jaggedwolf

S. Rajaratnam, The Authorised Biography, Volume One: The Singapore Lion by Irene Ng

Anyone with sense is wary of a biography labeled an “authorised” one. That holds true here, where the life of one founder of the People’s Action Party (PAP), the still-ruling party of Singapore, is documented by an author who was both a PAP MP herself and whose journalism career was in SPH, the state-owned newspaper corporation. The writing itself is rather middling.

Those caveats aside, I enjoyed learning about this guy, to the extent that I might give volume two of the propaganda a shot the next time I’m in the country. Like, I’ll be fully transparent, my vague knowledge of him was “wrote the national pledge” and “the one Indian guy who isn’t Devan Nair among the PAP 1st gen” and I now feel pretty damn embarrassed about that.

( let us run down the biographical facts )

The polemical journalist becomes Minister of Culture and then slams down restrictions on the press, expressing himself just as vigorously on the supposed necessity of that. Classic, isn’t it.

And yet the thing that’s stuck with me, a month later, is this constant sincere yearning of his for multiracialism, pluralism, whatever it is one wants to call a society that isn’t so fundamentally demarcated by race. He was one of the last holdouts on Singapore’s separation from Malaysia, because he was Malaya-born himself and wanted to believe this was a federation that could work without racial animosity being so destabilizing as to make it impossible.

I dunno. It’s a throughline that made me morose because like, in the 80s and 90s (not covered in this volume but the next one), he’s going to be publicly dismayed about the government emphasizing race more — in what your second language is, in which group you go to if you need economic/other assistance, in immigration quotas, and so on. And one can go, well yeah, natural consequence of PAP, but if we’re talking about the 50s, everyone’s crazy about race. The communists are. UMNO is. There’s no fucking escape. I get why an English-speaking Indian guy is looking around going okay, I’m sticking with LKY.

But some of the stuff he’ll get dismayed about will happen while he’s still holding office, and I suspect there is a certain political ineffectualness at work too, a kinda guy who cannot play the game beyond expressing himself and then sticking with his party.

Interesting fella, all in all.

The Singapore I recognize: Essays on home, community, and hope by Kirsten Han

On the other end of the time scale, we have here a series of essays by a writer whose work I used to read online all the time back in high school. The most surprising thing was learning she accidentally stumbled face-first into anti-death-penalty activism after college — she just got a journalism job, was assigned to cover a death penalty case, and found herself horrified by a part of the Singapore legal system that she’d previously dismissed without much thought as “probably necessary”.

A good read all around, with insights on how journalism and/or activism functions (or doesn’t) in Singapore’’s specific environment.

The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie

Another Christie thriller, a quasi-sequel to The Secret of Chimneys. Much better than that one, and I am so mad at myself for not figuring out the bad guy. Such a classic Christie move, ugh!

Saving Central Park: A History and a Memoir by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Realizing that the books in this post have self-explanatory titles and so make me feel like a dummy when I write these first sentences, but I shall bravely forge on anyway: we’ve got here a memoir by the woman who helped found the Central Park Conservancy, a private nonprofit that did a lot of work in the restoration of Central Park in the 1980s and 1990s and basically manages the park today.

It was cool to hear about folks trying to restore some of the landscape design principles that Central Park was originally laid down by, while still making space for new practical purposes people were using the park for —- sports, playgrounds, and so on. My logistics-brain loved hearing about the acre-by-acre plans for maintenance and improvements. The rigor of the planning combined with the donations of a fair number of very rich people worked out well for Central Park. Not the sort of framework that seems extensible to many city parks, but there’s something to be said about going oh, you’d like to donate to our park, here’s our detailed list of projects we’ve already mapped out, pick your favorite.

Scarlet Morning by N.D. Stevenson

Middle-grade illustrated novel by the creator of Nimona and that She-Ra reboot, about two teens abandoned on an island who join a pirate crew and learn more about how the world was shattered to turn the sea terrible, right before they were born. A breezy read, and the drawings were all really cute!

I didn’t realize right till the end that there would be a sequel so I went !?!?!?! over all my lore questions, as I enjoyed finding out more and more backstories with different revelations each time. Of course, I adored everything to do with Viola and Captain Chase <3.

The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories by Stephen Crane

Haven’t read any other fiction set in the midst of the Civil War battles, or anything else by Crane. The main novel here is written in a sort of abstract way, the soldiers only given titles in dialogue, our protagonist never thinking of the names of the sides or even about the war is over. A self-involved guy, that fella, who ultimately overcomes his cowardice by losing his mind in the moment of battle.

Found it amusing that this collection involved both the the Civil War novel (The Red Badge of Courage) and a short story about four men left adrift on a boat after their ship capsizes (The Open Boat) — the former was so popular and specific that people would assume Crane had served in the Union army when he’d in fact been born after the war, while the latter was inspired by Crane actually being adrift at sea when his ship to Cuba sank.

A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie

Did Christie title this with “Pocket Full” instead of “Pocketful” so that it would be distinguished from the very nursery rhyme it’s based off of? Seems possible. Anyway, we continue our adventures in Marple stories. While the cast is a mostly miserable lot, Miss Marple shines. The first time I’ve seen her so genuinely outraged over a murder, appearing in this book almost as if she were an avenging angel. Makes the ending lines quite satisfying.

It took me way too long to figure out who did it, because apparently I am still vulnerable to the obfuscation of that character type. The inspector and the housekeeper were my favorites of the ensemble cast, well-drawn.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

You know, I thought I read it as a teenager, but I see no record of it in my books log and I sure as hell did not remember most of the novel, so I might’ve made up a memory of that. I did as a kid definitely read a children’s illustrated version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and from that I only remember a faked funeral and that I liked the bit where Tom tricks other kids into painting his fence for him.

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Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser

A book on the dynamics and functioning of modern cities, one that often deconstructs myths about the way cities work (Aren’t the urban poor we see worse off than the rural poor we don’t? No. Doesn’t keeping buildings short keep housing cheap? No.)

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Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Read most of it before I watched this year’s Shakespeare in the Park production, finished the rest after.

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The Portrait of a Lady | Anna Chronistic and the Scarab of Destiny | Mother of Souls

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Continuing my adventures in the classics where a woman makes very bad romantic choices. Alas, this time she goes so far as to marry the bad choice. I knew nothing about this book other than the title and its author until February of this year, when I came across a reference to “Isabel Archer sitting in her chair” in Researcher’s First Murder.

She sure sits in that chair, huh.

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Side note: Read a decent chunk of this while sitting in a park and a random fellow remarked “I finished that book two months ago, it’s very psychological” and I was like yeah, you’re not wrong.

Anna Chronistic and the Scarab of Destiny by Anakaret Wells

Time-travel novel that made me wonder if I’m a dummy or if the plot in the last third of the book was poorly explained. Of course, those are not mutually exclusive options.

Additionally, I think it rude to offer several intriguing times and locations and then spend the bulk of your time travel novel in an upper-class home in 18th/19th century England. (No, I cannot recall which century it was and I may even be mistaken in this broad range.)

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Mother of Souls by Heather Rose Jones

Third book in the Alpennia series. The new romance here was my least favorite of the three couples, perhaps because it itself is least certain of being a settled Romance at all. Yet I did enjoy the imagery of their particular pairing. Also, just plain fun to hang out with the gang again.

...I may have gained a het ship I support in this series, despite the impossibility of the class and religious differences???? C’mon, I know this setting is too grounded for it but I think the hets should have this.

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Socialist Realism by Trisha Low

I, uh, might not be sufficiently into Art TM or Artistes TM or Leftism TM for this memoir/book-length essay/stream of consciousness with time-jumping. I mean, I don’t particularly regret reading it, I will give most Singaporean authors a shot.

But somewhere around the “at an S&M workshop about how to safely waterboard your partner or be waterboarded by your partner” or the “being very upset about my mom wanting to buy a $25k handbag she can afford and asking me to pick it up” anecdotes, I was going, “oh, some people live very interesting lives” like a person diplomatically desperate to leave a party conversation. (I wasn’t paying full attention to thematic point of the first anecdote because I kept going...I don’t know that there’s really a safe way to do that...maybe don’t do that...)

Much like party conversations, it can’t have been purely the content of the author’s thoughts that put me off but the presentation. Maybe I could’ve liked if it had been even more stream-of-consciousness, instead of explaining the context for some art piece or Utena or Singapore, because by the end, I was thinking man, I’d take being dunked into your French New Wave thoughts without the prior explanation if it meant I did not have to read your explanation of who One Direction are.

Though perhaps I’d have an uncharitable response regardless. I often found myself thinking that whatever the given topic the author had switched to, I had read more interesting thoughts on it elsewhere. I’d rather read Zeynep Tufecki on protest movements in Turkey, or PJ Thum’s critique of Lee Kuan Yew’s approach to statecraft, or any of a number of online posts on celebrity fame. I’m additionally bored of reading thoughts on ~revolution~ in a modern American political context, I’m much more into the nuts and bolts these days.

So yeah, not for me, would not recommend.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

All I knew I was going into this was that the series won some hugos and the author was one of the people being terrible about Isabel Fall on Twitter. Reasonably I decided to put both out of my mind.

As I began reading the book, I remembered that wait, I’d actually osmosised a third thing about the author, that she’s a big Dragon Age fan who cared a lot about Cullen and the mages vs templars shit. Orogenes and guardians are merely reskinned mages and templars, where magic is replaced with earthbending.

Despite that obviousness, the novel works. Decent fantasy time.

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The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare

I don’t think twin-based misunderstandings are my jam. I got bored of the confusion fairly quickly when watching a recent production and when reading the play afterwards. There’s not much else going on here. Enjoyed most the interactions between the Duke and Egeon, of all things.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

TL;DR this meme lmfao

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Those Who Wait by Haley Cass

I...probably would’ve given up on this romance novel halfway through, between the prose, characterization, and handling of politics, if it weren’t for a friend enlightening me that it was actually a Sansa/Margaery fic with the numbers filed off for publication. A ship that I am deeply neutral on, but did make the whole experience more entertaining, as I went “oh my god, her dad is the senator, and her grandma was the president!”

Unfortunately when you have the Margaery expy - Charlotte - being a Deputy Mayor in NYC who is running for an open House Representative seat, you have me judging the political stuff. On the one level, the words “Democrat” or “Republican” or “primary” are never uttered. On a different level, I don’t think Charlotte is as competent a politician as the book wants me to believe she is? She is closested publicly for political career reasons, but we’re told she’s been hooking up with so many women (rarely the same one twice) right till her campaign starts. When she discusses attack openings with her strategist at no point does she mention the possibility of any of those women outing her (even accidentally! Like “oh lmao I think I hooked up with that lady running for congress”), she has no concerns about being followed while running around with Sutton, she has to be talked into using a political opportunity.

The Sansa expy - Sutton - was a bit too much of a blushing ingenue for my taste. Found it funny that while discussing the book with friends I had to go look for details to confirm that she was a grad student getting a master’s and not a grad student getting a PhD because the book never explicitly states that, just leaves little clues.

Final note: I understand what the author was going for with the Renly/Loras expies, but it is absolutely insane to have the NYC mayor be secretly dating a NYPD cop, given uh, everything. The press should notice how much they hang out given that they literally pop into offices together, and should be having a field day over even a friendship. You could’ve just made Loras personal security! That’s so easy!

Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids by Maia Szalavitz

This is a good book from 2006 on the US troubled teen industry and the numerous abuses, deaths, and repeat offenders it has gotten away with it. I read Joe vs Elan, which wrapped up last year, and wanted to read a broader overview of the industry.

The Synanon cult of the 60s is a huge inspiration for many of these “behavioural therapy” or “drug rehabilitation” programs that get forced on unwilling teenagers. The Seed in the 70s and Straight in the 80s are two examples hugely popular with politicians and parents as the War on Drugs kicks into high gear and parents are easily convinced that a single whiff of marijuana will leave their kid a doomed addict on the streets. Those spawn many of their own spinoffs, including the terrible combo of “wilderness boot camps”, where kids get marched through hot deserts, injuries and medical emergencies are assumed to be faked, and even the staff that aren’t cruel shits lack any training to be looking after kids in the outdoors.

As I predicted, this book left me in a low level of constant rage for the past week. I found it harder to read than some of my roughest non-fiction reads, and I think that stems from the fact of how much goddamn active effort went into hurting these kids while people on the outside pretended these were normal and fine institutions to pack kids off too. Just. Furious. At the founders and institutions and employees, of course, but also the parents, who accept things like

• Yeah, we have to kidnap your kid with no warning from their bed in the middle of the night with two dudes that’ll threaten violence for any disobedience, this is completely fucking normal
• Oh, if you want us to keep treating your kid who is an addict/problem child, you have to let us imprison their perfectly normal sibling who is right here and who we’ve coerced into admitting all sorts of things when we isolated them in a different room. (It’s bad that this stuff happened to any kids at all, but thinking of this specific trade as an acceptable one as a parent....)
• You will not physically see your kid or have phone calls with your kids for months, and if your kid sends you any letters saying they are being abused or starved, that means your kid is trying to manipulate you.

Again, the ultimate villains are the institutions but the above drove me insane because, I dunno, I kind of think you have one (1) job as a parent, and even some of the sympathetic parents made me think they just wanted to drop a teenager off somewhere like a dented car at the mechanic.

As the book points out, this is a consequence of a larger cultural belief in the idea of “tough love”, and a cultural obsession with the faults of adolescence even as the adolescents of today are continually safer than the adolescents of yesterday. Most teenagers grow into pretty functional adults without any need for inpatient treatment, and these institutions tends to produced very troubled adults, who struggle with getting past the betrayal and powerlessness of their experiences.

I skimmed the wikipedia article for the troubled teen industry today - the most recent death in one of those wilderness teen camps was in February 2024. So, yeah. Still happening. No one’s really checking on these kids. Even in cases where successful civil or criminal charges were brought, many of the people involved were allowed to continue opening new schools elsewhere without even a slap on the wrist.

To end on a slightly less depressing note, I found heartening how hard people fought for some of the victims:

• Richard Bradbury’s childhood friend, who when he finds out where Richard has been and that he’s now working there, keeps talking to him till he realizes how fucked up Straight is
• Fred Collins’ fraternity brothers, who house and hide him when he escapes from Seed
• Paul Richards’ neighbours, who keep asking after him when his parents send him to a school in Samoa, and when his parents disown him for leaving the program, adopt him.

I swear I've been reading things other than Christie mysteries this year, those other things are just long long reads...

Marple: Twelve New Mysteries

So, this one isn't actually by Agatha Christie but is a Miss Marple short story collection by twelve authors, each putting their own spin on the classic detective. I'm less familiar with Marple. Of the novels I've only read A Murder Is Announced and a few other short stories I've come across in my Poirot endeavour, but I found this a fun collection nonetheless. There are the pastiches, with another murder in the vicarage or quiet town genealogy sparking up into violence, and then the ones that put a new spin - Miss Marple in Manhattan, Miss Marple on a steamer to Hong Kong, Miss Marple dining at Cambridge, etc. Was a fun read, my favorites were The Jade Empress by Jean Kwok, The Disappearance by Leigh Bardugo, and The Murdering Sort by Karen M. McManus.

Dead Man's Folly by Agatha Christie

The crime novelist Ariadne Oliver gets a bad feeling about the murder puzzle hunt she's organizing, so of course she invites her friend Hercule Poirot to the party. Her instincts are proven right. While I'm glad to return to the more classic setting for a Christie mystery after the badly-handled Hickory Dickory Dock and there's a satisfying reveal to a certain character's speech pattern, I didn't care too much for this one's resolution. It required a perpetrator to engage in way more shenanigans than necessary, without the appropriate characterization to support it.

I adore Oliver whenever she shows up though, and she was as delightful as ever here.

Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

Murder at an all-girls boarding school. Poirot makes a late entrance, but the means by which he does so is so pleasing to me that I cannot criticize it. In the meantime, I enjoyed the POVs of the school's competent headmistress Bulstrode, clever student Julia Upjohn and that of Julia's overly credulous and tennis-obsessed friend. Also good: all the adults being bewildered when they ask Julia where her mother can be contacted and Julia going, I don't know, she's on a bus in Anatolia somewhere. The resolution to the mystery makes sense, with some Christie-typical misdirection, and I didn't mind there being less Poirot.

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie

A short story collection, mostly Poirots, one Miss Marple. I thought Under Dog was fun, even with the silly hypnosis scene, and Greenshaw's Folly was satisfying in its simplicity.

First, we'll have the only non-Poirot book of this batch...

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke The American City and How To Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Written a former NYC urban planner, a very readable introduction to what zoning is and more importantly, the way it has basically broken the housing market is most major American cities. The book first explains is that zoning has two main purposes: (1) separating land uses (commercial, residential, etc.) and (2) controlling density.

It then makes a convincing argument that zoning utterly fails at doing (1) in ways that actually matter to the people living in an area - commercial zones of vastly different noisiness often gets lumped together, it often rids residential neighbourhoods of useful small shops. Even more convincing is its point on (2) - zoning is a huge part of why housing costs have risen so sharply. The following is a smattering of upsetting facts.

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Anyway, I'd highly recommend this book, it goes into a bunch of other cool details, like how having to change zoning to build more housing on a lot disincentivizes density, or a quick dive into Japan's zoning scheme that is limited nationwide to only twelve types of zones.

Now it's time for some Poirot!

Lord Edgeware Dies by Agatha Christie

An actress's husband is found dead shortly after she visited him, but at the time of the supposed visit, she was seen having dinner with twelve others on the other side of town. Poirot and Hastings investigate. One of the deaths in this book had some real pathos for me, the solution makes you groan in realization (in a fun way) and Hastings gets delightfully defensive of Poirot when it comes to Japp. But there was some filler I was bored by, and more jarringly, even for a Christie novel this one manages to do like, a hat-trick of bigotry across a few pages, with anti-black racism, some anti-semitism, and some anti-chinese racism. At seven novels in I thought I'd be able to predict when that shows up, and I can to some degree, but there are still some surprises left for me.

Three Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie

An actor who is taking a break from the stage throws a party at his place, and one of the guests suddenly dies after a sip of his cocktail. There's no apparent motivation, and its chalked up to a medical issue until at another party at a different residence, with a big overlap in guests from the earlier one, the host dies in a similar manner. Much of the book is split between the actor and his two friends investigating, and Poirot investigating. This book makes it very obvious (if it wasn't already) that Poirot really does not enjoy being retired with nothing to do. Dude wants to solve crime, is probably going to keep solving crime till he literally drops dead.

Anyway, this had some fun character moments (there's a playwright that's clearly just Christie making fun of herself), I found the murderer even more cold-blooded than I expected and there were a looot of PoV switches. I think one might be able to start figuring out who the murderers in these novels are via the romantic subplots though.

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie

Look, this should be a fun one. Someone dies on a plane! Someone dies on a plane that Poirot is also on, albeit distracted by his mal de air! There's blackmail, wills, two countries worth of suspects! But while the solution is reasonably clever and satisfying, I was quite uninterested in our heroine, Jane Grey, who's helping out Poirot. Possibly the least charming of the ones we've met so far, and that's before the narration drops in some prejudice in what's supposed to be a cute paragraph about her bonding with a to-be lover.

Running a little behind because I fell headlong into a small side-project, will be playing catch-up for a bit. For today, flowersforgraves ask me "your favorite and least favorite books you read this year (of any genre)?"

I'm at 42 books so far, but there was nothing I was super duper enthusiastic about or that I really really hated. Unlike last year, where I very much occupied both extremes.

Fiction

My highlights would be:

• Empress Of The World by Sara Ryan: Sometimes one must simply read a standard gay YA novel in a day
• Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra: Particularly Singh's side of this dual cops & gangsters narrative set in Mumbai
• Exhalation by Ted Chiang: An interesting array of sci-fi stories

The closest to a lowlight is The Black Tides Of Heaven by Neon Yang, where the story felt too sparse for me to get invested in anyone, really.

Non-Fiction

I don't think I have any least favorites here - some of these books were much drier than others, but I knew that going in and I really doubt I was the intended audience for those. So instead I'll arbitrarily share the books that fell into the fun category of "Meant for a general audience; was packed with pretty pictures or diagrams that made thumbing through a physical copy very worth it".

• Gut by Giulia Enders: All about the human digestive system
• Singapore: A Biography: A history of Singapore from the 1300s to 1965 (Singapore's independence), with the mixture of personal stories with the larger overview keeping it very readable
• The Works: Anatomy Of A City by Kate Ascher: Overview of the swath of systems that keep NYC running, from the water supply to the cell network to trash collection and so on.

Gideon The Ninth by Tamayn Muir

A re-read! Quite the anatomical and necromantical refresher.

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I’ve landed in the odd position of wanting to keep up with this series, but more for the plot than for the characters. Which is not a bad position at all, but means I’m far more interested in trawling through theories on reddit than fic on AO3.

To be clear, I found it enjoyable and fascinating, but in a way completely orthogonal to how I delighted in the previous book. Much like one can’t enjoy Cain’s Jawbone like a normal book, I wouldn’t have a good time if I didn’t like the puzzling it together aspects, for if GtN was a murder mystery where I was emotionally invested in the characters and saddened by deaths, HtN was more like being dropped mid-season into a reality show of assholes and going “lmao you really live like this huh”

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I’d probably have to reread the whole book to fully get it but uh, I have no urge to and will happily let the internet fill in the gaps for me.

Nona The Ninth Excerpts

Yeah I have no self-control.

The three-page prologue

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The 73-page excerpt after that

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