The Big Bookshop Sale
This must be the longest book sale ever. More than a month. I went to the shop near the beginning of the sale and wasn’t too impressed. I went again yesterday. Still not too impressed.
On my way to the supermarket downstairs, I found the real location of the sale. Triple duh, Chet
The one I’d been going to is the proper bookshop. The one with the sale is located where the book section of Parkson used to be. And man, the selection of novels in the proper sale. Wonderful trade paperbacks going for RM12.00 each.
I was impressed.
I got me a few books, including one each by Annie Proulx, Jeanette Winterson, and Isabel Allende. Also one by the former chef for Mick Jagger. I don’t remember the chef’s name, but the book is called The Taste of Honey, and it’s fiction about a restaurant on the island of Crete.
The most valued purchase from the sale yesterday is Gene Wilder’s autobiography, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art. He doesn’t write it like an autobiography; instead, he presents only the events in his life that mean something to him (life-changing?), and he presents them through sessions with his therapist.
I love Gene Wilder’s film work. I love, too, that the late Gilda Radner was married to him. She was the funny woman from Saturday Night Live who succumbed to cancer in the late 1980s. There was one sketch she did about an old lady who said she didn’t understand how there could be too much “violins” on air. Go figure.
I’ve started reading Kiss Me Like a Stranger. I’m also reading When Red Is Black, a Chinese mystery about the murder of the author of a book banned in China. The book’s in English but set in China, with Chinese characters, and written by a Chinese, Qiu Xiaolong. That’s why it’s a Chinese mystery.
And I just finished reading Oracle Night by Paul Auster. Probably the best book read all year. But then, there was no competition - all my other 2006 reads were either work-related or light fiction. No, wait. Those two books by J A Jance that I read cannot be considered light reads, but made subtle statements - Exit Wounds about domestic abuse leading to certain obsessions later on (in the case of the book, it was about animal hoarding), and Edge of Evil about a television presenter sacked for no longer being young who fought back.
Oh, I’ve digressed … But so much good reading waiting for me in 2007!
