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Books & printed materials

[2979] My readings in 2023

Fictions dominated my list this year. In 2022, more than four fifths of my major reads were non-fictions but for 2023, the ratio fell to less than half. There were two reasons behind this.

One, I have gained more responsibilities at work and despite that, I had played Football Manager 2023 quite religiously as a way to alleviate work stress (I do not recommend this because… ‘alleviate’ is not a word in the Football Manager’s dictionary). This had left me with less time to read, and risked having me falling short of my reading goal. To meet that goal, I cheated by turning to fictions. I find fictions are generally easier to read than non-fictions (as long as they are not written by Kafka).

Two, the non-fiction-heavy list in the past few years was really due to my book writing project. By 2022 and definitely by 2023, the project that began in mid-2010s was coming to an end. So, there was a bit of non-fiction fatigue happening.

Here, I am summarizing selected books I read in 2023.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This is my best read this year, and bought from Literati in Ann Arbor. The novel describes the experience of a Nigerian woman moving to the United States and then returning home. While written from a Nigerian perspective, I think the theme would resonate with a lot of foreign students in the US. The author tells the story of a person wanting to run away from home, the racism she faces in the US and eventually the conflicting feeling she have about returning home. I enjoyed how the author describes Lagos: I love novels that tell me more about a place, like The Art of Losing, The Kite Runner and A Bookshop in Algiers, all of which I read in recent years.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Speaking about places, during a recent visit to George Town, I stumbled upon one of Hemingway’s less known work. The novel tells a story of a group of friends living in 1920s Paris making a trip to Pamplona to watch a bullfight. The highlight of the novel is the bullfight but I found I like the Paris part of the story better. But how do I rate it? The Sun Also Rises is the inferior version of A Moveable Feast, also by Hemingway.

Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau

Yet another novel with place-context heavy set in the 1950s Paris. This was supposed to be a funny breezy read but I ended up struggling to go through it. Originally written in French and quite influential when it first came out, the translated English work lost a whole lot of nuances. There is a movie adaptation of the novel, and I recommend watching that instead of the translated work.

Victory City by Salman Rushdie

Unlike the earlier three, Victory City sets in a semi-fictional place. It is a fictional retelling of Vijayanagara, which was an actual empire in pre-colonial India. Since I have reviewed this in much longer length, I do not want to spend too much time here, except that I recommend the novel.

The Employees by Olga Ravn

I bought this from Kinokuniya Kuala Lumpur because it was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. I regretted that. It is a science fiction with an interesting theme but its unorthodox structure left me dissatisfied and made reading a burden despite its low word count.

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

This must be read with the right frame of mind and at the appropriate turn of your life. You would have to be really sad and in melancholy. I was generally content when I read this and so, I did not really appreciate it.

The Fall of Srivijaya in Malay History by O. W. Wolters

A classic, the work explains that the content of Sejarah Melayu should not be dismissed as myths. Instead, should be read within a certain context. Once the context is set right, the piece of literature could tell a lot about history of the Malays in the Strait of Malacca. The title suggests the work is about Srivijaya, but it is really more about the early days of Malacca, and how Malacca is linked to Srivijaya. I was lucky to found it while visiting Riwayat bookstore in old parts of Kuala Lumpur.

Malay Ideas on Development: From Feudal Lord to Capitalist by Maaruf Shaharuddin

A huge chunk of the book is a continuation or a repeat of points made in another of his work, Concept of a Hero in Malay Society. It is the latter parts of the book that I found interesting, where the author discusses several 20th century Malay personalities who he presents as the leader of their respective school of thoughts. I think the two most important ones are Zaaba’s Malay capitalism (which blames the Malays for their own backwardness) and Abdul Rahim Kajai-Ishak Haji Muhammad’s version of Malay capitalism (that blames other communities, specifically British and Chinese, for Malay backwardness). Maaruf reasons that the synthesis of these two ideas came in the form of Mahathir Mohamad (which is best understood by reading The Malay Dilemma).

The Malaysian Islamic Party 1951-2013 by Farish A. Noor

I think this is the best book about Pas available out there. Farish explains the evolution of the party from the beginning up until the 2013 General Election. In short, Pas began as a provincial insular gouping but in the 1950s, it evolved to become a leftist pan-Islamist political party. But the 1970s, it evolved again to become a Malay nationalist party before shedding its racist skin to become an Islamist party in the 1980s. By the 2000s, the party moderated its stance and became a party of Muslim democrats.

The End of the Nineteen-Nineties by Hafiz Noor Shams

Okay, this is a cheat. I read this multiple times as I went through the proofreading process with my editors. Yes, written my me. More about the book here.

Cover for the The End of the Nineteen-Nineties

Other mentions

The Parade by David Eggers — a fiction about two men building a highway in a war torn country, which people aspired for peace. There is a twist at the end. I recommend this if you need a short but impactful story.

How I Learned to Hate in Ohio by David Stuart MacLean — a story of racism in 1980s Ohio. It gets dark, slowly.

Acts of Resistance: Dol Said and the Naning War by Shaun Adam — it is a bit of retelling of the Naning War.

Categories
Books & printed materials Personal

[2978] Shall we read The End of the Nineteen-Nineties?

It has been a long journey but after seven or eight years of writing it, I am pleased to share that The End of the Nineteen-Nineties, published by Matahari Books, is finally out in the market.[1]

Cover for the The End of the Nineteen-Nineties

The synopsis on the back cover does a good job describing what the book is all about. Still, I feel I should explain it further and the best way to do so is to discuss the title of the book.

The obvious interpretation of the title is that the book is about the nineteen-nineties in Malaysia. The decade is the subject because, as I explained in the book, the period is special in several important aspects. To understand its specialness, I look back far into history to explain certain trends, and then rationalize the decades after through the lens of the 1990s.

One reason the 1990s is special is what I consider the end (as in the purpose) of the decade. That end is the creation of a larger civic nationalism that we commonly call Bangsa Malaysia. That wider nationalism beyond ethnicities was not conceived in the 1990s. It has a long history, but the specialness of the decade created space which civic nationalism could grow and prosper, unlike previous (and latter) attempts that failed.

The 1990s ended in a spectacular fashion with a political upheaval and an economic crisis. One of many victims of the end of the nineteen-nineties was Bangsa Malaysia.

The book is a broad sweep of Malaysian history. It is a bit of retelling by a person who grew up during the decade. It is written by a person who loved the country, fell out of love, and then ends up in a situationship.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — The book is slowly making its way to various physical stores. But online purchase is likely the best for most people. Here are several places where you could buy it online:

Finally, there will be several events linked to the book set in February 2024. I hope to see you there.

Categories
Books & printed materials Fiction

[2977] How I learned to stop worrying and love Salman Rushdie’s Victory City

Reading Victory City, I found myself figuring out whether the places and persons mentioned in the book were real. It is like reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: fiction is weaved through real history and that blurs the line separating the two.

But Victory City is worse than that. It is fashioned as a casual modern translation of a supposedly ancient text detailing the rise and fall of the Bisnaga Empire, which is a reference to a real entity that was the Vijayanagar Empire that covered much of southern India.

My knowledge of the Indian subcontinent history is not as good as that of other areas. That shows when I know of Vijayanagar largely from playing Europa Universalis IV.

Already having a superficial understanding of southern Indian history, the novel did not help. Is Victory City, actually based on something like Sejarah Melayu, an actual document however fanciful the details are? At the back of the novel, the author Salman Rushdie, lists sources he referred to, giving an aura of seriousness (aura of non-fiction?) to his work of fiction. He was painting a picture of 14th-15th-16th century southern India on an un-blanked canvas belonging to another painting. I was worried that would give me the wrong impression of Vijayanagar.

So worried was I, that I tried ascertaining the real history behind names and places in the book. Google. Wikipedia. The usual places for a quick lookup. But that worked up as a distraction, slowing my reading pace and disrupting the rhythm set by the book. Reading became a chore by too much.

Realizing that, I stopped my side quests, and enjoyed the book as it is, tracking the fictional life of the founder of Bisnaga, the fantastical almost immortal sage Pampa Kampana, born just before the empire was founded, and died as the empire collapsed more than two hundred years later.

Categories
Economics WDYT

[2976] Guess the 2Q23 Malaysian GDP growth

The second quarter GDP for Malaysia will be published tomorrow, at noon Malaysian time.

As a reminder, the first quarter economy grew by 5.6% year-on-year. That was a surprisingly resilient quarter, despite deceleration in growth.

How fast do you think did the Malaysian economy expand in 2Q23 from a year ago?

  • 2% or slower (8%, 1 Votes)
  • 2.1%-3.0% (38%, 5 Votes)
  • 3.1%-4.0% (23%, 3 Votes)
  • 4.1%-5.0% (23%, 3 Votes)
  • 5.1%-6.0% (8%, 1 Votes)
  • Faster than 6.0% (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 13

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All available statistics point towards a second quarter slowdown. Export numbers during the quarter have been horrible, and the country’s industrial output, given how Malaysia is an small, open economy, has not been doing well either.

Part of the reason why the decline in exports and industrial output is due to the extraordinary post-lockdown growth, amid severe supply chain complications: that created an extremely high base effect and that effect will likely persist until the third quarter.

But that should distract us from the ongoing global growth slowdown. Europe is in recession and China is in trouble. The only real bright spot is the US, which is surprising because much, much earlier, many had expected the country to go into a recession.

But the US strength itself is causing troubles elsewhere in the form of capital outflows and foreign exchange volatility, since it gives more room for the Fed to raise rates. The end of the hike cycle keeps getting delayed.

The good news is that the domestic labor market remains solid, and there has been a little bit more medium-term direction given out by this government. The political heat has come down a bit after the recent state elections, which hopefully, will convince the government to shift more attention towards the economy, and other nation-building exercise.

And challenges in the next several quarters will not be small. Next in the list is a strong El Nino phenomenon, resulting, very likely, the hottest season we will go through yet. That will require a little bit of preparation: water supply, electricity transmission, manufacturing inputs, health services, firefighting services, etc.

And I pray there will be no forest fire and haze this time around.

Categories
Politics & government Society

[2975] Do not blame Muda by too much

Ralph Nader was a popular figure in some of the progressive parts of America. He gave speeches in Ann Arbor several times when I lived there, and once ahead of the 2004 presidential election, he had to defend himself from vote-splitting accusation. In 2000, Al Gore lost the presidential election to George Bush with the narrowest of margin, with the Naders’ Greens won substantial votes as the third party candidate. Given that Nader and the Democrats’ bases overlapped, it was easy for bitter Democrats to claim that Nader took votes away from Al Gore, and paved the way for Bush’s presidency. Nader defended himself by saying that if he did not put himself on the ballot, those who had voted him would likely have not gone out to vote anyway.

I see Pakatan Harapan supporters blaming Muda for vote-splitting, and for easing Perikatan Nasional’s advances in Selangor. For a number of seats PH lost, the loss margin was smaller than the votes Muda won, even as Muda lost all of their deposits.

And it is easy to dislike Muda this time around. The episode in Bukit Gasing was Muda’s act of self-sabotage. Their asset declaration exercise was less than truthful, and so, to me, insulting. More than several candidates were nothing more than rich kids with little understanding of society or policy. Their campaign messages were jumbled up badly, confusing local, state and national policies all at once. I came out of the 2 weeks campaigning period from a position of neutral-to-mild skepticism near the beginning, to that of a dismissal by voting day. The latest set of candidates undid some good work earlier ones like Lim Wei Jiet have done.

Yes, it is easy to dislike Muda but Nader’s defense applies here.

The low turnout suggests PH bases were uninspired this time around. PH’s pandering to the deep conservatives on the far side is one possible reason for these people not to go out and vote. And there are people, who voted for PH the last round, openly said their would vote for a third choice as a sign of protest.

So, if there was no Muda, it is hard to say whether those Muda votes would have gone to PH or BN.

But more than that, for every vote Muda got, there were more PH voters who did not go out and vote. Blaming Muda is an excuse to ignore the much bigger point: PH base is dissatisfied. PH is committing the same mistake PH 2018-2020 did: trying to get the votes they could never get on the far side of the spectrum, at the expense of the middle voters and PH bases. And these voters protested and did not bother to go out.

This dissatisfaction has to be addressed.