One of the reasons why I haven't been blogging recently (other factors that contribute to my inactivity include writer's block, and just plain laziness...) is that I'm on a mad rush to finish reading my library books before their due date, which is next Wednesday. I just completed Zadie Smith's White Teeth early this evening (which myzanthropik mentioned in one of her entries a long time ago -- thanks Naz!), before catching the irrepressible Tan Kheng Hua on The Food Chain, and have started on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire right after dinner.
YES -- I'm only at book FOUR and couldn't even be bothered to buy the copy I'm reading, preferring instead to loan it from the library. Rather cheap-skate hor?? But whatever la.. I'm really running out of storage space in my room and I'll probably try collecting the Potter books after I get a proper shelf for all my reading stuff (and probably after I throw out a couple of tonnes of my past school-notes and text-books).Honestly though, I don't really read much books nowadays, preferring instead the cold, hard facts of the daily newspapers or the gossip pages of the latest 8days or Manja magazines. Local/world current affairs and pop culture is so hard (and time-consuming) to keep track of these days that I haven't got the spare time to indulge myself in the fictional world of the latest paperback novel.
However, my sister managed to drag me along to the book fair at expo last saturday, at the insistence of her two daughters (i.e. my bratty nieces). There were thousands of books going at incredibly low prices but I couldn't really find anything I was interested in initially. Nevertheless, seeing the throng of kiasu Singaporeans buying books by the dozen (and dozens of them indeed!) did inspire me to make my own selection, but I ended up spending a little less than ten bucks on two precious finds; Mark Haddon's incredibly humorous The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-time (which I'm half-way through already) and HP's Order of The Phoenix, paperback version.
I can't wait to start on the latter but I'm still only a quarter way through book 4. Seriously though, I think J.K Rowling is not really a fantastic author. I admire the vividness of the world she has conjured for her readers but her writing tends to be abit unfocused and too verbose. Sometimes, her descriptive narrative falls flat, feels too trite and two-dimensional and lacks soul. Compare her works to some of Roald Dahl's classics and you'll get what I mean... But hey~ I really dig all this fantasy-shit anyway (I've always been a David Eddings and Anne MaCaffrey fan); gimme a story with a dragon in it and I'll lap it up in a jiffy! LOl
