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As in a mirror, dimly
(crossposted from Facebook/added links/might expand on my thoughts later) Someone on a Malaysian expats group shared that they were trying to learn Chinese so other people started sharing their experiences, I wrote a very cheong hei comment so I thought I’d repost it to my own timeline if anybody cares.I grew up in an anglophone…
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A Journal of the Plague Year
Link to my review on Goodreads (same text as below). The book, free on Gutenberg.org. This was pretty entertaining reading in the grip of a pandemic. Just to be clear, Defoe himself was a small kid at the time of the Great Plague of London. This first-person account may be based on the journals of…
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The Headless Horse
One of my colleagues at work told me the story of how Western Equine Encephalitis was discovered and later he sent me the source article, which is a biography of Karl Friedrich Meyer by Albert Sabin, of all people. Meyer was keen to find the cause of a strange encephalitis which had struck horses in…
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Malaysian books I have read
I heard this great interview on BFM’s Night School with Raja Ahmad Aminullah, a poet and essayist and now I really really want to get a hold of his “Minda Tertawan“. Thinking about it, I actually haven’t read that many books by local authors. Here’s a list in rough chronological order of local books I…
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Steaming through the devouring night
I’ve been playing the popular text fiction game Fallen London for quite some time now and am at a point where I have several interesting storylines going, but am temporarily tired of it because my primary goal (build a ship) is in an extremely grindy phase. I don’t often pay for computer games but (this…
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Wrenching
Finally got around to watching Twelve Years a Slave, which I had on my to-do list but didn’t actually want to watch for a long time because I knew it would be difficult to watch the scenes of torture and abuse. We went to hang out with my first sister-in-law and brother-in-law and they had…