This is the grandaddy of all the other books on Singlish. This paperback, containing reprints of two originally separate volumes from 1982 and 1986, contains a wealth of acronyms, onomatopoeias, words, phrases, and chants in or derived from English, Malay, and the locally spoken Chinese dialects Hokkien, Cantonese, and Teochew.
Continue reading The Complete Eh, Goondu! by Sylvia Toh Paik Choo
Singaporean graphic designer Hang Kwong Lim struck internet gold when he transformed the names of all Singapore’s MRT stations into logos resembling those of famous local and international brands.
My first thought was “Hm, that’s interesting…” and my next thought was “Oh, I recognize some of these,” and my doom was “I think I’ll share this with my boyfriend.” The two of us proceeded to spend over three hours together on Skype puzzling them out.
Some answers were really obvious, some were less obvious, some came in a flash of uncanny insight accompanied by a feeling that was equal parts pride and utter mystification in the face of the veiled mysteries of the workings of the human mind. A few of them, I admit, we got by the simple expedient of using Google’s “search by image” feature. I only looked at answers in Facebook comments for the last two, because TBH I didn’t realize the answers were there.
Keep reading for a complete list of answers and my thoughts on this delightful excursion into the world of branding. Visit the Mothership post first if you want to work out the answers on your own!
Continue reading Singapore MRT station names as famous brand logos
Award-winning Singaporean author Catherine Lim has written many books, but this is the first one to find its way into my collection. I don’t think it’s typical; it’s a rather short novel based on a cruise she went on.
I’m not a fan of semi-fictionalized stories (like Roots) that chase two rabbits and catch neither. Memoir-type stories are interesting as accurate representations of unusual situations, whereas novels entertain by telling carefully constructed, dramatic stories. If you’re composing a memoir, you create drama by choosing what to include and what to omit, but you don’t invent things. If you’re writing a novel, you invent pretty much everything. If you switch back and forth from recording to creating, I never know whether you’re relating something that happened, or something you imagined. The result is a feeling of cognitive dissonance.
The genesis of Meet Me was, according to the author’s preface, accidental, and its publication reluctant. When Lim was on the Queen Elizabeth 2, she wanted to write satirically about the people she met. After penning her thoughts, however, she found that the ship had subverted her intentions and made her instead write unflatteringly about herself, at which point she thought maybe she wouldn’t actually publish anything about the cruise. Nevertheless, here we are. And there she is on the cover.
If you’re going to read a navel-gazing book about a female author’s mid-life crisis, read Eat, Pray, Love. There’s a reason Elizabeth Gilbert’s quest to find God or a man or whatever is one that hundreds of thousands of people have read about and/or watched. To the extent that Gilbert rewrote her own experiences by leaving out the messy or unsatisfying bits, her story became stronger as a story. When we read narrative non-fiction, we still look for narrative as well as truth.
I tend to like teen novels about dystopias. I do NOT, however, like zombies. I’m really glad I checked out these books from the library rather than buying them (as I was considering doing), because, as it turns out, they’re about—guess what?—zombies.
The book series, kind of like a zombie, refuses to die. It keeps getting more and more volumes tacked on, so there must be people who enjoy this sort of thing. I decided reading the original trilogy was quite sufficient. Oh, and I’ve seen the first movie twice now. The original book trilogy, consisting of The Maze Runner, The Scorch Trials, and The Death Cure contains a complete story arc.
[H]e rode so softly, and the sun’s heat increased so fast, and was so violent, that it would have been sufficient to have melted his brains had he had any left.The elevated language and long, flowing sentence, of which this is just the very tail end, left me unprepared for the apt insult lurking all the way at the end. When I read this joke, I knew I was going to enjoy the novel. I was utterly floored in the second half of the book to learn that the characters are aware that they have been written about. The idea of breaking the fourth wall is older than I would ever have guessed! The narrator goes to great lengths to insist that he is now narrating the ONE TRUE SEQUEL, never mind those bumbling copycats who had tried, between the publication of Part 1 and the publication of Part 2, to steal the author’s glory and book sales.
I read the Garnett translation. I was happy with it, to the extent that “happy” is the right word to describe the experience of reading what I found to be a depressing novel.
I did some research on the available translations, which I have presented in a long, illustrated post on my other website, We Love Translations, called “Which translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment should I read?”
That post compares in-print translations. I count seven in-print translations of thirteen total, listed here:
| # | Translator | Year | Publisher |
| Frederick Whishaw | 1885 | ||
| 1. | Constance Garnett | 1914 | Heinemann |
| David Magarshack | 1951 | Penguin | |
| Princess Alexandra Kropotkin | 1953 | ||
| Jessie Coulson | 1953 | Norton | |
| Michael Scammell | 1963 | Washington Square | |
| 2. | Sidney Monas | 1968 | Signet |
| Julius Katzer | 1985 | Raduga | |
| 3. | David McDuff | 1991 | Viking |
| 4. | Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky | 1992 | Knopf |
| 5. | Oliver Ready | 2014 | Penguin |
| 6. | Nicolas Pasternak Slater | 2017 | Oxford |
| 7. | Michael R. Katz | 2018 | Liveright (Norton) |
I recommend the Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment.
Buy Garnett / Wordsworth paperback from Amazon
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I love books. I love languages. I built welovetranslations.com. Visit to learn more about translations of Crime of Punishment!
The word “mnemonic” has nothing to do with anything in the movie. Nothing. It’s just a weird word that makes the title sound fancy.
As an adjective, “mnemonic” means “aiding or designed to aid the memory” or “relating to the power of memory”. As a noun, it means a special word or poem that helps you recall a set of connected ideas—like “FANBOYS”, which reminds you of seven coordinating conjunctions in English: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so.
But the premise of Johnny Mnemonic is that the protagonist is carrying data in his head like a drug mule and doesn’t even know what it is! Moreover, he doesn’t remember much about himself; he dumped his memories to make more space to carry data. From the title, I would have guessed he had a special memory skill, but no. He just has a cybernetic upgrade that turned his brain into a (rather faulty) hard drive. He’s nothing special. Might as well be named John Doe.
William Gibson wrote the screenplay as well as the short story of the same name, so the title was his choice, nothing to do with Hollywood. Maybe he picked it because the character wishes he could remember his childhood?
See below for more on what the movie is like and why I didn’t particularly like it.
I didn’t particularly like Crime and Punishment… it was third-person omniscient but drifted into unreliable narrator territory because the protagonist is crazy, and you spend a lot of time watching him very closely as he goes around in circles being indecisive. I find his behavior dull at best and really frustrating at times—which is perhaps the point, but it’s unpleasant and rather drawn-out. I think I was expecting more overt philosophy, but there’s only a couple of scattered bits.
I read the Constance Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment. If you are trying to decide on a translation, check out my post over at Medium on which translation of Crime and Punishment you should read.
More on what I liked about the translation and didn’t like about the novel below.
Continue reading Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett
This book was printed in 1950. It’s in decent condition, although the pages are a little brownish. It has a pleasant smell, like an old library. The content as well as the paper, the fonts, and the typesetting make for a kind of armchair time-traveling experience.
I am not practiced in evaluating biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. I don’t often read them. In fact, I only just learned (by asking Google) that the difference between an autobiography and a memoir is that the former generally consists of key facts about a person who just happens to be the author, whereas the latter is more about “emotional truth”.
So what do I think of the emotional truth of Tara Westover’s memoir Educated? I’m not sure. I could go at it one of several ways. Maybe it’s an indictment of a backward Mormon family. Maybe it’s the story of the triumph of a determined individual over uniquely challenging circumstances. Maybe it’s the literary equivalent of a sordid reality TV-show. Probably it’s a little bit of all those things. See below for more on what I thought of the book and why.
Are there spoilers in the post? Well… memoirs don’t have plot, and you know that Tara became a successful author in the end, so… no. Not really.
