On The Mekong

I picked up a publication quite new to me in November last year, from Wardah Books. Entitled Mekong Review it's handsome looking in its way, modelled to some degree, I'd guess, on The New York Review of Books. It certainly seems to aspire to some level of academic credibility, successfully I'd say, based on what I've read.  I'm not sure how many issues there have been, but mine was Volume 4, Number 1, which suggests a fair few.

It took me a little while to get down to reading the issue I picked up. Initially I found the focus on East Asia and its affairs mildly forbidding, although I immediately enjoyed Anjan Sundaram's penetrating essay on V.S. Naipaul, I suppose because that was familiar enough territory. But over the last month and a half I warmed up to the contents, feeling more than a little guilty at my initial lack of interest over what is, after all, on my doorstep. Having just completed the issue in question I find myself reflecting on a number of striking articles, with a particularly outstanding piece from Kim Cheng Boey on war graves in Vietnam reminding me of how just limited my perspective on the region is and how desperately it needs widening. (When I think of the war in Vietnam I primarily think of the Americans who died. How oddly blinkered that is.)

Funnily enough, on the same weekend I finished my issue of Mekong Review I picked up an issue of Prog for the first time in quite a while. At one point I assumed it had gone out of print, but it looks as if problems of distribution took it off the shelves over here. However, after reading just a couple of articles I've decided this is probably the last time I'll buy it. It strikes me as being a bit tired, a lot over-written and more than a bit narrow in what it covers. Not terribly challenging, but expensively so. And I need challenges, and reasonably cheap ones at that.