In Anticipation of Malaysians' Top 10 Books

From StarMag, 21st April 2006.

Books Malaysians Love

THE original plan, when StarMag first decided to run a poll on Malaysians' favourite books, was to ask readers to submit one title each. However, the groans, moans and curses that issued from the mouths of those whom we first ran the idea by prompted an increase to 10 fiction titles.

The grumbling continued, though. As one reader, lawyer Animah Kosai, says, “If not for the deadline, I’d still be vascilating. It was a tough choice – I had to decide, one (book) per author. Otherwise there’d be more Murakami, Kundera and Nabakov.” Asked how long the list should have been? She says, “How long is a piece of string? I bet if I had to submit the list again, it would be slightly different.” The list Kosai did submit includes Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

The content of the list which we asked readers for was also a subject of some discussion among StarMag’s staff. Deciding on a solely fiction list proved slightly problematic as My Family and Other Animals and James Herriot’s books about his life as a vet in the British Yorkshire Dales popped up on several lists.

Should we restrict our readers to just books originally written in English? No, we decided that this would mean leaving out some really important works of literature, like Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind.

Of course, we fully expected to be inundated with lists featuring The Da Vinci Code, but Dan Brown’s bestseller doesn’t seem to be a favourite of as many Malaysians as evinced from local sales of the book. It might be a case of anonymity not allowing some readers to be as honest as they otherwise might be about their preferences.

“Some people might just want to appear intelligent so they’d probably include a list of classics or maybe some really ‘smart’ books. It could lead to pretty pretentious lists and inaccurate results!” says Julianne Leow, a 20-year-old Universiti Malaya undergraduate whose Top 10, which include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, was chosen based on books that made a lasting impression and one or two titles that “influenced my thinking, perception and – dare I say it – life in some way.” 

We received e-mails from the day the poll was announced (April 1) and the overall response has been healthy considering that we are a nation who, supposedly, reads an average of two books per person per year. Look out for the final results in our Reads Monthly pullout next week. 

Leow predicts that J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings will top the charts. Do you agree? You and your book club buddies can start placing bets now on what Malaysians' favourite books are!

 

21st April, 2007

Tots to Teens
By DAPHNE LEE

Here are a few must-reads for the young and young at heart.

Super little gems

DID you vote for your top 10 favourite works of fiction in the poll we recently conducted? How many of them were children’s books? Half my list comprised books for children.

My 10 all-time favourite titles include several non-fiction books so I had to do a bit of reshuffling. I am the sort who enjoys making lists of favourites, but I’d not examined my top 10 book list for a while. When I looked at it on the eve of the launch of the poll, I realised that some of the fiction titles should no longer be on my top 10. They still make my top 20, though.

Not only do I have to love the books on my top 10, they also have to be books that I regularly re-read ... at least once every couple of years. That’s just my way of settling on a top 10, but I wonder what criteria others have. Care to e-mail and tell me?

Anyway, here are the five children’s books that made my top 10:

  The Ready-Made Family by Antonia Forest (Girls Gone By, pages, ISBN: 978-190-441-7361)

Antonia Forest is my all-time favourite children’s novelist. Unfortunately, her books are only available in new editions (that cost £10/RM68) by a small, private press called Girls Gone By. All but one of the 13 books she wrote are about a family called Marlow. The Ready-Made Family is set on the family’s inherited farm and is, essentially, about their reaction to the eldest daughter, Karen’s announcement that she wishes to marry a much-older widower and father of three; and how they cope with the subsequent marriage and Karen’s new husband, Edwin, and step-children. Forest captures the awkwardness of the situation so effectively that she makes me squirm and cringe when I read the parts that involve exchanges between the Marlows and the officious Edwin. This is also one of the books in which most of the Marlows (there are eight of them, excluding parents) feature, and family politics and dynamics are rivetingly and sensitively portrayed. 

  The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper (Puffin Books, 800 pages, ISBN: 978-0140316889)

I got to sneak four extra books into my list with this series, which was my introduction to fantasy fiction. The sequence tells of the struggle between the Light and the Dark, and the five children who are destined to play a part in saving the world from the forces of evil. The first and third books may read like they are written for younger children who are making the transition from Enid Blyton mysteries to, say, The Hobbit, but this is one of the reasons I like the series so much: the different styles suit different moods. 

  The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones (HarperCollins Children’s Books, 221  pages, ISBN: 978-000-711-2173)

The four Melling sisters are haunted by a ghost from the future who suspects that it is one of the girls and is there to warn her of impending calamity. The characters are surprising, outrageous and funny; and the story is still one of the most inventive and original (in terms of both plot and delivery) I have ever encountered in fantasy fiction. 

  Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson (Farrar Straus Giroux, 176 pages, ISBN: 978-037-445-3039)

The fifth book in Tove Jansson’s Moomin series is a bleak but beautiful tribute to silence and solitude. Moomintroll wakes up in the midst of winter and tries to cope by himself while the rest of his family continue to sleep. His loneliness is eased when he meets the independent and matter-of-fact Too-Ticky, but she is unable to offer Moomintroll the comfort and communion he craves. Moomintroll’s wanderings through the wintry landscape of his valley reveals hitherto unimagined wonders and horrors, forcing him to confront his deepest fears, and, eventually, appreciate life’s shadowlands as well as its springtime.

  These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder (HarperPaperbacks, 304 pages, ISBN: 978-006-440-0084)

I think the reason why this is my favourite Little House book is that it sees the Ingalls finally settling down to a much easier life after all the hardships and tragedies they’ve had to bear. Laura is a schoolteacher and able to contribute to the family coffers, and her romance with Almanzo Wilder is blossoming. The book ends with her marriage, in a black dress and a green poke bonnet tied with ribbons as blue as her eyes. I love happy endings!

And, by the way, Happy World Book Day tomorrow!

 

Comments

[YTSL]

Hi Daph --

Hope you don't mind but I've tagged you for a meme; details of which you can find out about on your next visit to my blog. :)