Title: The Fountainhead

Author: Ayn Rand

Imprint: Plume (2005)

(Request pending for OPAC)

I just finished reading a book I’d been putting off for years.  Partly because of its exorbitant length, but also because I have a tendency to purposefully neglect books that are commonly espoused as “must-read-classics.”  Yes, I can be that stubborn.

I finally caved in a few months ago, however.

I have a tradition of buying a new book every time I go downtown with my Social Psych students as they work on their experiments for their first assignment.  I went into the bookstore and saw this one cradling the barrier between the Fiction and Philosophy sections.  I thought to myself, “Well, I guess it’s time.”

Anyways, I’m glad to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed this book despite my stubborn anti-snobbism (which is really just being a snob myself).  It was refreshing to read a book that was so rigidly structured and purposeful.  Most of the modern fiction that you’ll read (and I’m guilty of writing in this style myself) feels a little too… natural?  Not to say that this is a bad thing, of course, just that “classic” literature tends to feel like there is more deliberate content in its prose.  If there was ever a novel that felt deliberate, this is the one.

Collectivism versus Individualism

Be prepared to be hit over the head by the end of the novel.  It can get very preachy.  Don’t let that dissuade you, however–the preachiness is very convincing.  If you’re coming into the novel with a background full of socialistic ideals and collectivism (as I was), be warned that this novel will challenge you more than most.  It is a novel that praises rugged individualism like I’ve never encountered in my life.

This debate is one that’s very dear to my heart and invades almost every aspect of my life (for reference, see my post on Punk Rock).

Since I began to consider politics and economics (read: high school and college days) I’ve always leaned towards the left; often-times the extreme left.  This continuum is interwined, I believe, with those of Idealism versus Realism and Subjectivity versus Objectivity.  The more I grow up (ha!) I find that these extremes are never really the answer.

The extreme left in politics isn’t practical and ends up being inefficient, while the extreme right neglects the human element and increases economic disparity.

Idealism can be argued for both sides of the political spectrum with realism existing somewhere in the center.

I find that things are less relative than we’ve always liked to think.  No matter how special and unique we like to think we are, there is an objective world out there (we can get into Skepticism at another time, perhaps).  This allows quality, integrity, and judgment to exist.  This is why it is ridiculous to say, “Well, I like ______ so I think it’s good.”  Goodness is an objective description based upon certain criteria.  Things have infinite forms of “likeability,” but that doesn’t make them “good.”  We cannot discount the effect of perception, however, as it is important to understanding ourselves and those around us.

The Fountainhead, however, is an exercise in extremes.  It will challenge you on all of these aspects.  It promotes extreme Individualism (read: the political right… although this is debatable) to counterract extreme Collectivism (read: the political left).  It promotes extreme Idealism over extreme Realism.  It promotes extreme Objectivity over extreme Subjectivity.  Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism is rampant throughout the novel, but there are specific moments where it really does feel like you’re being beaten into submission.  In the best possible way.

Extremism is fun to dabble in.  It’s much more exciting than moderation.  Reality will always try to pull you back to the middle, in my experience.

Anyways, definitely give this novel a shot.  The story itself is a pretty good read .  If nothing else, it’s good to challenge your views in order to find yourself wrong or to strengthen them even further.

They’re both really interesting for one reason: they follow the money.

Title: Inside the red mansion : on the trail of China’s most wanted man
Author: Oliver August
Imprint: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007.

Oliver August’s book is a well-crafted and compelling non-fiction narrative that traces the author’s search for a fugitive tycoon in China. To find the man, August, in essence, follows his money. He goes to the homes he bought, the clubs where he drank, and the skyscrapers he built. Sometime memoir, sometime suspense novel, the book sheds light on the nature of money and money-making in China.

Title: Asian Godfathers
Author: Joe Studwell
Imprint: London : Profile, 2007.

Studwell’s is more academic work (but don’t worry — it’s very readable) that investigates the tycoons of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, in depth and in detail. Southeast Asia, for not being the richest part of the world, nor the biggest, has an inordinate number of the world’s richest people, he begins. Who are they? How did they get so rich? And where did they get all that money? These are the questions he has investigated, including some very interesting but not often discussed aspects of Singapore’s economy (see pages 34 and 35 of Chapter 1, for and early example).

Both authors are seasoned journalists — August is a generalist, the Beijing bureau chief for The Times of London, and Studwell is the editor of the respected financial magazine, the China Economic Quarterly. They are both great storytellers and pack in lots of facts without making the reader (me) feel overloaded. They both shed new light on things that I thought I was already familiar with. They are both very difficult to put down.

The question is, which one should I put down first?

The library is screening the film version of the first of this series, The Golden Compass, right now. They have many copies of the film and also of the book.

Title: The Golden Compass
Author: Philip Pullman
Imprint: New York : Dell Laurel-Leaf, 2003.

Title: The Golden Compass (Film)
Writer/Director: Chris Weitz
Imprint: [Burbank, CA] : New Line Home Entertainment, 2008.

Ok, so maybe that title is a little morbid and irreverent–but so was he.

Today marks the death of one of Russia’s most important 20th century authors. Much of our knowledge of what life in the Soviet Gulags was like is based upon his literary accounts of his experiences as Soviet political prisoner. Now, I feel a little bit unqualified to comment on his life and work, because I’ve only read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (and it was required reading in my high school lit class), so I’ll let the New York Times do the talking for me:

Solzhenitsyn, Who Defied Soviets, Dies at 89

or, the BBC:

Obituary: Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Some really good information is to be gotten from these websites, but if you’re feeling a little rebellious you can check out the wikipedia page (so long as you’re not one of my students! Wikipedia is still not allowed to be used as a source, even if I use it).

Anyways, check out One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It’s a pretty good read, and it’s good to have something of an understanding of what life as a political prisoner in Stalinist Russia was like.

Title: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Author: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Imprint: New York: Knopf, Everyman’s Library, 1995.

To this list of things you can find at the library, we add board games. In the back of the Lifestyle Library, next to the cafe, there is a small room where you can borrow and play board games, complete with pop (sometime overly pop) music and cushioned floor seating. You might also find international fellow Greg Redman and I catching a quick game.

Scrabble anyone?

I taught the book to 43 students in two classes. It was both a simple and difficult decision to choose this as one of the module’s books. I am well aware that the gruesome realities of war and aggression are not exactly polite dinner conversation. I wasn’t sure how much NP students would want to engage with this kind of writing and the discussions of global politics that must accompany it.

But the book is one that opened my eyes to the power of good and honest journalism, and, more broadly, to the power of content-filled writing. New York University’s journalism school faculty calls it the best work of U.S. journalism of all time. And the story of how Hersey’s work was initially published is quite compelling.

By and large, my students found the book eye-opening. It was not the kind of book they would normally choose to read, nor was it a popularly checked out book at the library. But, based on the reactions and engagement and interest of my students, I am convinced that this is not just a book for American journalism students and World War II historians. It is a book that should be much more widely read — in any country that has a military, any country that has a history including war. Singapore included.

Title: Hiroshima
Author: Hersey, John
Imprint: New York : Vintage Books, 1989.

There were several books about Pakistan and terrorism, some about culture and literature, and a few that focus on Pakistani politicians. One book caught my eye — Daughter of the East, by Benazir Bhutto herself. It’s an old edition of the book, published in 1989 just after Bhutto, at 35 years old, was elected the first female leader of a Muslim state. (Don’t be afraid to ask librarians to retrieve material for you from the Closed Stacks.)

The memoir begins with the death of her father, which makes for an eerie way to learn about a woman who was just assassinated herself. She describes in detail the processions and mourners and her father’s interment at the family mausoleum in Garhi Khuda Baksh, her hometown in Sindh. The Sydney Morning Herald did a story about Bhutto’s visit to the mausoleum just two months before she was to buried there herself.

Bhutto’s personal account here is very moving, as are the sections of the book that touch on the ways her personal and political lives intersected — well, more like overlapped. Her discussion of her arranged marriage to Asif Ali Zardari is particularly interesting. Her discussion of the birth of her eldest son amidst a political campaign is almost unbelievable. She clearly was not an ordinary woman in any respect. These things that others would consider exempt from political consideration took on heavy political meanings for Benazir Bhutto.

But perhaps what was most interesting about revisiting this book now are the stories that are missing from her narrative. While many in the English-language press hail Benazir Bhutto as a martyr to democracy, she was not so simple. She and her husband faced serious accusations of corruption, both in Pakistani and European courts. Some saw her as a sellout to the west. Others where critical of her keep-it-in-the-family treatment of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). (Her will stipulates that leadership of the PPP will go to her husband and her 19-year-old son.) Daughter of the East paints the Bhutto family and PPP loyalists as tragic martyrs to the cause of democracy — it drives that point home again and again. But there are parts where it feels like she sidesteps the complexity of her image.

For example, Bhutto was held as a political prisoner before her father’s death for about five years. She spent most of those years in solitary confinement in one of her family’s residences or in squalid jail cells. She clearly endured a lot and never gave in to the military dictator Zia ul-Haq’s demands. She alludes to her brothers’ involvement in the militant group, al-Zulfikar, but does not spend much time explaining what her brothers did and how her critics saw their actions. She mentions having political disagreements with her brothers in a passage about a family reunion in France, but she does not explain what those disagreements were. One of her brothers died under suspicious circumstances in France at the end of that reunion; the other, Murtaza Bhutto, was shot in 1996 during Bhutto’s second term as Prime Minister.

Murtaza’s daughter, Fatima Bhutto, wrote a very interesting article in the Los Angeles Times in November that questions the holes in Benazir Bhutto’s narrative. Tariq Ali, Bhutto’s contemporary who incidentally held the same position as the president of the Oxford Union debating club that she did, also wrote piece for the London Review of Books a few weeks before the assassination took place. In the lengthy article, called “Daughter of the West”, Ali fills in many of the holes of the Bhutto memoir. Ironically, he takes on the idea of arranged marriage as well — but his discussion is about Bhutto’s metaphoric political marriage to Gen. Musharraf as arranged by the United States. These kinds of critiques are essential context for anyone interested in reading between the lines in Daughter of the East.

See a photo of the book and its vitals in my last post.

I started this blog for two reasons: one is that I love to read and I’m on the School of Interdisciplinary Studies reading committee whose mission is to promote reading. The second reason I started the blog is because I like to discuss. So let us know what you think — about this blog, about what you’re reading or about reading in general at Ngee Ann Polytechnic.

This is the book I am reading now, but I’ll write more about it later:

Title: Daughter of the East
Author: Bhutto, Benazir
Imprint: London : Mandarin, 1989.