Fine Finishes

Although I've not had that much chance to read much last week I did get through a few books when we were in KL and Melaka, and this time I completed everything from the library ahead of schedule. (Noi is still going on hers which is why I've not taken my stuff back this weekend.)

I'm pleased to say Marine Parade Library now stocks quite a few graphic novels/comic books so that's a good opportunity to broaden my awareness of what's available without having to shell out too many of the readies. I finished Frank Miller's Batman: Year One at speed, which is an indication of the good story-telling involved. But its not a book I'd buy to read again. Like most of his stuff it is limited by Miller's obsessively compulsive world view riddled with a barely controlled sado-masochistic streak. This is not someone I'd like to spend time with. But this is the real Batman - salvation from the self-parodying nonsense the movies degenerated into (though I'm told Batman Begins is a different beast altogether.)

I also zipped through Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, a re-read ahead of getting hold of his new novel. One of the IB students is doing this for her extended essay (though not with me) and I thought I'd remind myself of how good it is. And it is very good, though the early part of the novel set in Afghanistan seems to me superior to what comes later. On a re-reading the melodramatic features of the narrative become more apparent, such that you can imagine the ending being done as part of something you might see on the Hallmark Channel. Perhaps that's why the novel has been so popular - not a bad thing by any means, if you can make the melodrama believable. I'm not sure Hosseini really does that with Assef as representative of the Taliban, and the depiction of said Taliban as all-round bad guys and murderous thugs while undoubtedly grounded in some truth seems far from satisfactory in terms of a deeper understanding of what makes good or average people, or even bad people, do awful things. But here's so much in the novel that is so obviously right - the battle of the kites over Kabul being just one - that it's easy to go along to the places Hosseini wants to take you.

And finally, in KL I bought Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life and, as is always the case with his highly superior tomes of self-help (which is pretty much what he claims Proust himself was consciously providing in In Search of Lost Time), I read quickly and learnt plenty. Whether I actually apply the wisdom acquired and change my life in any way is another thing, and Proust, of course, is particularly good on why it's so hard for us to be wise, and so easy to be idiotic, and why it's so difficult for us to change anything. Proust is also the master of making us read slowly, listen attentively, watch carefully and smell creatively.

Just finished watching Titus. Magnificent. Compelling. Haunting. Disturbing. The central images of brutality and suffering are almost too much. I have taken too little care of this.