Book Box: Spotlight on books and bookstores
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SINGAPORE – In this week’s book box, The Sunday Times highlights books about bookshops. Buy the books at Amazon
Accidental translator Shanna Tan signs four book deals, including for South Korean bestsellers
ST PHOTO: GIN TAY
Singaporean Shanna Tan stumbled into translation when she translated a tweet from a K-pop idol.
“I never really thought I wanted to work towards being a translator. It was a natural journey that just materialised,” says the 33-year-old.
The polyglot, who has been self-studying Korean since 2008, also translates from Japanese and Chinese, and is now learning Thai.
Today, the home-grown self-starter is one of the rising stars in translation being tapped by international publishers such as Bloomsbury and Penguin Random House to bring some of South Korea’s bestsellers into English.
Book review: Hwang Bo-reum’s Welcome To The Hyunam-dong Bookshop explores books and burnout
Book lovers who read this novel will come out of it fantasising about their ideal bookstore. They might even walk away with a few nifty ideas about how to run one.
In Welcome To The Hyunam-dong Bookshop, Yeongju – who once threw herself into reading to mend a broken childhood friendship – opens a bookstore in a quiet neighbourhood to escape from a life that was “siphoning her soul away”.
Throughout the book, the sensitive Yeongju grapples with the many aesthetic and practical challenges of being a new bookseller. Should her bookstore sell books she dislikes? What are the principles of recommending a book to a customer? How can she turn her bookstore into not just a business, but also a cultural space?
Book review: Bestseller Days At The Morisaki Bookshop twee tale of finding peace at a second-hand bookstore
A colossus on international bestseller lists, this novella about the mind-expanding effect a Tokyo bookshop has on an ordinary office lady is unfortunately twee to the point of semi-blandness and lacks ambition.
It is part of a wave of feel-good, easily digestible books now emerging from East Asia, seemingly written to cater to that most indulgent instinct of book lovers – their love for the transformative space of the bookshop.
First published in Japanese in 2010, it was author Satoshi Yagisawa’s debut and won the Chiyoda Literature Prize.
It has been newly translated by Eric Ozawa for the English market, perhaps with a greater marketability now, given the nostalgia for independent spaces and more generally as an escape from the world.
Book review: What You Are Looking For Is In The Library is a paean to the power of books
As expected from its title, What You Are Looking For Is In The Library is a paean to literature and the power of books.
Beneath the surface of Japanese writer Michiko Aoyama’s down-to-earth and almost soppily sentimental prose is a celebration of life and all that can come with positive thinking.
These themes are obviously universal and the book, first published in 2020, has not only been shortlisted for the Japan Booksellers’ Award, but has also been translated into more than 20 languages.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers Nov 4
PHOTOS: BLOOMSBURY, PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, MACMILLAN
South Korean writer Hwang Bo-reum’s Welcome To The Hyunam-dong Bookshop, translated by Singaporean Shanna Tan, tops The Straits Times’ bestsellers list.
