Soft Ice Cream Day/Zoroastrian New Year/Aviation Day/Potato Day/Spicy Food Day
2008-08-19 @ 8:08 p.m.

Didn't do much today, although I did manage to finish reading Suchen Christine Lim's The Lies That Build A Marriage. I quite enjoyed this collection of short stories, although part of me wonders if they would have been as noteworthy had they not been set in a local context. The stories are ostensibly aimed at a general readership, which Lim takes great pains to point out in her postscript, although one wonders how much of that readership will actually pick up the collection. In any case, I think the collection isn't that challenging, in the sense that it doesn't provoke and give new insights. At least not for me. I suppose for a good number of people here, it will, but that only goes to show how far we have to go as a society. Returning to yesterday's post about local literature, this is one of the problems that I have with it, which is that it often doesn't go far enough to challenge its readership, and yet it keeps being lauded for doing exactly that. Or maybe I'm just a stupid undergraduate-to-be who shouldn't be disagreeing with all the critics who heap praise on our local output? Maybe...