Favourite writers.

[Watson.]

Thanks for pointing out Fuzzy Ken book swap! I learn so much from this forum and as reading is so important to me, this info is priceless. =D> What i will do is bring books i have here and take them to Fuzzy Ken's, and am sure when i live in Udon I will be using the swap facility for sure! Thanks for that

[beer monkey]

Mills and Boon writers.

[laphanphon]

does everyone have a book about everything, at book store today, clinton, obama, mccain, how obama won/state by state , that's got to be interesting, and alan greenspan , ok, i like finances, but that's got to be a bit weak also, especially since, 'i made mistakes' , ok, i want to read your book, that's a learning experience for today's economics. sell sell sell. expensive sucker also.

even saw some from agatha christie, hmm, grandkids are happy. 10 little indians, i think, one of my earliest books.

[TJ]

I've been investigating the Udon Thani used book market for a year or two, hoping that a small outlet or wholesale operation for used books could survive. I'm satisfied that Thais won't buy them; that is the young Thai children being tutored in English or uni students taking English class. The English-speaking foreigners, tourists and locals, are pretty much it for the Udon market.

I sell used books on the internet. Last visit I left sixty or seventy books with Fuzzy Ken, they are still there unsold. One sold, a Clancy novel for 100 baht, in about a month while was staying in Udon Thani. Fuzzy has the market on used books, a nitch market. My guess is that he has been spending more to increase his library than he is taking in, not including food and drink a swapper might purchase.

Next trip, maybe March or April, I may bring another hundred or so paperbacks with me to test the market somehow. I've a good collection and very good local sources. I'll bring 3 or 4 copies of The Thornbirds for the Aussies. Do they read much?

If I could sell used books at 100 baht it would be great, if at 50 baht it would be disappointing. My guess is that i can't sell much at either price. If I could wholesale to Ken and others that would be ok. I'd ship a thousand or two over if there was a decent market. Books selected with some care and research for the Udon Thani expat and tourist market. A lady friend that speaks good English wants me to "sponser" her and another Thai lady in opening some kind of clothing stall at the night market. I may do this with the condition that she display a hundred of my used books for sale.

[Geordie]

With all due respect to Ken [a nice bloke] i looked through the selection of books on offer and very few made me excited as a prospective buyer.Maybe its me being too selective but i like a good read & not the run of the mill stuff churned out by so many so called popular authors.
Back on topic of " Favourite Writers i would like to add to my earlier list,
Leslie Thomas.
Hammond Innes.
Compton Mc'enzie.
And the late great Ian Fleming for James Bond.

[westerby]

Umberto Ecco, Guenter Grass, Feodor Dostoyevski, Mishima.

Yukio Mishima? I read Mishima on Hagekure years ago and then saw the film, Mishima, a Life in Four Chapters...fascinating.


Never read Mills and Boon though....

[Laan Yaa Mo]

The list is long: Winston Churchill, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Pasuk Phongpaichit, Alexander Woodside, Trevor Lloyd, Archibald Thornton, Bernard Shaw, Lord Curzon, Disraeli, Duong Thu Huong, Ho Xu'an Huang, Donald Swearer, Victor Lieberman, David Chandler, David Starkey, Michael Aung-Thwin, David Wyatt, James Clavell, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Thomas Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Wallace (Sanders of the River), Martin Gilbert, Lord Blake, Giovanni Boccaccio, Albert Camus, Seneca, Dante, Lei Ba, Ken Kesey, Roy Jenkins, Colin Dexter, Than Tun, Iris Chang, Jung Chang, Nien Cheng et al. There is more to come.

[polehawk]

Too many to list but here's a few current ones (and some older ones) that I enjoy .....

David Young (Fast Eddies Lucky 7 A Go-Go, Sukhumvit Road, etc.)

Dean Barrett (Skytrain to Murder, Memoirs of a Bangkok Warrior, etc.)

Christopher Robbins (The Ravens, Air America, etc.)

Chris Ryan (The One Who Got Away, Strike Back, etc.)

Mitch Albom, John Grisham, Stephen individual, Andy McNab, Joseph Wambaugh, John D. MacDonald (Travis McGee books)

Whenever I'm in a bookstore I will stop dead in my tracks when I spot books by any of the above authors and scan the offerings. Sometimes I will even buy a book again that I already read in the past.

[rufus]

Umberto Ecco, Guenter Grass, Feodor Dostoyevski, Mishima.

Yukio Mishima? I read Mishima on Hagekure years ago and then saw the film, Mishima, a Life in Four Chapters...fascinating.


Never read Mills and Boon though....

Yes, he was a fascinating man. The film was excellent. Have you read "The sailor who returned from the sea"?

[rufus]

TILOKRAT!!!!

"Thomas Conrad"
I think you mean Joseph Conrad? Yes, I agree, "Lord Jim", "The Heart of Darkness" are great books. Some on your list are unfamiliar to me; I should ask.

[rufus]

Westers, I have a biography of Mishima. On my next visit to udon I can drop it off somewhere if you would like.

[westerby]

Westers, I have a biography of Mishima. On my next visit to udon I can drop it off somewhere if you would like.

No worries, I'm in England, I'll go looking for it around the bazaars but thanks anyway. I'll also look for, 'The Sailor who Returned from the Sea'.

Joseph Conrad - a brilliant author on a par with Dickens in my view. He was also an ethnic Pole who settled in UK so he was writing in his second language. I like his protagonist, Marlow, as I do, George Smiley from Tinker, Tailor, etc.

Bernard Fall and his work on Dien Bien Phu is also a very good read.

What other books on the Far East do you recommend, chaps?

[Laan Yaa Mo]

TILOKRAT!!!!

"Thomas Conrad"
I think you mean Joseph Conrad? Yes, I agree, "Lord Jim", "The Heart of Darkness" are great books. Some on your list are unfamiliar to me; I should ask.

55555 Yes, good old Thomas Conrad...hmmmm. I really do prefer Josef, as Westerby points out, Joseph was a Polish citizen who made good in England. He was a precursor of many Poles who came to England, and the latter Poles fought for the good guys vs. the Germans in the Battle of Britain.

Many of the writers on my list are specialists in Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodian and British Imperial history.

I should like to add the fiction writer who produced those interesting books on the police in Thailand in which his main character is half-Thai, half-farang. I cannot remember his name for the moment.

Bernard Fall is excellent too, and a few years ago a couple of writers wrote about the allies and the recapture of Burma from the Japanese. It was good but I have forgotten their names too.

Richard Stubbs wrote a good book about the emergency in Malaysia, and one British writer wrote a very funny trilogy about the British in Malaya and the ups and downs of the British, the Malays, the Chinese and so on. I just cannot remember his name either. Another day.

There are some good books about the Brooke family and their rule in Sarawak.

And there are some very good writers on Indonesia, and Sukarno and Suharto. But their names have slipped my mind as well.

Anthony Burgess, I think, is the writer about British Malaya. Very funny stuff.

And there is a very good writer who produced an excellent biography of Stalin whose name also eludes me.

There is an American writer who wrote about the Soong Dynasty and the Empress Dowager of China (Ts-u tse) by the name of Sterling Seagrave. His father was an American missionary in Burma before and during the Second World War. I think he (the father) introduced the concept of the barefoot doctor into Burma years before Mao and Norman Bethune thought of the idea. More to come.

[Astana]

Were you thinking of of Alan Bullock 'Stalin' Tilokarat, this is the supposed classic in the genre.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

No, that is not the one. I will have to look it up at home or the library tomorrow. It was pretty hard stuff to get through because of the brutality and senseless slaughter, but it was compelling reading.

There is another good Russian writer, last name Babel first name maybe Issac, who writes on the scene observations from battles with the Poles in the early 1920s. Not much done for the people here.

[westerby]

Tilo, Rufus, ever read 'The Quiet American' by Graham Greene? Another great novel.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

Astana, the author is, Simon Sebag Montefiane, and the title is something like 'Court of the Red Tsar', and it is excellent.

Khun Westerby, I have yet to read 'The Quiet American', which is based, I think, on a former American Ambassador to Vietnam or Cambodia.

And it is definitely Anthony Burgess who wrote the very funny, 'The Malayan Trilogy'.

Another fascinating writer is Michael Vickery. He is very left-wing and wrote two controversial books about Cambodia during the reign of Pol Pot to show that conditions and murders varied according the zone and the local commanders.

Even better than that is Vickery questioned the Sukhothai inscription that historians have used to mark the beginning of Thai civilization and state in current-day Thailand. The Sukhothai inscription is the one that goes something like this, 'There are fish in the ponds, rice in the fields...Sukhothai is a wondrous place. Vickery, now deceased, was one of the few historians who could read ancient stone inscriptions in both Angkorian Khmer and ancient Thai. He claimed that this inscription is actually a forgery written in the 19th century and that Sukhothai, rather than being a Thai kingdom, was, in fact, Lao.

Many younger Thai historians support Vickery while older ones do not. Vickery's article about this, and the whole controversy is in various editions of the Journal of the Siam Society. I believe the Siam Society collected all of the articles and printed them in a special edition.

I remember attending an American organised conference in Chiang Mai that was devoted to providing support to the Sihanouk-Sonn San (sp)-Khmer Rouge coalition to fight the Vietnamese. Vickery showed up about half way through the conference, and asked if he could speak because he had just returned from three weeks or so in Vietnamese military-occupied Cambodia. He was going to refute much of what the coalition supporters said, but they refused to let him speak because 'he was not registered to give a lecture for this conference'. But they could not stop him asking questions and refuting much of what was said to the great consternation of the conference organisers. At that time, Vickery taught at University Sains Malaysia.

He was a great academic and provided excellent insight into ancient and modern Thai and Cambodian history owing to his extensive linguist ability. David Chandler was his great liberal democrat opponent over Cambodia, and about the only well versed enough in Cambodian history to challenge Vickery. Chandler is at Monash. Both men are American, or in the case of Vickery, was.

John Burdett is the writer of the half-Thai half farang detective novels that are very entertaining.

Other books that are not bad at all are,

Janet Lim. 'Sold for Silver'

Jonathan Becker. 'Hungry Ghosts'. He investigated the Great Leap Forward in China and discovered that at least 30,000,000 Chinese died of starvation during Mao's great experiment. This included widespread cannibalism something which did not make it into 'The Little Red Book'.

Francois Bizot. 'The Gate'

Hans Penth. Writer of Northern Thai history from ancient chronicles and stone inscriptions that are in Mon, and Lanna.

George Orwell. 'Burmese Days' among others

Edgar Vincent. 'Lord Nelson'

K. Surangkhananang. 'The Prostitute'. She is a very popular writer and published this book in 1937. It is a useful reminder that the world's oldest profession was not invented in Thailand by westerners. Her book follows the life of a young lady.

M.C. Rickles and Jean Taylor have written very readable and important histories of Indonesia. Note, for any readers from the U.S.A. that is M.C. Rickles, not Don Rickles.

[rufus]

Yes, actually I just re read it about 2 weeks ago.
Regarding books on Asia - the following are not great literature by any means, but they are fun to read:
"Another Quiet American" by Brett Dakin
Colin Coterril's Dr Siri Payboun series. If you don't know there, they are set in Lao in the '70s. They are a fun blend of mystery, mysticism and historical fact. Ineteresting for me as I live in Laos.

[polehawk]

I have yet to read 'The Quiet American', which is based, I think, on a former American Ambassador to Vietnam or Cambodia.

Think you have it confused with "The Ugly American" about an American diplomat posted as Ambassador to the fictional country of Sarkhan in Southeast Asia. The movie was one of Marlon Brando's better efforts and believe it was filmed in Thailand. Former Thai PM Kukrit Pramoj acted in the film and portrayed, you guessed it, a Prime Minister.

Wasn't "The Quiet American" about a journalist in Vietnam during the '50s?

[westerby]

Wasn't "The Quiet American" about a journalist in Vietnam during the '50s?

Yes, a British Journo who loses his teenage Vietnamese girlfriend to an American from the Embassy because he won't marry her. It's set around the time of Dien Bien Phu when the French controlled Indo China.