books @ cc.

by Georges Perec (1978)

A quilt of stories of inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block, frozen in time the moment the protagonist (if he may be called so) Bartlebooth, dies. The layered stories are interwoven with hundreds of lives, minutiae of details, literary and historical allusions, written with self-imposed constraints, resulting in an encyclopaedic work that is not just fascinating in its richness and masterful construction, but also beautiful, ordinary, bizarre, moving, and heart-wrenching.

by Felisberto Hernández

One reads Hernández’ stories feeling as if drifting through fluid, phantasmagorical trance, animistic worlds where everyday objects take a life of their own, eliciting delicate forgotten responses, thoughts, feelings and memories. There are fifteen stories in this book, three of which are slightly longer pieces (The Stray Horse, The Daisy Dolls, The Flooded House), all of them inevitably in one way or another relate to a piano.

How Our Brains Become Who We Are
by Joseph LeDoux (2002)

Lucidly written and generously illustrated with simple diagrams, Synaptic Self analyses the way the psychological, social, moral, aesthetic or spiritual self is realised through the interconnectivity between neurons. LeDoux thoroughly and comprehensively summarises and explains neuroscientific terms and discoveries up to the year the book was published (2002), taking the readers through fascinating tour of the working machinery of the brain and nervous system: the relation between memory and hippocampus (retro/anterograde amnesia), Hebbian learning, cellular mechanism of working memory,  the highly developed PFC in human, the popular oxytocin and vasopressin, motive circuitry, dopamine behavioural invigoration, and nervous illness.

since c.1200 (3rd ed.)
by M.C. Ricklefs (2001)

Divided into six parts of major chronological history of Indonesia from the coming of Islam to the removal of Abdurrahman Wahid in 2001, this textbook is designed as a stepping stone for those overwhelmed by the wealth of specialised information (and oftentimes in foreign-language), or those wanting relatively detailed panoramic view of Indonesian history in English without the overemphasis on colonialism and exoticism.

by László Krasznahorkai (1989)

From the backcover:

A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the whole world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find—music, cosmology, fascism.

by Arthur Koestler (1940)

A fictional account of a show trial during Stalin’s 1930s purges, Rubashov, the protagonist, once a revolutionary disillusioned by the regime, is abducted, jailed, tortured (psychologically) and finally confessed to a series of “counter-revolutionary” crimes he didn’t commit, for the ideals of the Revolution.

( Read more… )

Gerhana Tengah Hari

translated from English to Indonesian by Gayus Siagian
published by Pustaka Jaya, 1982

The translation is sadly of low quality, with too many basic grammar and typographic mistakes.

Chronicle of the Future
by Svetlana Alexievich (1997)

( New version from the Dalkey Archive Press available )

“This is not a book about Chernobyl, but about the world of Chernobyl,” so Alexievich wrote, and indeed, instead of writing about what happened, she compiled a wide range of oral, first-hand testimony, accounts, sometimes occasional rant and condemnations from broad range of people involved and/or affected by Chernobyl. Plenty of tongue-in-cheek resignations in the face of something big and unknown gone wrong. Alexievich is mostly invisible—she allows everyone to speak for themselves—although a certain amount of editing has definitely been done. Alexievich realises that “suffering is our refuge”, that, as one of her interviewee said, people who haven’t suffered hungered for stories about suffering— “cheap philosophy”.

by Sophie D. Coe, Michael D. Coe (2003)

Generously accompanied with 97 illustrations (13 in colour), the book examines the origin of the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao, “food of the gods”), its history and sociological importance/pervasiveness from its first domestication by the Olmec, the more colourful widespread combinations of chocolate (e.g. with chilli, vegetables, meat, pasta) and finally its familiar present-day uses brought about by mass production and its recent luxurious status revival.

by Mark Mazower (2000)

A short but broad-ranging history book, it challenges the common one-dimensional stereotype of “the Balkans”. From the Romans to the present, including the Byzantine and Ottoman experiences, it treats the former Turkish domains as part of a common, if complex, historical inheritance.

and Other Stories
by Nadine Gordimer (1991)

While the subject matters — the (moral and psychological tensions of) life in a racially-divided country — would normally be treated in a political manner, in this book Gordimer observes and writes stories with seemingly no committed specific political ideologies.