A Day of Books, Plates & Moo Cow..

It has been almost a year since I last step foot inside Amcorp Mall in Petaling Jaya (story here). I remember that trip well because it marked my very first venture into BookXcess, that sprawling, totally unpretentious store on the third floor, where books were sold at stunningly low prices. 

Today once again I was Amcorp Mall bound; it was my day out with the eldest, Naj, and the youngest, Awwa. An outing with Naj is a rare occurrence, then and now. A journo's life is a hectic one; having been one myself, I know the score. So when he called to ask if I would like to go book-shopping with him, I jumped at the idea. 

Today's haul was a good one; Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier In America, Jon Katz's The Dogs of Bedlam Farm, Bill Bryson's In A Sunburned Country and Shakespeare: The World As Stage, Jim Wight's The Real James Herriot - A Memoir of My Father and Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul.

Touted as 'a comic masterpiece' by New Yorker and 'fizzing with fictional panache' by Sunday Times, Parrot and Olivier In America details the picaresque travels in the New World of a French aristocrat and his Englishman servant. Going by the blurbs alone, I think I am going to enjoy this one.

Peter Carey is twice winner of The Booker Prize (for Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of The Kelly Gang) and the book Parrot and Olivier was shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2010. (Howard Jacobson eventually won it for his The Finkler Question).

Jon Katz's The Dogs of Bedlam Farm can't go wrong with people who love animal stories. Yorkshire vet and master storyteller James Herriot got me started some 40 years ago, and I haven't looked back since. 

There's Vicki Myron's delightful Dewey, about a cat adopted by a small town library, and John Grogan's Myron & Me, about a dog that changed a man's life, on the shelf at home, not to mention the whole gamut of Herriot's humorous take on his rural practice. Simply said, I'm a sucker for animal tales.

Of Bill Bryson, of course he needs no introduction. I'm a fan through and through and the two books complete my collection of all his work. In A Sunburned Country, his dry take on equally parched Australia continues his travelogue tradition and in Shakespeare: The World As Stage, Bryson, with his trademark wit, wades through the muddles of time to reveal Shakespeare as the poet really was.       

In The Real James Herriot - A Memoir of My Father, son Jim Wight ventures beyond his father's life as a veterinarian to reveal the man behind the stories, the private individual who refused to allow fame and wealth to interfere with his practice or his family.

As for The Bookseller of Kabul, I must confess I had neither read nor heard of Norwegian writer Asne Seierstad before. The book is an international bestseller and "the most intimate description of an Afghan household ever produced by a Western journalist.." (New York Times Book Review) is enough to capture my attention.

With the exception of Bill Bryson's "Shakespeare... at RM19.90, the rest were priced at RM17.90 each, working out to less than RM110 for six brand new books. If that's not a decent enough damage I don't know what is. In ordinary book stores, I'd probably have to fork out more than twice as much for the same number of books.   

It being Sunday, the flea market was in full swing so we joined the teeming crowd... and got ourselves these cake plates at RM10 for six pieces (you can mix and match). Couldn't resist lah, darn cheap, so I settled upon these two patterns. These are brand new plates; the factory is in Puchong.

One Utama was the last stop before going home; I was lamenting about the disappearance of my favourite yoghurt swirl from Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf's menu (the line was discontinued effective 26/9 recently) when Awwa suggested I should give Moo Cow a try...

My verdict: SEDAP!