From Yi-ling

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

kellykelly’s add: I’m sorry, but there are books I LOVE and there are books that BLOW MY FUCKING MIND AWAY and/or made me cry (I mean, the ending of “Of Mice and Men” hellooo? Buckets of tears!). I have added an asterisk to those that BLOW MY FUCKING MIND AWAY…they deserve their own category of awesomeness.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee*
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell*
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot*
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck*
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy*
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding*
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley*
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck*
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I bet this list will instigate a whole bunch of aghast book snobs to go “gasp! THAT’S on the list? wtf?” But then, any list that has Tolstoy, Eliot, Huxley, Steinback and The Faraway Tree collection is fine by me. Also, even if Mitch Albom makes me gag, a book is a book and it touches different people in different ways, like how different music touches people differently. So there will never be THE list of “great books” that will satisfy anyone. Although this list is kinda odd in that it has the complete works of Shakespeare and the Chronicles of Narnia, but then has Hamlet and the Lion, Witch, Wardrobe. Double counting? But I love lists like that because it makes me smile and remember the books I love and go “OOO! gotta underline THAT one!”

Since the end of the CFA, I’ve managed to finish 2 thin books…Hiroshima (John Hersey) and Summer Crossing (Truman Capote). Hiroshima was really interesting, a pseudo-journalistic recollection of what happened when The Bomb hit. Everyone should read it just to know. Summer Crossing was near awful really…I found myself kinda just scanning the book to the end. It was about a rich spoiled young Manhattan socialite who thought going to Brooklyn was an adventure. Seriously lame. I loved Capote since the masterpiece In Cold Blood and the less masterpiece but still entertaining Breakfast at Tiffany’s (although it was also about a socialite, at least she was kinda poor-ish and had some cuckoo yet interesting depth to her). Apparently, Capote had actually threw Summer Crossing in the trash, and someone took it and published it posthumously. What a shame…s/he should have left it in the trash if the writer didn’t intend to publish it! I mean, c’mon! But I guess Summer Crossing could be used in some college English class to deconstruct the evolution of a writer’s writing or something boring like that.

Pat’s off to Singapore in a few hours. Well, getting on a plane in a few hours…it’d take more than a few hours to get there. Singapopos be forewarned….crazy ang moh is baaack!

I miss him alreadeee.

Wow. Just had to squeeze past a massive crowd downstairs on the way to work because Coldplay is playing at the Today show. It was the most number of people I’ve seen show up…more than Chris Brown or New Kids On The Block. Rihanna was here a couple of weeks ago and the crowd was really mild.

I don’t really listen to radio or watch MTV so I don’t really know who the hot act of the moment is, so my guage of popularity is the crowds that show up at the Today show. Ha!

But really…Coldplay?

Went to Pearl Jam last night at the Madison Square Garden. I never saw so many white men pumping up their fists in the air and singing in unison for 3 hours before. It was honestly a sing-along show for 3 hours.

Unfortunately, I knew just about 2 of their songs (Pat is the fan). It’s blasphemy, I know, but I only know the Eddie Vedder (namesake of my niece Star Vedder) I saw in Iconoclast. I wished I was more familiar with their songs. It seemed almost blasphemous to be standing there kinda clueless when there are a thousand maniac fans jumping around me.

Still, the concert was pretty electrifying. Madison Square truly is a world class venue…you have to see it to believe it.

Going to Tortured Soul tonight at Stuy Town (free concert), ghetto watch (sit outside the venue..FREE!) Thievery Corporation, Seu Jorge (if you haven’t heard him, he’s awesome), Bebel Gilberto & Federico Aubele, and Turntables on the Hudson at Central Park Summerstage on Thursday if it doesn’t rain, and Mos Def at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night. Participating in a stoop sale with the Park Slope Yoga in the Park ladies on Saturday, and yoga in the park on Sunday. It’s my one weekend to be KKSC (Pat flies off to Singapopoland on Friday; I fly off the Thursday after) before Singapore, and it sure looks like it’s gonna be fabulous.

NYC is fun like that.

Not exactly new news; Herbie Hancock’s album River: The Joni Letters won the Grammy back in Feb 08. But I only just listened to it good and it’s soooo gooood.

I’m not normally a fan of jazz, but there’s something truly special about this album as a whole. The way it leads from one song to another. It’s lovely. Have a listen. The 2nd track with Tina Turner will give you goosebumps and the last track with Leonard Cohen sure is something special.

Chansidines had been on a search for great Pad Thai and Tom Yum in NYC. We order Thai food at least once a week. There was none in our neighborhood that was truly authentic. Not to say that they aren’t good food (they are still yummy), just not good Thai food. The fact that most of them seem to be run by Chinese doesn’t help. The Pad Thai was always too “Chinese” tasting (there’s no other way I can put it…) and the Tom Yum is always too sweet and not spicy/sour enough, even when you ask for it “extra extra spicy..THAI SPICY!” The best Thai place previously in Park Slope we found was Mango Fushion Thai. They have been consistently good with their dishes, but they still don’t get the Pad Thai and Tom Yum just the way we like it.

So far what sticks out from memory is the Thai place (we only tried the Tom Yum) at Chelsea market and Pam Real Thai which is all the way on the west side at midtown. None of which we would like to trot all the way there for often.

A week ago, we saw new construction across the street from us (the turnaround of stores in Park Slope is amazing…you get stores opening and closing all the time). Pat found out that it was going to be a Thai restaurant (Mee Thai…they are so new they don’t have any online presence yet). Imagine our excitement! We hoped and prayed that it’d be owned (and cooked) by actual Thais, and yes! They were! We excitedly ordered our standard – Pad Thai, Tom Yum, spring rolls and a curry….extra extra spicy of course.

OMG…BEST Pad Thai and Tom Yum and spring rolls we’ve had in NYC!! The soup had us a-sweatin’, and the noodles had our lips a-smackin’. The curry had a tad bit too much coconut milk for my liking, but at least it was spicy. The spring rolls tasted like they were made to order (vs. something that came pre-made and frozen) with fresh vegetables inside. The Pad Thai tasted like those we tasted in the streets of Bangkok. Unfortunately, the prices were not Bangkok prices. The dishes are $1-3 dollars more expensive than a regular Thai restaurant in Park Slope ($10.95 for Pad Thai with shrimp; $9.95 for beef curry; $5.95 for the spring rolls) so I had HIGH expectations. And it was so worth it. I don’t really care that we spend more than US$30 for dinner these days. It seemed absolutely ridiculous when we first moved here (hello? S$3-5 meals at a regular hawker center/food court!). But because of American sized portions, a dinner becomes a minimum 3 packed lunches for kellykelly and occassionally 2 dinners for both of us. Yes, that’s how big American portions are.

And it’s right across the street from us! Oh lucky us! Now we just need an authentic Singaporean/Malaysian place (Nana has great food and run by Singaporeans/Malaysians but it’s mainly targeted at the Asian Fusion crowd – think too sweet and too un-spicy food) and Vietnamese to open a Vietnamese resaturant in Park Slope (would you believe there is not a single Vietnamese restaurant in Park Slope? Oh, the blasphemy!).

But then, all these won’t matter for the next 3 weeks as the Chansidines Return To Singapore and devour yummy SG food (CRAB BEEHOON! ROTI PRATA! LASKA! SATAY! YONG TAU FOO!! HERE I COME!!). Yes folks, we’re comiiiing back! Pat will be in Singapore for about 2 months, and I will for 3 weeks. P.S. If happiness is relative, it SUCKS being married to a school teacher who gets all summer off, winter break and spring break, while I get a miserable 15 days a year.

I did the unthinkable and brought work home over the weekend (I know! I know!). It’s because I’m going back to Singapore on vacation for 3 weeks in July and want to be the smarty-pants and get all my July work done before I leave.

What I realize is work really doesn’t feel like work when I’m doing it from home. I’ve always said how much I love my job. I am officially a Credit Analyst. But I like to call my job position as Official Summarizer because I essentially take a hundred pages of financial statements, news releases, ratings reports and summarize it in about 6 pages and give it to head office for approval. That’s really pretty much it. I get to read a bunch of stuff about a company and the related economy, think about it, then write a paper. It’s the perfect job for me and I love it.

But work still feels like work when I have to get up, get dressed and commute to the office which is in probably the most uninspiring part of Manhattan (midtown), and have 15 vacation days a year (yes, I got screwed there moving from Singapore where I had 21 days to America).

I wish I could work from home.

You’ve probably read this already but this is JK Rowling’s speech at Harvard’s class of 2008 commencement.

The entire speech is awesome, but the 2nd part of her speech, about the importance of imagination, really struck me to the core. She spoke about working at Amnesty International and links imagination to empathy.

The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Those words hit something in me. I have been struggling for a bit with the feeling a guilt (as I elucidated here in my ‘Diamands are for fools’ comment response). This is a result of empathy, the things in my head that imagines what it must be like to be stripped of all individual choice, to be uneducated, to be poor and not being able to climb out of it, not for want of effort, but for the lack of opportunities and the deliberate actions of others to keep the shackles on. My life have been absolutely blessed with none of the above. And then more guilt comes because how could I possibly even imagine or know what it must be like to be so powerless, when I have experienced none of it? Is it, as I’ve read on someone’s blog post once about the blogosphere’s response to the Virginia Tech shootings, a misuse of the word empathy? Am I simply waxing lyrical and being disrespectful in doing so?

But these words resolved something in me. Rowling talks about the power of imagining and empathizing and the dangers of not:

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

Not to say that I am absolved of merely waxing lyrical, because my empathy has not yet led to any serious action; I can’t even vote in this country I am in now. But in doing so, the intention is not to be disrespectful of the true suffering of oppressed people, but perhaps in a way to try to spur myself into action when I can, or perhaps to add a teeny-tiny voice somewhere that, in collective, could spur someone else with the power to do so. Because obviously I am powerless in the realm of bigger things, the way countries are run, the legacies of history that has led to why people are oppressed, the millions of issues in this world that need to be changed. But the alternative, apathy, doesn’t seem to be the better option.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

Watched Blood Diamond last night. It was a solid movie despite Leo’s overacting. But more importantly, it made me interested in the topic of diamonds, conflict and otherwise, and I did a little more research about it after.

My position on diamonds has always been that it was for suckers…just like $4,000 Prada bags. But at least Prada bags don’t finance wars. And you can actually use a Prada bag e.g. to carry things. There is nothing, nothing you as a normal consumer can do with a diamond except to show it off. Unless you also host a factory at home that uses the diamond to cut other metals.

The entire diamond industry is built on a fallacy, and nothing more. The whole concept of a diamond engagement ring, with the tacit rule of 2-3 month’s salary, is ridiculously ridiculous. I often bite my lip when friends show me their rings or ask me about buying one, because they are all wonderful people and I love them dearly and I don’t wanna be a party pooper…but really, who cares? (P.S. They all look alike BTW, just like the wedding gown…you spend an obscene amount of time and money designing/tailoring/fitting/ for something that ends up looking just like any other. What an odd tradition).

But I cannot judge how people spend their time and money and what is important to them. What gets me angry however, is how this diamond industry, perpetuated a myth at such heavy humanitarian costs. And how the fools that buy them or put value on them have fallen headlong into the LIE. For years and years. The diamond, and all its fallacies, is the perfect example of how stupid and selfish people are. Even though there have been attempts like the Kimberly Process to certify conflict-free diamonds, how can you be really sure? The Kimberly Process is such a blatant alternative marketing scam for diamond producers to fool you once again.

In any case, why would you want to pay an obscene amount of money for this sparkly thing meant solely for display? I am a vain person myself, so I totally hear you if you like to dress up and show off. But if you like to display sparkly sparkly things, you can always use Moissanite, which is said to be more sparkly than a diamond even. Or wear a glowstick. If you want to show off money, just take a bunch of thousand dollar bills and use them as a fan. Show it off, if it makes you happy. Whatever it takes. But really STOP BUYING DIAMONDS, the source of which could very possibly be the root of so much humanitarian disasters!

As always, The Economist provides a great summary, with an excellent display of common sense. Humanitarian disaster aside, from a purely economic point of view, in short, you have been Punk’d. The article written in 1997:

The preciousness of the diamond is perhaps the world’s most sophisticated illusion—a feat of marketing more dazzling than the gem itself

Welcome to the mad world of De Beers, where James Bond meets the Wild West and manages to turn the raw, lawless frontier world of diamond digging and dealing into the most smoothly manipulated business in the world—“all”, as Lord Randolph Churchill famously observed when he visited the South African diamond mines in the 1890s, “for the vanity of woman” (and, today, of man). It is not merely gems that De Beers is selling, but symbols, myths, magic. As a worldwide dealer in enchanting illusions, Disney has nothing on De Beers: for the preciousness of the diamond is not a fact but a triumph of modern marketing.

The allure of diamonds rests on one illusion above all: that “a diamond is forever”. That clever marketing slogan, first invented in 1947 by De Beers’s American advertising men and still used today, sells two dreams in one: that diamonds bring eternal love and romance, and that diamonds never lose their value.

Like magic, the dream has come true. Unlike such other precious commodities as gold, whose price has yo-yoed over the years, the average price of diamonds has maintained a relentless upward creep. Between 1986 and 1996, average prices of diamonds grew by 50%. Again like magic, this took place despite the fact that over the same period more and more diamonds flowed onto the market. How?

…The answer was to support prices artificially by seizing control of all the mines…From that point, market control derived from a monopolist’s rule-book: when times are bad, hold back diamonds to support the price; when times are good, release the gems and clean up.

…Small, plain diamonds, however, are in fact not all that scarce. Their reputation for rarity comes in no small part from man, not nature.

…However ingenious the men from De Beers, their grand scheme would come to nothing were it not for the depths of human folly. Ruling the diamond empire requires not only control of the supply of diamonds to the market, but clever manipulation of desire too. In this respect, the diamond people have proved to be among the greatest salesmen of the century.

The supposedly precious nature of diamonds, and their association with romance and Hollywood, with James Bond and Elizabeth Taylor, have such a hold on the modern imagination that it is sometimes easy to forget how much of the glamour was the product of a professionally designed marketing campaign. For it, Harry Oppenheimer, father of Nicky and son of Sir Ernest, can take most of the credit.

By the end of the 19th century, a time when the discovery of diamonds in South Africa led to a glut, diamonds were already changing from exclusive trophies for royalty into more accessible ornaments for the burgeoning nouveaux riches, especially in America. It was not until the end of the Depression years, however, that the diamond king concocted his scheme to sell the gems more widely.

His idea was to turn diamonds into an essential middle-class accessory, a statement of aspiration to luxury, yet within the reach of bourgeois pockets. To do this, he concentrated on fixing in the public imagination the instant association of diamonds with romantic rites of passage: engagements, weddings, anniversaries. In 1939, he launched the first American advertising campaign. By 1941, the sales of diamonds in the United States had jumped by 55%.

The De Beers marketing people have never let up. Today, the United States still accounts for more than a third of world diamond jewellery sales. But now the company spends no less than $200m a year on marketing diamonds in 34 countries around the globe. It sells the dream to every new generation of impressionable young women and men. De Beers maintains an army of marketing people to keep the dream alive, sponsoring women’s magazines, hosting celebrity auctions and design competitions, and planting diamonds on television.

One recent coup was to persuade “Baywatch” to devote an entire episode to a story about the purchase of a diamond engagement ring. Naturally, De Beers did not miss the chance to drive home the crude message that a man really should spend two months’ salary on his fiancée’s rock.

Creating such traditions has become something of a speciality. To reinvent the dream for those who have already bought it once, De Beers revived the languishing American custom of the “eternity ring”: a band of diamonds bought to celebrate the tenth wedding anniversary. The slogan they came up with: “Show her you would marry her all over again.” Since this tradition’s reinvention in 1988, the share of women wearing a diamond anniversary band has jumped more than fourfold, to more than one in ten.

Finally, De Beers aggressively sells the dream to the uninitiated. The best example is Japan. In the 1960s, before De Beers muscled in, barely one in 20 Japanese brides wore a diamond engagement ring. The company then advertised the diamond ring as combining the modern western look with an embodiment of purity that fits the Shinto aesthetic. Today, diamond engagement rings are sported by some 70% of Japanese brides, helping to make Japan the second-biggest diamond-jewellery market after America.

…Vanity, greed, envy, desire, even love: the diamond barons could scarcely appeal to more common human instincts. In whose interest, they repeatedly ask, would it be to destroy the magic? Surely not the jeweller’s, the cutter’s, the dealer’s, or the miner’s. Above all, does not the bride-to-be want the immortal and the incomparable to shine in her ring? The diamond myth lives in a world a bit outside of logic, outside of ordinary economics: a world where there are still a few talismanic substances whose magic rubs off on the bearer. Thus do the sorcerers of Charterhouse Street concoct glamour from carbon, and fool us all.

I am risking pissing a bunch of friends and family off by writing this, because the diamond rings have already been purchased, worn, and loved. And I am saying that people who buy diamonds are fools, not only fools, but dangerously supporting an industry that has been the source of much much conflict. But my aim here is not to criticize what has already been done unconsciously but hopefully to provide information that will educate your future choice to buy a diamond. I respect traditions to be what they are and that people have emotional connections that are difficult to break, but sometimes we need to take a look at the origins of such traditions and what the perpetuation of them will entail.

P.S. As a disclaimer, my engagement ring from Pat was his late grandmother’s amethyst ring that she left to him in her will a few months before he proposed. That, and the ring holder on which she had engraved “Patrick and Kelly” means more to me than anything Pat could have bought with 3,000 months salary. Hell, he could have proposed with a freakin’ soda can tab and I’d have said yes. Remember: it is JUST a ring. It is JUST a symbol. What is real is your love, and nothing else.

This movie is about a man who was paralyzed from head-to-toe and could only move one eyeball.

It’s amazing that a movie with such a difficult premise as a movie could be made so beautifully. And made so beautifully at that. Just wow, to the life of Jean-Dominique Bauby, to the actors in the movie, to the director. Go watch it. I’m so gonna pick up the novel asap.