Every Book Its Reader

Saturday, January 14, 2012

The Use of Front Endpaper

This is an extract from A Pound of Paper by John Baxter, a book which i had finally read through few weeks ago.

Many People, it seems, are convinced that the front endpaper - the blank page at the beginning of a book - exists to be written on. Ladies and gentlemen, the free endpaper is not there to scribble on, or otherwise, as it used to say on computer cards when computers used cards, 'tear, fold, spindle or mutilate'. The endpaper has the same significance in a book as the silences in a Pinter play, the gaps between movement in a Beethoven quartet or the unpainted canvas of one of Bacon's screaming popes. Between the gaudiness of the dust wrapper and the solemnity of the text, it provides a beat.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Miki

He hardly poses, I mean stay still, for shoot. These are rare. :)

In The Ladies .......

Found in the cubicle in the Ladies at 4th floor, Nex Serangoon.

Micro

Finished this entertaining, engaging fast-paced techno-thriller by the late Michael Crichton in a mere 3 days period. I didn't know that the author died of throat cancer on November 4,2008 till I read the last page about the Authors. It mentioned that Crichton was well into the writing of this novel at the time of his death, and Richard Preston was selected to complete it.

The back cover blurb:

In a locked Honolulu office building, three men are found dead with no sign of struggle except for the ultrafine, razor-sharp cuts covering their bodies. The only clue left behind is a tiny bladed robot, nearly invisible to the human eye.

In the lush forests of Oahu, groundbreaking technology has ushered in a revolutionary era of biological prospecting. Trillions of microorganisms, tens of thousands of bacteria species, are being discovered; they are feeding a search for priceless drugs and applications on a scale beyond anything previously imagined.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven graduate students at the forefront of their fields are recruited by a pioneering microbiology start-up. Nanigen MicroTechnologies dispatches the group to a mysterious lab in Hawaii, where they are promised access to tools that will open a whole new scientific frontier.

But once in the Oahu rain forest, the scientists are thrust into a hostile wilderness that reveals profound and surprising dangers at every turn. Armed only with their knowledge of the natural world, they find themselves prey to a technology of radical and unbridled power. To survive, they must harness the inherent forces of nature itself.

The stories is about one of the nanotech companies, The Nanigen MicroTechnologies corporation has developed revolutionary shrinking technology based on tensor fields, an extremely high-intensity magnetic fields. Not only can they reduce machines and robots, they can reduce living human beings and then decompress them to full size. Once they become a threat to the evil Nanigen's president, the seven graduate students and an unlucky Nanigen employee are shrank into half an inch tall micro humans, who manage to escape into Hawaii's forest before they are killed. Here starts the quest to barely survive the hostile surroundings (inserts, warps, spiders, poisons & venoms, and chemical defenses of plants, all deadly to micro humans) and to find their ways back to full size before they would suffer internal Hemorrhage with a prolonged stay extending out to only a few more days in the micro-world.

I've 'learned' quite a bit about inserts' behaviour. Though I swear not wanting to experience it personally.