By No Means Useless

For some reason I haven't been settling down to read the journals I buy this year as much as in the past. I've only read a single hardcopy of The New York Review of Books since January, for example. Normally I'd have read five or six by this time. I suppose I'm now tending to read the same material on-line, which somehow isn't quite as satisfying, but just comes so much more easily to hand. Perhaps not such a good habit.

It also took me a long time to get round to reading my second ever copy of the Mekong Review, the May - July issue. I finally got down to doing so last weekend and zoomed through it in four days. It turned out to be an excellent read and I'm definitely going to look out for the next issue come August. There was an intriguing interview with Ma Jian, the Chinese novelist, that convinced me I needed to expand my horizons to stretch as far as at least one example of his fiction, plus a sort of interview-cum-profile of Anwar Ibrahim that reminded me of what a genuinely fascinating politician he is. But the most striking piece in this issue was actually the first one in, a sort of review by Robert Templer of a trio of books related to climate change, that frightened and depressed me in a way that I suspect I needed to be. It's couched as a sort of letter to a 'Maldivian' from some time in an imagined and very bleak future and it doesn't hold out much hope for the Maldives or Singapore, or pretty much anywhere else for that matter.

Oh, and I really should mention an excellent short story in the issue by Preeta Samarasan - a new name for me - entitled Useless. The title makes it sound bleak, and it was, but eminently readable. Must look out for more by Ms Samarasan (whom I needed to google, just to be sure I got her gender correct. Her narrator in Useless is male, and completely convincingly so.)