Blue Chi’s

I just finished reading Watchmen, the graphic novel on which the recent Watchmen movie was based. I did not watch the movie when it was out in the cinema a short while ago, but I’ve been wanting to read a comic or a manga book which was a self-contained novel and not something episodical which I would have to carry on reading for months and months. Watchmen was exactly what I wanted because it is a 12-issue collection of the entire story.

Watchmen tells the story about costumed vigilantes who were once active in fighting crime before the government passed a law prohibiting their activity. The story starts with the sudden murder or one of the Watchmen which led to fear of a conspiracy to eliminate all costumed crime fighters. 

I don’t think I ever read a graphic novel since I was a child, and I really liked this one. It was really artistic and smart, especially the way two scenes would be told simultaneously to indicate irony (part where the kid is reading the novel on the street and other events happening). 

I usually read in bed at night before going to sleep, but I found it hard to do that because, unlike pure text novels, you have to focus on each picture and analyse all the contents of the frame, which is mentally exhausting.

Now that I missed the movie in the cinema, I will make sure I get the DVD when it comes out.

My next book is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Blogger Ahmed Al Mueini published a news article stating that the Cultural Club announced a national program to support the publication of new books in the country in hope of publishing a 100 new books a year. The program will be funded by the Cultural Club and other private and public bodies. It will be headed by a committee made up of representatives from the Cultural Club, SQU, Scientific Research Council, the Authors Association, and others.

The initiative is a result of one of the recommendations made during the period national discussion meeting of the Cultural Club. Other recommendations include:

• Requesting the Ministry of Information to update the Publication Law, which is according to the news report, a barrier for the proliferation of book publication in the country.
• Requesting the authorities to establish and support  more public libraries.
• Requesting the authorities to support publications houses by assigning more publication works to them (How else was the government publishing its books? Duh.)
• Preparing a nation report on “book problems”.  The preparation of this report will be carried over three phases is aimed to conclude with solutions for short and long term goals.

The meeting concluded that Omani authors are faced with many obstacles such as the lack of financing, the strictness of the old Publications Law, the lack of decent publication houses, and distributions and marketing difficulties.

A more “interesting obstacle” stated by the Club is the lack of “appreciation, criticism and reward” for authors in Oman. 

The press release made mentions in what is almost a footnote, the ‘emergence’ of a problem in ‘readership’  - as reading is not a daily activity for people in the Arab world and has become sort of an “activity for the affluent”.

———–

I guess it is nice that Omani authors will have some support to write and publish their books. Not sure if this will have any impact on readership though, publishing books (which have no contraversial content) is a relatively easy process in Oman, it is relatively very cheap to independently publish small books and novels, but distributing them is very difficult.

Making money from your book is even much much more harder, especially due to the low price at which Arabic books sell.You can buy an Arabic novel for something as low as 700 baisa (About $2) with expensive novels going for Ro1.5 (Less than $4). 

Due to the very small demand for books, the dominating publishers in the local market are stationers who sell books as a secondary product to their “papers and pens”. A book author who manages to convince this sort of  ”publisher” to publish his work will provide the script and the publisher takes care of printing and distributing on a share of profit basis – which usually goes on at 50-50. Usually 500 prints are made in each release, this number could go up to a 1000 copies in certain circumstances. The most oft hese copies are sold at the annual book exhibition.

This means if an author manages to sell every single copy (1000) of his book that costs RO 1.5, he would make: RO 750. This number is subject to reduction relating to printing costs, design costs, registrations costs, and just everything else that has to be done through the process, from writing and typing, to driving up and down to get your book out.

You can add to this the lack of respect for copyright by people, including school teachers and university lecturers, which could mean that your book will be copied like hell without you being able to do anything about it. 

The business of writing in Arabic for a living is just not a viable business in Oman.

I’m super excited about the new upcoming novel by Douglas Coupland. The new novel is titled “Generation A” and it’s expected to be published in September 2009. The title indicates a connection with the first novel written by Coupland “Generation X”. Here is the book blurb from the official website:

In the near future bees are extinct—until one autumn when five unconnected individuals, in Iowa, New Zealand, Paris, Ontario, and Sri Lanka, are stung. Immediately snatched up by ominous figures in hazmat suits, interrogated separately in neutral Ikea-like chambers, and then released as 15-minute-celebrities into a world driven almost entirely by the internet, these five unforgettable people endure a barrage of unusual and highly 21st-century circumstances. A charismatic scientist with dubious motives eventually brings the quintet together on a remote Canadian island. But their shared experience unites them in a way they could never have imagined.

Generation A mirrors the structure of 1991’s Generation X as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world.

I find it a little bit scary that Coupland has gone back to his first novel, I hope this has nothing to do with retirement or an intention to quit. 

It looks like this story will be a mix of Generation X and jPod. Can’t wait for September to come!

I’m still not sure about how feel about Keri Hilson’s debut album. I’ve been waiting for this album forever, and it got delayed over and over and over again. And when it came out, it was not released in the UK! I eventually managed to get one imported through HMV.

Keri Hilson is very talented, she has written the most beautiful songs for people like Toni Braxton (Sposed to be) and Jennifer Lopez (Wrong When Your Gone), and even Britney Spears (Break the Ice). She’s been all over Timbaland’s last album, she had a duo with Chris Brown, and she was also on Diddy last album as well.

Anyway, now that her album is out, I was really not that impressed. I hate the song Turning Me On, I think it’s stupid and I just don’t like it. I was addicted to Energy when it came out more than a freaking year ago, but not so much now. I do like a number of tracks on the album like Knock You Down, Intuition, Alienated, and Change Me, but I was really hoping for a masterpiece that I would be listening for months and months to come, not an album that I would get bored off into a couple of days. 

I am really disappointed by Keri Hilson. I hope that the album grows on me over time.

1. Intro
2. Turnin Me On ft. Lil Wayne
3. Get Your Money Up ft. Keyshia Cole & Trina
4. Return The Favor ft. Timbaland
5. Knock You Down ft. Neyo
6. Slow Dance
7. Make Love
8. Intuition
9. How Does It Feel
10. Alienated
11. Tell Him the Truth
12. Change Me ft. Akon
13. Energy
14. Where Did He Go

2.5/5

Girls of Riyadh (بنات الرياض) is an Arabic novel written by a young Saudi female author about four girls living in the capital of Saudi and their attempts to find love in there. I thought that the book was very real and I believe that there are people who live the lifestyle and stories told in this book. I loved the narration style, the use use classical Arabic for the narration and the use of Arabic accents and dialects for the characters dialogue. The book is so funny at times and so sad and depressing at other times. 

There is an English translated copy of the book, I’m not sure if it is as good as the Arabic one (which I read), especially as I personally liked the writing style more than anything else in the book.

I found it interesting how each chapter would start with a quote or a short poem to tell something. Some chapters had like a whole one page poem by Nizar Qabani, there were nice and they perfectly matched the story, but I really think that quoting a whole poem by someone like Nizar Qabani is copyright infringement cause he only recently died and copying the whole poem is not fair use. On the other hand, even though copyright captures this act, it is one of these instances where the law should probably be changed to allow other people to “remix” and create transformative works that create something interesting such as Girls of Riyadh.

This was the second Arabic book I read in probably the last seven years. I really loved it! If you are looking for a quick Arabic read make sure you check this book out.

Urgh, if only we had something as fun as this to read about Omani culture.