Recently-bought books (and a few free ones)

I went to Pay Less Book Store clearance sale in Subang last Friday with my friend Xin. We arrived at about 11.30 AM and spent about an hour browsing the selections. What caught us by surprise was the length of the checkout lines. We retreated at about 1.10 PM (since nearly everyone else were buying books in numbers that could easily fill up a small library), abandoned the checkout line, set our books aside in a box by the wall and headed for the Al-Falakh mosque (if I'm not mistaken) for Friday prayers. We came back to claim our spoils about an hour later and had lunch at the nearby A&W before heading home.

I must remind myself to allocate a few free hours for events like these. Due to lack of time, I couldn't practice some (most, actually) of the advice I shared on preparing for a book sale.

Despite the time constraint, I managed to grab a few books that I think I will enjoy. Xin took home 5 books, one sci-fi and books from the Jean Auel's Earth's Children series. I had to put a few titles back on the shelves to save some money for the next trip to a bookstore, but overall I'm happy with my rezeki for the day.




Like most male readers, I tend to gravitate towards non-fiction. I bought two memoirs by Rick Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin' and Ava's Man. He was former journalist of The New York Times. The books are on his childhood in the Deep South Alabama.



I caught this one right before leaving and I'm currently reading it. Home by Choice is an in depth examination of the role of a stay-at-home mother and a rebuttal to the feminist-spawned notion of 'being "just a housewife" destroyed women's potential and caused brain rot', to quote a line from the book. One of my main motivations for reading this is explore solutions that would allow women to fully play their roles as mothers and earn an income at the same time. I don't know if we're seeing the same thing, but I do think that the current situation is unhealthy (or perhaps even hazardous) for the mental well-being of the future generation. Women can become industrial workers, managers or CEOs (and a lot of them are good at their job). The issue here is that we can find people to fill the roles of the industrial workers, managers or CEOs; but there is no one that can fill in the role of mothers other than the mothers themselves. I believe mothers do understand this, but society has no real idea how it is extremely important for mothers to be there for their young children. This book is not about guilt tripping working mothers into full time housewifery, but it is a despairing plea to every one of us to reconsider our decisions in order to ensure that our children will not suffer in this progressively chaotic world.

How much did I pay for these 3 books? RM13. Xin got his for RM12.

I also got a few other books for free.



The Bootstapper's Bible is a book by Seth Godin on the bootstrapper state of mind. I highly recommend this e-book for anyone as a business read and especially for those looking for starter's guide in entrepreneurship. It's currently being offered as a free download only until this 30th December at ChangeThis.



I must thank Jiwa Rasa for his review of this book. Mengapa Kami Bantah!: Penggunaan Bahasa Inggeris bagi Mengajarkan Sains dan Matematik is a collection of academic writings on the highly-debated (not out on the open, anyway) issue. My personal feeling is more on the process of evaluation of the proposed idea, a few years back then. No pilot group, no open discussions with education experts and the speed of which everything was implemented are some of the things that still bug me till this day. I just downloaded this e-book from the Kongres Bahasa website a few hours ago. I hope it will open our eyes, and hopefully the policy makers' as well, to what is happening and what the academicians have to say.