of the details to write about them in depth (I read the book FOUR years ago!), but a couple of things stayed in my mind till today.

Jho Low used his time in Wharton to make friends with children from elite families. To appear like he's in their league, he rented yachts, luxury homes and cars and passed them off as belonging to his family. There was one luxury home he rented where he planted his family photos strategically around the house to further cement the lie. 

Another impression that lingered was that Jho Low might not like women very much. He might have surrounded himself with extremely beautiful women, but he did not seem to care for their company. 

For example, he would pose with them for the cameras, looking for all the world like he enjoyed their company but once the cameras were gone, he would sit alone or with other men, smoking or drinking. His interactions with them were more like a king with his subjects. It was as if he was telling the women that they might be highly paid sought-after celebrities, but they're nothing more than background setting to him. 

Putrajaya "Avatar" Garden

Well, for better or for worse I've revived my defunct blog under a different name, with a major cosmetic change. It is now streamlined to focus only on travels and book reviews.

It took some effort, I had so many places and books that I wanted to blog about, which one should I start with? One idea after another were tossed aside for later, until eventually I felt that it is more appropriate to share about the latest attraction at Putrajaya, the administrative capital of Malaysia.

Best of all, it is my adjacent neighbourhood, and is free from traffic jam. Most of the wide roads are relatively traffic-free, unlike downtown city.

Putrajaya is a beautiful place, each building has its own character, with one looking like an alien mothership. Even something as mundane as street lights are gorgeous. Each street has a different, intricately designed street lights. Even the traffic lights look like a tentacle of an alien. My favourite street lights are those that were designed to look like a vertical half of our traditional kites called "Wau". Until I take pictures of the street lights, below is what a Wau looks like.

Photo source: www.calendata.com

So is it any surprise that the latest garden lights look like something out of the Avatar movie like some say? 

The car park is on the right after this square

The blue lights do look a bit like out of Avatar

A great place to go on a date unless you prefer a more secluded garden, in which case either the Lake Gardens (aka Perdana Botanical Gardens ) or Titiwangsa Lake Garden would be a better fit.

This garden is at Taman Putra Perdana, Precinct 1, opposite Pulse Grande Hotel. Parking is available onsite and is free. The lights are turned on at 7.00pm.