Word: jaspers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...laden Kinta Valley during and after World War II. The "factory" is a nondescript shophouse Johnny buys in 1942 to serve as home and headquarters for his many business schemes. "Our house was not the kind of place just anyone could visit," writes Johnny's only son Jasper, the first of the book's three narrators. "To be invited, you had to be like my father?that is to say, you had to be a liar, a cheat, a traitor, and a skirt chaser. Of the very highest order...
...Having grown up tracking his father's venality, Jasper has little use for the man. But two other observers provide a less sinister account. Snow Soong, daughter of the biggest Chinese tin magnate in the valley, is a willowy beauty whom Johnny woos and weds through guile and determination. Barely a year later Snow dies giving birth to Jasper, but not before producing a diary that forms the second narrative. It depicts Johnny as a clueless bumpkin whom she can't wait to ditch, probably for a suave, handsome Japanese professor named Kunichika who has befriended her parents...
...Still, the samizdat film fits the picture painted by recent defectors of an increasingly angry and desperate populace. "I really think it reflects the popular mood," says Jasper Becker, author of a forthcoming book titled Rogue State: The Continuing Threat of North Korea. "There is a persistent pattern of people trying to voice their hatred of Kim Jong Il and blame him for the disasters that have overtaken the country." Those voices may be getting louder, but it's not clear that Bush?already entangled in Iraq?will be inclined to listen...
...nine years, Canadian triathlete Jasper Blake has been selecting from a menu of technological aids in a bid to get to the top of his event?a leg-sapping, lung-wringing combination of swimming, cycling and running that only the fittest, and perhaps dorkiest, athletes can win. "Triathlon is a nerdy sport," says the intense, lean, 1.7-m Blake. "We have the weirdest group of people into the most gimmicky, gizmo things...
...Jane Eyre (which happened in The Eyre Affair, the first Thursday Next novel), Thursday would be on the case. This is what the British call silliness, and people generally find it either dismal or delightful. If you're in the latter camp, prepare to be delighted by Jasper Fforde's Something Rotten (Viking; 385 pages), the fourth book in the Next series...