WRAPPED UP IN BOOKS (2014 EDITION)

The Hong Kong Book Fair has come and gone.

And despite this one being the 25th anniversary of the event, I don’t have a lot to report – partly because it wasn’t much different from last year’s (apart from seeing an awful lot of John Green books on the tables, and slightly more Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Hillary Clinton than usual), and partly because it was a rushed visit for me.

I didn’t even think we were going to go this year, due to incompatible schedules and recent developments at work and at home taking up more free time than usual. But I was able to wrangle about 90 minutes out of my morning yesterday (the last day of the fair), and by now I know which booths to hit and where to find them, and which ones are more likely to have anything I’d want to read.

(For example, if all you tend to carry every year is mass-market writers like Stieg Larsson, Sophie Kinsella, Stephen King, Jodi Picoult, Sidney Sheldon, James Patterson, Elizabeth Gilbert, Mitch Albom, Clive Cussler, Matthew Reilly, Dan Brown, Malcolm Gladwell, George RR Martin, JRR Tolkien, Stephanie Meyer and Donald Trump, then there’s really no need for me to check and see if you happen to have anything that interests me – and if you do, it’s likely to be Neil Gaiman, and odds are I already have that one.)

So that helped expedite things.

Normally I like to take my time and browse for new discoveries or writers I hadn’t paid much attention to before and see if there’s anything worth risking for a bargain price. But there was no time for that this year, so I basically kept an eye out for the more familiar names and titles.

And so here’s this year’s comparatively modest haul.



I’m pretty confident about that stack. I’ve read Schlosser, Mailer and Greenwald before, although I’ve read Greenwald’s online work, not his books. Also, I didn’t actually like Mailer, but that was Barbary Shore, which it turns out everyone agrees is far from his best work, and anyway I’m willing to give his non-fiction a try, and hey, it’s about the moon landings, so why not?.

I’ve been meaning to try Bolano for awhile now, so it's good to start with something slim and cheap. I've been less enthusiastic about trying Keigo Higashino, but mainly because the book's publishers describe him as "the Japanese Stieg Larsson". (Tip to publishers: when you try to promote an author by comparing him or her to someone popular and famous, I'm automatically going to assume he/she is actually nothing like that author because whenever you do that, I'm invariably disappointed if I read it with that benchmark in mind. Alternately, if you compare him/her to someone I have no interest in reading in the first place, that doesn't really motivate me to give it a try.) On the other hand, the bride has read a couple of his books, so for 50% off, I’m game.

And of course, lots of friends have namedropped David Foster Wallace as a must-read, so it’s probably time I tried him out.

As for the Big Data book, that’s somewhat more relevant to my day job (we cover that topic from the perspective of telecoms companies), but I saw Viktor Meyer-Schönberger speak at an event in Singapore last month, and was very impressed with his holistic view on Big Data and the pros and cons therein, so I’m interested to read an expanded version of that view.

And so much for the Hong Kong Book Fair.

Same time next year,

This is dF