Just finished reading the Form 4 textbook novel for BM next year. A very dpressing and slow-paced story of war and the ugliness of human nature in desperate times. It's not sad (for me), it's just very heavy and disturbing to read. A. Samad Said (a Malaysian version of Dumbledore- no, I'm serious!) totally knows how to play with the emotions and drama. When I wrote the synopsis, it mostly consisted of describing lengths and lengths of conversation between the characters. It is definitely not a book of hope as it shows the characters being so helpless and just accept their fate. You can kind of imagine what it's like during wartime when watching Steven Spielberg's War Of The Worlds, except without the human-vapourizing alien robot things. Just so you know, the movie nearly made its place in my heart, if not for its oh-so-unexplosive ending. Spoilt everything! Anyway, back to the textbook reviews. (I'm so damn bored that I wrote reviews on textbooks! bah!)The anthology was nice and typical. I really liked the play Serunai Malam, very cheeky. Khadijah Hashim's Budi Yang Tak Terbeli was also very nice, liked her works. The Pantuns and The Sajaks, on the other hand, seems very tough. Never really liked it as well as the traditional prose, don't really get it. For English, we get a collection of short stories and poems. The poems are a bit advanced in language and does require a lot more effort in internalizing it compared to the Form One poems. (yes, I was able to understand Macbeth because I think that he's a historical EMo figure. see, EMO was way cool back then even before there was an EMo music scene). The short stories are okay and different compared to the Form One short stories. some tend to convey a hidden message I have yet to unearth like the Drover's Wife and The Sound Machine. The wide range of genre differs from those childish short stories learnt in Form One. I liked the tale of The Necklace by Guy de Maupasant (I think I spelt it wrong..). It depicts a woman's studipidity in an obsession of materialistic things. (totally agree with that!). But I'd like it better if we had a dose of those 'em sci-fi stuff by writers like Isaac Newton and the lot..which actually brings us back to H.G. Wells who...
This is an old issue, I know. What has brought my attention to the topic of women rights was when I watched one of the episodes of Commander In Chief on Hallmark. In that series, the president of the United States was supposedly a woman. Interesting, and she plans to take the stand for women rights to the next level despite the controversies arousing her brave statement. The debate was whether or not it was relevant to debate on an old issue, in respect of the state of today's society. Women of today have a better status than they did way back in the days of history old. Women emancipation has been heatedly debated especially in the West throughout the time, and perhaps, the most memorable one was of the Suffragettes, fighting for the right of women to vote. Some places in Africa, in history, do not even recognize rape of women, as a crime, however, all of that has changed, thankfully. The question now is, are women actually 'emancipated' as we are all made to belief? well,...
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