Hilm

Some highlights from this book:

205 If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help
Presumably most readers of these novels see themselves in the protagonist's shoes, fantasizing about their own acquisition of sorcery. Wishing for magic. And, barring improbable demographics, most readers of these novels are not scientists. Born into a world of science, they did not become scientists. What makes them think that, in a world of magic, they would act any differently?

181 Universal Fire
Matches catch fire because of phosphorus. Phosphorus is highly reactive; pure phosphorus glows in the dark and may spontaneously combust. Phosphorus is thus also well-suited to its role in adenosine triphosphate, ATP, your body's chief method of storing chemical energy. ATP is sometimes called the “molecular currency.” It invigorates your muscles and charges up your neurons. Almost every metabolic reaction in biology relies on ATP, and therefore on the chemical properties of phosphorus. If a match stops working, so do you. You can't change just one thing.

202 Joy in the Merely Real
If we cannot take joy in things that are merely real, our lives will always be empty.

201 Savannah Poets
What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? That's a real question, what kind of poet can write about Jupiter the god, but not Jupiter the immense sphere?

——
189 Dissolving the Question
Many philosophers share a dangerous instinct: If you give them a question, they try to answer it. Like, say, “Do we have free will?” The dangerous instinct of philosophy is to marshal the arguments in favor, and marshal the arguments against, and weigh them up, and publish them in a prestigious journal of philosophy, and so finally conclude: “Yes, we must have free will,” or “No, we cannot possibly have free will.”

191 Righting a Wrong Question
When you are faced with an unanswerable question—a question to which it seems impossible to even imagine an answer—there is a simple trick that can turn the question solvable. Compare: “Why do I have free will?” “Why do I think I have free will?” The nice thing about the second question is that it is guaranteed to have a real answer, whether or not there is any such thing as free will.

236 Privileging the Hypothesis
In large answer spaces, attention without evidence is more than halfway to belief without evidence.

——–

207 The Beauty of Settled Science
And thinking you can jump right into the frontier, when you haven't learned the settled science, is like trying to climb only the top half of Mount Everest (which is the only part that interests you) by standing at the base of the mountain, bending your knees, and jumping really hard (so you can pass over the boring parts).

209 Is Humanism a Religion Substitute?
When someone sets out to write an atheistic hymn—“Hail, oh unintelligent universe,” blah, blah, blah—the result will, without exception, suck. Why? Because they're being imitative. Because they have no motivation for writing the hymn except a vague feeling that since churches have hymns, they ought to have one too. And, on a purely artistic level, that puts them far beneath genuine religious art that is not an imitation of anything, but an original expression of emotion.

229 Quantum Explanations
Talking to aspiring young physicists about “wave/particle duality” is like starting chemistry students on the Four Elements.

249 No Safe Defense, Not Even Science
Of the people I know who are reaching upward as rationalists, who volunteer information about their childhoods, there is a surprising tendency to hear things like, “My family joined a cult and I had to break out,” or, “One of my parents was clinically insane and I had to learn to filter out reality from their madness.” My own experience with growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family seems tame by comparison but it accomplished the same outcome: It broke my core emotional trust in the sanity of the people around me.

221 Zombies! Zombies?
Native Chinese speakers can remember longer digit sequences than English-speakers. Chinese digits are all single syllables, and so Chinese speakers can remember around ten digits, versus the famous “seven plus or minus two” for English speakers.

225 Belief in the Implied Invisible
Lex parsimoniae: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That was Occam's original formulation, the law of parsimony: Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

Interlude: An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes's Theorem
Karl Popper's falsificationism—this is the old philosophy that the Bayesian revolution is currently dethroning. Karl Popper's idea that theories can be definitely falsified, but never definitely confirmed, is yet another special case of the Bayesian rules.

DNF at 17% because the main character is annoying.

great premise (totalitarian/militant islamic rule) and important issues (grassroots opposition) with too-lengthy exposition that doesn't quite work with me. Opened up with a grisly execution of two lovers, part one was exhaustingly dragging. Part two where the main characters (?) finally published the underground journal was more promising (tension! ethical discussion! how much should journalists feel responsible?) but the delivery remains uneven.

Favorite short story in this collection: Working Woman by Olivia Ho and Life Under Glass by Nghi Vo.

The one story set in alt-Indonesia is interesting (I did not expect a Malin Kundang retelling/remix) with a diverse cast (a Papuan leading an Indonesian airship!) but this made me wonder why present-day borders should even persist in a steampunk alternate history.

DNF at p79 or so because I wasn't feeling it. Maybe I'll come back to it if/when I reread Vicious.

Pinjam dari perpus Pardee, baca bab 2 (Is it too late? Young adults and the formation of professional ethics) dan bab 4 (A program to integrate leadership, ethics, and corporate responsibility into management education) setelah ngobrol sedikit sama Adi di HBS.

Despite its publication date in 1993, it doesn't actually feel too dated, although I wonder what changes they have made/how their approach has evolved since obviously the world has changed a lot in the last 30 years.

Chapter 2 is quite interesting, and the authors' answer to the question it posed in its title is–unsurprisingly–no, it's not too late to teach ethics to twenty-something and thirty-something MBA students. Instead, no time is more strategic as they are ready for ethical reflection! But they are vulnerable to ‘vacuous credos' such as “I must do my personal best–which would depend on what company I work for–doesn't matter which company I work for.”

The authors wrote, “Some of these young adults, however, seem to hold deeply cherished values such as dignity of all persons, or a commitment to working on behalf of a specific social issue. But they do not yet appear to have at hand a publicly legitimized, comfortable language whereby they might forthrightly and gracefully articulate those commitments. Without an adequate public language, ethical commitments tend to remain a matter of personal morality and are thus rendered impotent for social and corporate transformation. Many of these students are well motivated, but they are not yet adequately prepared to articulate their values whether in the classroom, the company, or our wider public life.” Personally to me this brings back memories from IM training where Pak AB admonished us for snickering at the phrase ‘role model' (this was before more netizen picked up Jaksel lingo).

They further illustrate the privatized sense of morality through the MBA students' answer to this (I think a very good question): `“You have commented on some of the things you would like to accomplish; as you think across all the years ahead, who do you think you may hurt?” The typical response was, “I hope I won't hurt anybody.”' The authors noted, “they do not yet seem to have a correspondingly clear consciousness of systemic hurt and injustice and its relationship to their own action in the world. They do not readily recognize that many of them will make complex decisions that may affect hundreds or even thousands of people whom they will never see and/or aspects of the ecosystem not immediately evident.”

On noblesse oblige: “When asked, ‘How much money would be enough?' the typical respondent answered, ‘Enough to support my lifestyle.' For most, lifestyle was defined by the norms of material success in the culture. No one mentioned the category of need. It was difficult to ascertain at what point the typical student would decide that enough ‘noblesse' had been achieved to set in motion the activity of ‘oblige'.”

Overall, this was an interesting read, although I didn't get what I was looking for when I picked it up (how does one teach ethics effectively?) but I found it interesting anyway and I will probably get to use the questions to friends from across the river, with a little hope to fluster them to produce interesting answers.

Started it and stopped at 10%. Maybe I'll pick it up again in the future, who knows? I just realized that I'm not in the mood for deceit (righteous or not) and its attendant stress.

Also while the hunger in the first few chapters are incredibly vivid it's really hard to get into when at the same time my mother in law was visiting and just could not stop cooking copious amount of food that I have no choice but to gorge on.

DNF at page 40.

Largely an okay read, but I am annoyed that the only bi character ends up being the killer.

I seem to highlight fewer stuff from this book than the earlier two books, but the last essay, An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes's Theorem points out how Popper and Bayes are connected:

Previously, the most popular philosophy of science was probably Karl Popper's falsificationism—this is the old philosophy that the Bayesian revolution is currently dethroning. Karl Popper's idea that theories can be definitely falsified, but never definitely confirmed, is yet another special case of the Bayesian rules.

I picked up this book because it was in my library's showcase and it looked interesting–I just met a Buddhist black woman for the first time the week prior. The meeting (not about Buddhism) left me realizing that I had never met a Buddhist who is black before. Certainly people with East Asian ancestry when I was in Japan or Indonesia, or if it's people from the west, white people. Yet of course there's no reason why Buddhism can't find followers among the black population, and the message from this book (especially the first part), is exactly that: Buddha's teaching can be relevant for Black people, with some parallels/similarities to African ancestral beliefs. (One essay argued that Buddha himself was black–see his hair in his likeness).

That being said, this book wasn't written for me so not a lot of it resonates with me. I'm not big on religion in general (anymore) and when some chapters reads like sermons (with a few that actually guided the readers through the chants), just not my cup of tea. Other chapters with reflections interested me more, but they often only scratched the surface, likely a limitation of the short essay forms.

This is a very readable, well-researched study on the Batak land. I learned three different things for my various levels of interest:

- general interest: chapter 6 is especially Illuminating as it deals with the ‘encroachment' into the Batak land by the Padri and shortly after, the missionaries, who bring with them the colonial might. As an Indonesian I know Sisingamaraja is a national hero but I had never learned why he was one. What was his motive of fighting against the Dutch, and was it really just the Dutch or Christianity? The author noted that it may not be easy for Batak scholars to accept that Sisingamaraja also fought against Christianity, given that modern day Batak population are Christians themselves.

(On a related note, the plight of early day Batak Christians would lend their story well to a Shusaku Endo's Silence style of religious persecution story.)

- academic interest: the Batak mission built schools, but it was often hard to convince people to send their children to school. There's one note about how the missionaries in the early days had to hold a feast with a water buffalo slaughter before the local chiefs deigned to send just four boys to be educated in their school.


- personal interest: I learned about the Batak creation myth.. which sadly lacks dragons. It does revolve around marriages, which befits the book's really major theme: gender relations. (And this is how I learned about “magigi” and “mahilolong”.) if my academic interest had been on gender/marriages in Indonesian culture this book is definitely an invaluable resource.

Three things stood out to me reading this essay collection:

1. Clothing.

Ninar Thanita Wongprasert wrote about Undressing Discrimination and this made something click in me. I have been watching Schitt's Creek this pandemic season (as one does) and Patrick's Dad said it best about David Rose.



I haven't been finding a lot of in-depth commentary about David Rose's less-than-uniformly-masculine wardrobe (he wore a skirt at his own wedding and Dan Levy wore one to the Emmys). But here Wongprasert wrote:

Clothing is political in the sense that it has been used by the state to control society and people. It signifies society, history, politics, and culture.

Fashion is an aesthetic politics. Its nature is boundless and may appear to be apolitical on the outside, but is actually very political within. It is well embedded with agenda. Fashion is an effective platform to send across political, social, and cultural messages by anyone and at any time.

As Islamophobia from Thai mainstream communities became more visible, so did in Thai queer communities and activism. An external factor that has triggered Islamophobia within our queer communities and activism is the rapid rise of queerphobic climates from neighboring Muslim dominant nations such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei just within the past few years. Meanwhile, a recent internal factor that has sparked anti-Muslim sentiments is the opposition of some Thai Muslims to the upcoming civil union bill. As a result, queer and queer-friendly Muslims have faced unjustified backlashes and Islamophobia from non-Muslim queer activists and the community members.

“History is still being made. Let us not forget.
And let us live, so that we may not be forgotten.”

I might suffer from inflated expectation because this book has just won Hugo, but this was underwhelming. I had to plod through and promised myself rewards every 30 pages or so because it really didn't compel me to continue reading.

The book began with a decent mystery, actually: Yskandr, the previous ambassador to the Empire, was dead and so Mahit was sent as a replacement. The whoddunit was quite intriguing.

But the narration could not sustain my interest. Maybe it was one thing being piled on after another in a very quick timeframe, maybe it was the long, pointlessly meandering internal thoughts on Mahit's part, maybe it was my lack of aptitude for poetry. English is not my first language so when they began to celebrate scansion and meters.. I just couldn't picture it in my mind.

As I began to lose my interest, several things stood out:
- This was billed as a space opera, but it's mainly political intrigue and you could transport most of the book to say, 14th century Italy, or a fantasy, or to present-day monarchy and there would be little difference to notice. [I noticed this point as I was listening to Genre Junkies podcast making this same exact complain about Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire–at least there were physics and physicists in Scalzi's Interdependency].
- An ambassador of one? How is it that Mahit was sent as an ambassador and she was the only person from Lesl in the City? It's hardly likely that if there had been trade no one else from Lesl would be in the City. She doesn't even have a native staff and I think it just beggars belief.
- An ambassador without access to resources that she had almost nothing to offer for a medical procedure? No money, nothing? (Compare this to real-life embassies full of diplomatic staff, local and otherwise.)
- Everyone in Teixcalaan seems to be basically human? At least everyone with speaking lines in the story is. And other than the (surmountable) difference in language, Mahit seems to be taller than other people, but that's it.
- Why is the imago technology that Mahit has seems to be an unspeakable taboo but other forms of bodily augmentation seems OK?

I can see this could have been an otherwise enjoyable read–but it doesn't seem to do the trick for me.

This is an enjoyable read: a mystery with an unusual setting (Laos in the 1970s, with the monarchy newly overthrown and the Communist rule was beginning). To me this book has a very strong Nuri Vittachi vibe with its humor, which I like. In my mind I also imagine Dr. Siri Paiboun, the main character to maybe look a little like Vittachi, too.

I was a bit apprehensive picking this up when I looked around what books my library has that is set in various Southeast Asian nations/written by SEA writers. I was apprehensive because this was not written by a Laotian, but a white guy, and I didn't like the last fiction set in Thailand I read which was written a white guy, but this seems short enough. I'm still glad I picked it up, but I'll probably need to read a Laotian writer sometime in the future to have a richer sense of Laos.

Some memorable bits:

“You people are never short of receptions, are you?”“That's why it's called the Communist ‘Party,' and not the Communist ‘sit down and get some work done'.”
The Thais were devastated that evil communists had moved in next door, in Laos. Siri loved to listen to their broadcasts. ... He'd listened to “expert”commentaries on the Reds' inborn taste for wife-sharing, an infirmity that caused such confusion in their society that “incest was inevitable”. How communism had led to a dramatic increase in two-headed births he was uncertain, but Thai radio had the figures to prove it.
“What torture is this? Leave me alone.”“I will not. You deliberately missed the community painting of the youth center last month. I'm certainly not going to let you miss out on the chance to dig the overflow canal.”Community service in the city of Vientiane wasn't a punishment; it was a reward for being a good citizen. The government knew the people would gladly give up their only day off for such a treat.
“I assumed that forty-six years of membership of the party would entitle me...“
“To a pension?” Kham laughed rudely
“Why not?”
“My old friend, I would have expected you to know better after forty-six years. Socialism means contributing for as long as you still have something to give. When you start to forget where your mouth is and dribble egg down your shirt, when you need to pack towels into your underpants to keep yourself dry, that's when the State will show its gratitude. Communism looks after its infirm.”
“I think you are a cog in this great revisionist machine which now powers our beloved country. You are a cog just as I am a cog and The President is a cog. At this important time in our creation, we need all our cogs meshing and coordinated. Don't let us down. Don't stop the machine, Siri.”
“Good health, Doctor. Sorry I can't get up.”
“Ma's got cirrhosis. I told you about it.”
“Yes. Good health, Mrs. Vongheuan.” It seemed peculiar to be wishing good health to a woman who was clearly not healthy at all. But such was the national greeting.

This book is downloadable at archive.org/details/GJA01.

“BAPA, mengapa tidak ada orang Irian yang jadi pahlawan nasional?”

This quote opens the first chapter and is probably the strongest opening you can ask for. I think the original essay was written before 1993–which I later learned was when the government admitted some Papuans to be a national hero. This includes Frans Kaiseipo whose face graces our current Rp.10.000 bills.

The quote made me pause to think how little I thought about where Indonesian national heroes come from. And 1993 was not so long ago: Indonesia had almost been independent for nearly 50 years. And while the Pepera did not happen until the 1960s, several decades had passed and it could only mean nothing but neglect.

The essays in these book vary in topics (and somewhat in quality). I think the first chapter on the erasure of Papuan nationalism in Indonesian historiography posed a deep and powerful question on what it means to be a part of Indonesia but it doesn't read easily.

I find the chapter on transmigrasi the most interesting. Here the author classified four types of oppositions to the transmigrasi program, one of which was the environment group. More interestingly, he listed rebuttals/counter arguments to the allegations that transmigrasi was a Javanization, Islamization, and militerization. His rebuttals were:
- in more recent years (1980s) migrants came from Bali and NTT–not Java.
- Balinese and NTT population weren't Muslim.
- A similar program to Desa Sapta Marga program that relocated decommissioned military personnels to South Sulawesi in the 1950s to counter DI/TII insurgency was never carried out in Papua. (I had no idea such program existed!)

Nonetheless, he admitted that there is an “issue of substance” remaining: involuntary takeover of traditional lands. For this he cited a 1986 Kompas article that reported traditional chiefs in Mimika “donated 300.000 ha of lands for transmigrants”.

I find this fascinating because of how little I know about this and there is a new study out on West Papua Transmigration (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3601528).

Rating: 4/5 well worth the time.

This was an amazing read.

I didn't grow up in Australia, nor did I grow up queer, but the essays resonated with me. Especially this quote:

“I want to tell people all the time: there is no deadline for growing up, no submission date for your life's narrative. You can work it out now or later. You can reveal yourself in parts, or as a whole, and make revisions. For better or worse, sooner or later, life conspires to reveal you to yourself, and this is growing up.”

Other choice quotes:

“I resented the idea of coming out. It wasn't that I was introverted, or that i felt like my romances were shameful, but that I loathed the idea of being pigeonholed. The social narratives around homosexuality had always left me with the impression that coming out was more than a courtesy. It was an expectation: like taking a ticket to join a queue or picking up litter; it was the responsibility of every good citizen to keep things neat and tidy.”

“To some gay people, being bi seems easy. We have the supposed luxury of being chameleons, the privilege of choosing from the entire buffet rather than being confined to a corner table, as if sex were simply a smorgasbord and falling in love a matter of calculated odds.
“The truth is, being bisexual means being invisible, especially if you are in a monogamous relationship, whether you paint yourself like a rainbow or a white picket fence.”

This book was so wonderful I had to mine the essays for quotes. I put the list of quotes that resonated with me in my blog here:
http://yellowdoorknob.blogspot.com/2020/05/growing-up-queer-in-australia.html

This book is bad. So bad it ignited a Read Rage so bright, it could have illuminated the entire area of London:

- It opens with an entitled high schooler, demanding a meeting with a faculty. Later we learn that he had a crush on one of the university students, and he wished for her to time-travel in flash time that will allow him to catch up with her in age and surely then she'll want to date him. Interspersed liberally with adolescent lovesick woes of you-are-not-seeing-someone-else-aren't-you-what-does-the-uncultured-american-have-over-me-whose-love-for-you-is-pure.

- People running around in Oxford 2060 trying to catch a person or another for some signatures that they need for forms that they need to file. Haven't they got emails? instant messages? sms? cell phones? So much for being in the future.

- I worked in a research center, and the work could be frantic at times when we need to prepare arrangements to go to the field in some rural villages: booking flights, reserving lodgings, packing clothes. It was necessary, but writing the minutiae of preparation would make for a dull read. Blackout is a dull read.

- The fieldwork is thoroughly unscientific. The historians, clearly ill-trained, would have produced zero primary materials. I imagine the best that they would produce are secondary materials in the form of recollections and commentaries, but no one could check if the inferences and conclusions that they draw (say, on commonpeople's heroism) were intellectually sound because these historians generate no primary source that other researchers can independently verify. This is something they could have done with further iteration of something like a Google glass/Snap glass that records audio and video for later review. But this leads us to..

- Shoddy ethics. The people that they interacted with (“contemps”/contemporaries) had no idea they were being observed as part of a study. There was no way they could consent to the inclusion, and the I can't imagine the deception can be ethically justified.

- The historians are so condescendingly full of themselves just because they came from the future and knew when and where certain events will happen. Even worse, it makes for a really infuriating reading because:

contemps [normal conversation]: XYZ will happen on date XXYY. I believe in the actions of people involved with XYZ.
historian [internal monologue]: poor contemps not knowing what will happen. XYZ will not happen until date XXYY+ZZ. I read it in my preparation research from newspaper article.
contemps [normal conversation, continue to patter on XYZ]
historian [internal monologue continues].

It reads as if the contemps were conversing with a mute that can only think internally. I could tolerate it if this were some Mexican/Indonesian soap opera—but was I wrong to expect something that garners such high praises (Nebula and Hugo) to be a little better than the novelization of soap operas?

And don't get me started about the clueless ambling and endless fretting for the retrieval team. The characters had no initiative and things just happen to them—such empty characters. It does not help that the main conflict of the book (will they be able to go back to the future?) did not really begin until page 200.

It was this that made me knock off one star—I could have given it two stars if this book were a shorter, or that there was some resolution at the end of the first book. I suffered through Blackout and I sure as hell would rather claw my eyes out than having to go through another 500-pages or so of All Clear just to find out what happens to the characters. Who cares if these historians perish in 1940s? Not me.

Yawla ngapain gw bela-belain namatin buku ini sih. Capek bacanya kebanyakan deskripsi berbunga-bunga.

In short, not the lack of education or poverty. Also, not really about religion. Krueger argued for a bit that the lack of civil liberties was a cause of terrorism.

From the Q&A:
Q: I think Indonesia presents an interesting case worth studying. When the Asian economic miracle was going full steam, Indonesia had a kind of Islam which would be called cultural Islam, rather like the situation in Turkey. You would be hard pressed to find fundamentalism in Indonesia before, say, 1994. But when the Asian economic miracle occurred, most of the wealthy left the country, the education system collapsed, and the madrasahs that teach extremist Islam moved in from Yemen. From 1995 onward, Indonesia experienced a rise in fundamentalism. This would support your argument that it is the content of education that is so important. I think Indonesia would be an ideal research vehicle for you because it provides “before” and “after” cases.

A: I appreciate the suggestion. In the second lecture I discuss the world more generally. I could have mentioned earlier that the Palestinians are particularly well educated, but that much of their education tends to be skewed toward religious studies (e.g., Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2002). This, I think, emphasizes that it is the content of education that is relevant.

This book was on display at my library, and I just read Jo Walton for the first time a couple of months ago ([b:Among Others 8706185 Among Others Jo Walton https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317792367l/8706185.SY75.jpg 6449955]) and I really liked it–so I thought I'd give it a try. It starts out strong with this opening in Chapter 1.Have the gates of Hell been opened? This promises a good pace–a welcome change from another book that I'm currently reading ([b:The Yiddish Policemen's Union 16703 The Yiddish Policemen's Union Michael Chabon https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1557172798l/16703.SX50.jpg 95855]) which bores me with its slow pace.Jo Walton did a wonderful job simplifying the politics in Florence–I have very little knowledge of medieval Italy and it would be really easy for me to get lost on who's who, and it did not happen here.A couple of chapters in, I found myself in wikipedia reading up on Girolamo–and spoiled myself of the story by learning that Girolamo was hanged and then burned at the stake. Or so I thought. As I continued reading, I was thinking this is a solid, enjoyable historical fiction that tracks really closely with the historical account (that I learned from Wikipedia), but with the additional perspective that Girolamo can actually see demons. Then I realized the narrative is moving really quickly, Girolamo is about to be hanged but it's only halfway through the book–And then we found Girolamo in Hell. He was actually a demon, and when he had lost hope in Hell, he began the cycle anew–which was how he prophesied future events. But the next time he returned to Earth, he learned about his true nature. His decisions and his attempts to use the Holy Grail to Harrow Hell over many lifetimes alters the course of history. Until he finally succeeded in the end? The last chapter he finally fell forward on his face from the stake. And the Gates of Hell have been opened.

Aduh, aku suka sekali seri kedua Na Willa ini walau akhirnya agak sedih. Reda Gaudiamo lihai sekali menulis akhir yang membuat pembacanya penasaran dan tidak sabar ingin membaca kelanjutan kisah Na Willa.

Cerita kesukaan saya adalah Ke Kantor Pak. Aku jadi ingat dulu ketika aku dibawa ke SMA tempat almarhum Papa bekerja, perpustakaannya banyak sekali bukunya. Lalu ketik-ketik di mesin tik seharian. Menyenangkan!

Cerpen favorit saya di kumpulan ini ada dua:
Opera Sekar Jagad (Kurnia Effendi) dan Durian Ayah (Rizki Turama). Keduanya tidak pretensius: premisnya natural dan penulisannya menyenangkan untuk diikuti. Ini pembukanya:

“Tangannya yang basah dan licin oleh sabun ikut tertegun. Ia mengenali kain dalam remasannya: batik tulis sekar jagad yang dia bikin hampir empat tahun lalu. .... Punya siapa? Ia tak pernah sengaja menghafalkan baju-baju milik pelanggan yang dia cuci dan setrika.” —Opera Sekar Jagad

“Di antara semua pohon yang ditanam ayah, hanya durian yang sampai sekarang belum berbuah. Padahal tangan ayah setahuku cukup dingin. Karena itulah, perihal durian yang tak kunjung berbuah ini menjadi sesuatu yang cukup mengganjal hati ayah.” —Durian Ayah

Beberapa cerpen lain punya kalimat pembuka yang menarik perhatian, tapi akhirnya tidak semenarik dua cerpen di atas. Misalnya,

“Setelah sholat tahajud, Gus Dar merasa mendapat pesan yang sudah lama ditunggu: kau akan mati pada saat berziarah di salah satu makam wali.” —Ziarah Terakhir Gus Dar (Triyanto Triwikromo)

“Tahukah dikau rasanya membunuh seseorang yang sedang makan lalampa pada gigitan pertama, tepat ketika potongan ketan berisi ikan itu melewati tenggorokannya? Aku tahu rasanya, karena akulah yang membunuhnya.” —GoKill (Seno Gumira Ajidarma)

Menurut saya sih yang betul kerongkongan, bukan tenggorokan. Tapi bebas lah.

“Apakah doa punya aroma? Setiap kali pertanyaan ini datang menggoda, aku akan teringat seorang tukang doa yang setia di masa kecilku. Entah mengapa, tiap kali mengingatnya, lafaz doa serasa bangkit bersama aroma yang membubung dari hidung ke dalam batin.” —Aroma Doa Bilal Jawad (Raudal Tanjung Banua)

Cerpen Doa ini adalah satu dari dua cerpen terbaik pilihan Kompas, bersama dengan cerpennya Faisal Oddang, Kapotjes dan Batu yang Terapung. Kombinasi judul dua cerpen inilah yang menjadi judul buku ini.

Beberapa cerpen lain lagi punya judul yang lebih menarik, walaupun lagi-lagi secara keseluruhan isinya bukan favorit saya. Misalnya:

Laki-laki yang Kawin dengan Babi (Mashdar Zainal)
Cara-cara Klise Berumah Tangga (Novka Kuaranita)
Lelaki yang Menderita bila Dipuji (Ahmad Tohari)

Lalu ada juga satu kutipan menarik dari Ayat Kopi, cerpennya Joko Pinurbo:

“Saya bingung, ajaran sesat mana yang saya sebarkan. Komandan pemuda setempat menunjukkan sesobek kertas bertuliskan, ‘Rayakanlah setiap rezeki dengan ngopi agar bahagia hidupmu nanti.'”

Ini buku kumpulan cerpen yang isinya memang beragam. Saya beri rating 3 bintang.

The most readable essay in this volume is by W.R. Hugenholtz, who wrote about Famine and Food Supply in Java 1830-1914. I did not learn of the famine in various years in Demak, Grobogan, etc. in grade school history lessons so it was new information for me.

However I'm fairly disturbed by the presentation of the Dutch colonizers as a government who merely administer a region, almost as if they were comparable to present day democratic government who are accountable to their subjects.

Probably the only reference to the ills of colonization in this book is this anodyne sentence:

“These payments [from the Cultivation System] were not commensurate with the market value of the products or with the efforts required from the planters.”

The above sentence was from C. Fasseur's essay on the Cultivation System and Its Impact on the Dutch Colonial Economy and the Indigenous Society in 19th Century Java. This essay is also one of the more informative essays in the book, it was well written and structured. Nevertheless, the quoted sentence above was all the more remarkable really because the essay as a whole advocated the reader to look at the Cultivation System more favorably, claiming that it didn't have many negative effects.

I really don't know how to judge the claims, not having read many literatures about the Cultivation System. I must admit it bothers me a lot though. I know I should probably read more about the Indonesian colonial history.

Comparisons with the British Indian colony in this book's essays mainly went over my head because my lack of familiarity with the subcontinent.

This is probably the first book that I read that has an asexual main character, which I really like, although my impression of the character is kind of a laminated cardboard: he's stiff and aloof. Maybe it's too stereotypical?

The other main character, Arthur is a demisexual. His character is more fleshed out with a backstory and everything, but it bothers me that he who had been a very capable organizer became practically useless in organizing a funeral right after Martin showed.

But this was still a very enjoyable read–a really quick one too.