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The Cat Welfare Society Supported by Tomorrow.sg |
V.S. Naipaul: A House for Mr. Biswas
Naipaul's semi-autobiographical tragi-comedy tells of one man's lifelong struggle for a place to call his own. A timeless tale of immigrant dreams and what it means to be master of your own fate.
Deni Bown: Aroids: Plants of the Arum Family
The sexiest family of plants, offering infinite botanical intrique and horticultural plasticity. Man and bug alike have fallen prey to the chaste allure of spathes that harbour seductions of cruel chemistry. Besides, what do you expect from the likes of plants called Amorphallus?
Vladimir Nabokov: Bend Sinister
A philosopher living in a police state led by his old schoolmate must choose to resist tyranny or be co-opted to validate the regime. Sounds like the Nominated MP scheme to me.
Edited by Edward O. Wilson: Biodiversity
The infinite diversity of life on earth and its perilous state of being.
Bohumil Hrabal: Closely Watched Trains
Trainwatching has never been so sexy. A virgin's frustration, comely Czech lasses and wartime intrique combine in a tale where time seems to stand still and every moment is a study in intensity.
Tijs Goldschmidt: Darwin's Dreampond : Drama in Lake Victoria
Speciation and cichlid diversity in an African lake. Also a warning tale of how man-made introductions cause irreparable damage to complex and fragile eco-systems.
J. M. Coetzee: Disgrace
Man and dog. Unwanted and despised. Both the products of the very system that discards them into the junk heap, where they rise and fall with denied dignity.
Dave Foreman: Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching
Ecoterrorism for Dummies. Disclaimer: for entertainment purposes only.....
Eva Jablonka: Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life
Exploring the role of epigenetic factors in phenotypic inheritance.
Charles Darwin: Expression of the Emotions In Man and Anim
Reading the minds of men and beasts.
C.W. Ceram: Gods, Graves & Scholars: The Story of Archaeology
Archaeology as high adventure, romance, history and scholarship. All about the men who dig it.
Francis Halle: In Praise of Plants
Even biologists have tended to overlook the matchless creativity of plants in forging a foothold in every cranny. Botanist Francis Halle spins a tender vine through the molecular ingenuity of green protoplasm to the breathing canopy on which life on earth depends.
Konrad Lorenz: King Solomon's Ring
The ethologist as interpretor of silent tongues. As close as one could possibly get to learning the language of nature.
Simon Conway Morris: Life's Solution : Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe
Are evolutionary outcomes, including man, random? Or predictable, even inevitable? Conway Morris of Burgess Shale fame offers some heretical ideas.
Anais Nin: Little Birds
My recommendation for a nice little volume for your loved one (preferably female or lesbo) this festive season (for others, try E.M. Forster's 'Maurice' instead). Guaranteed to whet (or wet) your appetite for life's little pleasures.
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Flirts like a butterfly, flees like a bee, leaving a sting in the heart that will not wear away. Nabokov's nubile nymphet remains irresistably delectable, distracting minds into an exploration of forbidden feminity, cloaked in glowing prose that wavers between yearning chastity and the full bloom of ravishment.
Jordi Agusti: Mammoths, Sabertooths, and Hominids
Megafauna evolution for those tired of terrible lizards.
John Fowles: Mantissa
Kinky nurses, unclothed lady doctors and endless sexual repartee. What better way to delve into timeless themes, as recast by the best living novelist yet to win a Nobel.
Selected excerpt for your objective evaluation:
"The nurse removed her hands.... one of them deftly lifted his limp penis and laid it back and rested on it; while the fingers of the other hand encircled his scrotal sac and began to massage it slowly..."
Richard Goldschmidt: Material Basis of Evolution
The theory of evolution in big leaps.
Konrad Lorenz: On Aggression
Why is man so violent, quarrelsome and warmongering? Seeking for clues, Lorenz looks at the role of ritual and rechanneled drives in regulating social interactions amongst animals. The troubling (to some) conclusion suggests that aggression and love are Siamese twins integral to the nature of humanity.
Charles Darwin: Origin of Species
The work of the devil himself. Monkeys, of course, may disagree.
Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake
Crakey! The last man alive sprayguns the pigoons and tells a tale of civilisation's final moments.
Margaret Atwood: Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus
The Odyssey through Penelope's eyes.
Peter S. Bellwood: Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago
Just a few thousand years ago, you could walk all the way from Burma to Borneo without catching sight of the sea. Some even claim Sundaland is the cradle of civilisation. Bellwood's review offers a more staid, though no less fascinating look at a vanished world.
Richard Dawkins: The Ancestor's Tale : A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
Evolutionary theory's high priest offers a new tale of the phylogenetic tree of life and its myriad branches. Not for those suffering from a "dangerous collective delusion."
Mauricio Anton: The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives
Nature long in tooth and claw. For the feline lover and fossil fan alike.
George Barlow: The Cichlid Fishes: Nature's Grand Experiment in Evolution
Lessons in ethological diversity and evolutionary dynamics from the SICK-lid family.
Karl J. Niklas: The Evolutionary Biology of Plants
Using the metaphor of fitness landscapes (Don't read this book unless you want to think, warns the back cover), Niklas offers a careful exploration of the vital nodes in an oft overlooked branch of life, without which non-photosynthetic metazoans like you and me would wither like blooms in autumn.
John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman
The Victorian novel recast in 20th Century sensibilities and the era of supreme uptightedness redeemed in all its lurid shame. All the good elements of a good book – sex, scenic English coastlines, scientific discussion, unseemly scandals, bigoted 'Christians', a sojourn in America and a denouement topped (some say marred) by a "choose your own adventure" device.
Karel Capek: The Gardener's Year
Czechoslovakia's (and one of Europe's) most penetrative writer offers a slim, moving and often hilarious portrait of the wonders and woes of life as a gardener. Leaf through it and laugh.
Jaroslav Hasek: The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War
The wise fool goes to war and all is haywire on the eastern front. A must read for every fan of life in the barracks.
Mervyn Peake: The Gormenghast Novels: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone
Gothic fantasy meets Dickens meets surreal sci-fi. Utterly depressing, beguiling and unforgettably bleak.
J. M. Coetzee: The Lives of Animals
Pleading the cause of the voiceless.
Alfred Russel Wallace: The Malay Archipelago
Wallace's survey of Malesian biogeography and the distribution of species points to the role of allopatric isolation in the promotion of speciation.
John Maynard Smith: The Theory of Evolution
Discovering the laws of inheritance and the transmission of selected traits.
Günter Grass: The Tin Drum
Peter Pan goes berzerk and gut-wrenchingly gross in Grass's lucid tale of a drum that dins through the demons of fascism. If you do manage to find the movie version, don't watch it on a full stomach.
Ivan Klima: The Ultimate Intimacy
What drives a godly man to abandon his vows in search of communion? In Klima's Prague, the fall of the Iron Curtain reveals a veil of pretence where faith and family tango in tragic epistles.
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled
Weird book. Still in progress... maybe not ever...
Colin Tudge: The Variety of Life: A Survey and a Celebration of All the Creatures That Have Ever Lived
Proof, if it was ever needed, that Homo sapiens is but a footnote in a quirky mammalian chapter of the annals of life on earth.
Karel Capek: War With the Newts
A must-read for all lovers of salamanders. Campy sci-fi meets realpolitik in a drama of geopolitical proportions, courtesy of the man who fathered the very idea of the "robot" (sorry, Asimov!)


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