Reset

Does there come a day in every man's life when he finds a transition from the upslope straight line to a peak and then decline? I can't be alone in this, can I?

The pattern is universal, according to the social scientist Arthur Brooks who wrote From Strength to Strength . After the age of fifty, you might find your reaching peak performance. Your decisions might not be as crisp as they once were. Your instincts are less reliable. Your productivity isn't as high.

Maybe


Chocolate

When my friend returned from her Swiss trip, she brought us chocolate resembling the iconic Matterhorn Glacier. That's pyramid-shaped chocolate with a dash of white colour at the top.

That reminds me of the memoir of Trevor Noah, who was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother. As a kid, Trevor didn't know what race was. To him, people were like different types of chocolate. His dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and he was


Carrie

For the past few years, the American author Taylor Jenkins Reid has been carving out a unique literary space, mostly novels of women characters. And it's almost impossible to read them without wondering if you're reading a biography or a fictional story. Nowhere is this better illustrated than by The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo . The story character is so real. So much so that I think it has come from the journalist work of Walter Isaacson.

Taylor Jenkins Reid's recent novel Carrie Soto is Back is

DPC

Historical fiction is often the most gripping witness to war. My recent favorite is Kristin Hannah's The Women , which takes me to the Vietnam War around 1967.

One of the women in this fiction is a twenty-year-old nurse Frances McGrath who joined the Army Nurse Corps. Let us not forget, indeed, that women can be heroes .

The story of this green nurse Frances McGrath in Vietnam is all blood and sweats. Her workplace was an operating table on wheels, and she lived


GUP

I kept being amused by Steven Rowley’s novel The Guncle this week.

Funny as it may sound, the fiction character name refers to a 43-year-old former sitcom star Patrick. Or else, you can call him Gay Uncle Patrick. Or, GUP, for short.

Patrick had to be a guardian of two children, a niece and a nephew, who kept acting out. They were either using outdoor voices inside or asking for YouTube, even on an airplane.

After the nine-year

Comedian

No manual of writing style that I know has a word to say of good humour; and yet, for me, a fiction about a comedian can sometimes be the most awkward theme to have laughable ideas.

It's a difficult subject, and try as you might, there is no way to make this sort of story a reading pleasure.

Not that the author Dolly Alderton thought it that way. She has written Good Material , a modern-day story of love and break-up; one of the main


YA Fiction

Picture yourself staying home with your teenage daughter on a rainy day. What would you do? I knew I have to figure out the answer myself, as my wife is out of town. I decided to borrow the fiction book The Fault in Our Stars from my daughter, and watched the film adaptation together. Pretty sweet torture, right? It is.

I read the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster who suffered from thyroid cancer spreading to her lungs. The cancer treatment gave her ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks; the satellite colony

Insult

Digital communciation is one of the most common channels for discussion. Whenever we can't (and often we can't) talk face to face, we make use of the live chat, emails, text messaging or voicemail.

What many people don't realize is that navigating the digital communication – and being successful in getting the message across – is a herculean task. If there's one thing you should know about the pitfall, it's the way to respond to an insult.

I soon came


Cassava

A commonly quoted reason for working memory failure is overload. We try to hang onto too much, and then push our memory past its limits. No less important than overload is mind-wandering. We're grabbed by some attention-seeking thoughts and our mind gets hijacked.

The question, for me, is how many books I should start reading. One after another? Different books at the same time? Once again, this is a question I don't have the answer but I tend to be promiscuous


Poverty

It's hard for us to imagine the life in Mozambique with a shockingly high child mortality rate. It's even harder for me to read the stories haranguing the Swedish doctor Hans Rosling serving an emergency clinic in Mozambique.

Better known for writing another bestselling book Factfulness , Hans Rosling has written a memoir How I Learned to Understand the World .

I admitted that his stories are indeed opening our eyes to poverty outside our comfort zone. And it is impossible to read without ooh and ahh.

One late afternoon in the