New additions to my reading list. I forgot my Kindle, so I took advantage of Singapore to pick up some stuff that doesn't normally appear on Western bookshops. I'm constantly struck by how stylistically distinct they are. Banana Yoshimoto is precise and gentle, exploring emotions whose English equivalents - "loss", "grief" somehow seem poor parodies of the original feeling. Ma Jian is both dreamlike and savage. The other two I haven't touched yet, but both are research for Extremistan, the city-state with a changing Constitution. Singapore proved useful for examining the Utopias and dystopias embedded within city-states.
