My Book of the Year 2022
The successor to SP Blog, SUSPECT is pleased to present yet another round-up of the year’s favorite reads, recommended by Singaporean writers, artists, and thinkers. The recommended book does not have to be written by a Singaporean, but if it isn’t, contributors could recommend a second title that is by a Singaporean. “There’s truly never been a better time than right now to be a poet,” wrote Yeow Kai Chai, and we agree, judging by the number and quality of the poetry books read and relished this year. On the fiction front, books by three different generations of Singaporean writers are noted and celebrated below. Towering above all, however, is the monumental achievement of The Food Of Singapore Malays: Gastronomic Travels Through the Archipelago, by Khir Johari, a history of Malay food and culture, told through the appealing format of a cookbook. In Thum Ping Tjin’s words, “It's not too late for Netflix or MediaCorp to pick it up and turn him into our own Anthony Bourdain!”
Big thanks to all our contributors! We hope you enjoy reading all the contributions as much we’ve enjoyed compiling them. Please support independent publishers and booksellers by ordering from them directly. If you believe in intellectual and cultural exchange as we do, please consider making a donation here.
Ann Ang, writer and literary researcher. This year, I've enjoyed reading a number of recent publications from Singapore and beyond. A fair number of these reflect my own personal interests in ecology and languages, but they resonate with broader conversations as well. I picked up Tokyo Ueno Station by Yū Miri in a bookshop and was only stopped from buying it immediately by my lack of luggage space. This compelling novel won the National Book Award for Translated Literature (2020) and blends sensory soundscapes to convey what it means to lose a loved one, while being lost to the world. Equally spellbinding though less bleak is Scattered All Over the Earth (2021) by Yoko Tawada, where a bumbling multilingual cast of characters helps the protagonist, from the vanished land of sushi, to connect with farflung native speakers of her lost language. I was also delighted by a number of new poetry collections this year that evinced an acute awareness of language-as-thing, and language-as-play, such as Of the Florids (2022) by Shawn Hoo and Anything But Human (2021) by Daryl Lim Wei Jie, both of which are quite aware that the natural world plays with us humans as things. But my book of the year is a non-fiction volume: Pang Sua Woodland: Sanctuary Unveiled Along the Rail Corridor (Cicada Tree Eco-Place and Nature Society Singapore, 2021) by Teresa Teo Gutternsohn and Leong Kwok Peng. It documents the history, geography and ecology of a patch of woodland along the Pang Sua river that adjoins Teck Whye, Bukit Panjang and Bukit Timah. Though the express purpose of this book is to document the natural riches of a location that will soon be developed for housing, the book itself is a gem of local authorship that brings community voices and observations together. It reminds us that we exist-in-place and we have a responsibility to understand our living environment beyond the human-made. This book proves that we don't have to wait for someone else to make a place look pretty or cool on social media before we start looking harder at our everyday ecologies around us.
Boedi Widjaja, artist. I wish to recommend Jee Leong Koh’s Snow at 5pm (Bench Press/Gaudy Boy, 2020) and Jonathan Chan’s going home (Landmark Books, 2022). Though different in method and genre, the two books converge in their exploration into spaces of intercultural liminality. Snow at 5pm is an intricate and playful work of speculative fiction that premises on a fictive writer’s commentary on a fictitious book of haikus. The book offered me a chiaroscuro effect; in the gap between Koh’s poetry and prose, I felt the sharp contrast between stillness and stirrings. going home — Chan’s debut collection of poetry — contemplates intercultural and migrant identities through his keen observations of contemporary social issues and his private experiences. Though speaking of diasporic longing, and at times loss and pain, the poems ring with tenderness and a calm assurance, especially the ones that echo intimate familial memories.
Cyril Wong, poet and fictionist. Shantih Shantih Shantih by Daryl Qilin Yam (Math Paper Press, 2021). I finished this novelette of interconnected stories on my way home one evening, half-expecting snow to fall in Singapore like in the book. There is just no other local author who writes with Daryl’s emo-Piscean sense of awe and wonder, making him as queerly unique as a pirouetting flake of starry snow in a fug of political correctness and ‘I’m-so-clever’ literariness suffusing the scene. I refused to step out from my train until I had finished reading the book!
Daryl Lim Wei Jie, poet, editor, translator, and critic. A book that's been much on my mind is the poetry collection Burning Walls for Paper Spirits (Pagesetters, 2021), by Ann Ang. In it, human consciousness bleeds into things, infusing them with audacious spirit. Beguiled by this whimsical, wonderfully haunting world, I find myself taking off the coveted crown of subjectivity, and gladly handing them over to former objects: a tree, a guava fruit, a bird, an HDB flat. I let my ego crumble into ash and float, supremely light, over a canal roaring with the monsoon rain. I have also enjoyed luxuriating in the deeply refreshing pond that is Shawn Hoo's Of the Florids (Diode Editions, 2022). It's another virtuoso debut that left me floored, astonished by its lithe, wriggling, playful lyric, which re-wilds a sometimes too-carefully manicured garden. What a time not to be human!
Hamid Roslan, poet. I think fondly of Werner Herzog’s The Twilight World (trans. Michael Hoffman) (Penguin Press, 2022), a slim volume of the filmmaker’s fever dream of Hiroo Onoda’s own illusions of defending an island in the Philippines that no longer required such protections. It’s slight, succulent, and kept me going with its supple, unpretentious language. At a recent screening of his latest film Theatre of Thought (2022) I attended, Werner declared himself to be a poet. I’m inclined to agree.
Tse Hao Guang, poet and editor. My book of the year is In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for Our Century (Carcanet and The Song Cave, 2022), translated by Wong May. She takes poems chewed over by generations of schoolchildren and returns strangeness to them, like a theremin cover of Majulah Singapura. In her Tang dynasty, "Cloud-Deep / No / Where," "The world is only world-wide". Some will take issue with this, but in her approach, Wong May reminds us many Tang poets were themselves rejected, exiled, while making exiles of us all from the country of Wong May. Watch out for the long-overdue republication of her debut collection A Bad Girl's Book of Animals (Harcourt & Brace, 1969; Ethos Books, 2023). A close second would have to be Daryl Qilin Yam's Lovelier, Lonelier (Epigram Books, 2021), a sophomore novel which avoids the slump altogether and instead shoots off into the deep and unsettling corners of outer space, the human heart, and an alternate-dimensional Substation.
Haresh Sharma, playwright. It's not every day one encounters a book that induces laughter, tears and anger—and pride. What We Inherit: Growing Up Indian [Singapore: AWARE, 2022] is a collection of stories essential in a society still fixated on binaries and an over-simplification of identity. That some of the stories overlap in their take on 'growing up Indian' is proof that our experiences are often shared, even without us realising it. Negotiating home and family, school and friends, adulthood and relationships, the writers' vulnerability is their strength; their candour, their armour. As Shobha Avadhani writes in The Freedom Walk: You have come through fire / You are strong and you are ready / You are surrounded by love / We are here for you... / You are free.
Felix Cheong, poet and fiction writer. Wendy Chin-Tanner and Tyler Chin-Tanner, editors. Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology (Rhinebeck, New York: A Wave Blue World, 2021.) Embodied is an exciting collaboration between poets and comics artists who are cis female, trans, and non-binary. What’s more, it comes with a study guide (for all you Lit teachers looking for resources!) and early drafts of the comics so that you can explore the creative process. Its 23 chapters feature poems from contemporary voices, such as Laura Hinton and Wendy Chin-Tanner (doing triple duty as editor and publisher too), and adapted into comics by artists like Emily Pearson and Soo Lee. As you’d expect from such a wide range of mix-and-match talents, the style is varied. Some of the comics is almost child-like, such as Ned Barnett’s interpretation of “Capitalism Ruins Everything, even Witchcraft” by Kendra DeColo. Others are more abstract, such as Stelladia’s visualisation of “Gender Studies” by Caroline Hagood. Just for good measure, if you want to read the poem without the artwork, this is provided at the end of each comic. This was an important resource for me in my foray into poetry comics. I read the anthology cover-to-cover a few times to get the hang of how poetry can meet comics book art in the middle, and still resonate as poetry. My second recommendation is Mr. Goodchild, by J.H. Low (Marshall Cavendish, 2021). More well-known as a children's book illustrator and writer—he was a co-winner this year of the Hedwig Anuar Book Award—J.H. Low released his first graphic novel, Mr. Goodchild, last year. And what a surreal, surprising -- and sometimes graphic, with scenes of nudity -- turn it is! The story revolves around a J. Alfred Prufrock-like character (drawn with a bull's head) who tries to break out of a hum-and-drum life measured out in coffee spoons. But first, there is the business of a beast he's always known lurking in his psyche. Low's painterly artwork is exquisite; each page can be easily blown up and framed, and it won't look out of place at the National Gallery. His prose, though, is rather flat and deadpan. While it pairs well with the illustrations and gets the job done in moving the story along, you wish it could be more expressive. But the book’s definitely a worthy addition to the corpus of Singapore graphic novels.
Jason Soo, filmmaker. Who's afraid of propaganda? In Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (The MIT Press, 2019), Jonas Staal overturns the pejorative connection between propaganda and totalitarianism. In democratic regimes, there is as much, if not more propaganda, and in a more insidious form, since they are often covert rather than overt. With a wide range of examples taken from contemporary art, literature, film and theatre, Staal provides a framework to explore what he calls "emancipatory propaganda", which aims to be a force for social democratization, mobilization, and transformation. The ethos of the book can be summarized in a quote from W.E.B. Du Bois: "All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent."
Jeremy Tiang, writer and translator. The late Budi Darma's Orang-Orang Bloomington is a portrait of small-town America as you've never seen it before. Set in the titular city in Indiana, where the author was a grad student in the 1970s, this short story collection views the atomised, faintly absurd lives of the townsfolk with detached curiosity, presenting us with archetypes such as the interfering landlady, the gun-toting neighbour, and any number of local eccentrics. Now available in Tiffany Tsao's vivid translation under the title People of Bloomington (Penguin Classics, 2022), this book also comes with an excellent introductory essay by Intan Paramaditha.
Jolene Tan, novelist. Towering above anything else I read this year is David Olusoga's Black and British: A Forgotten History (Pan Macmillan, 2021 edition). Olusoga brings depth and quiet clarity to the history of relations between Britain, Africa and the Americas, recreating for the reader so many critical episodes, and extraordinary people, that are too often omitted from dominant imaginings of empire, slavery, industrialisation and migration. Put simply, this book will expand your understanding of the world we live in. I picked it up because I live in England, but there is much here of relevance for all Singaporeans—we whose institutions and imaginings are still indelibly shaped by colonialism, often without interrogation.
Yeow Kai Chai, poet. There’s truly never been a better time than right now to be a poet. The rule book is jettisoned, and I’m endlessly fascinated by the proliferations of approaches these days. There’s the eco-archival friskiness of Shawn Hoo’s chapbook Of the Florids (Diode Editions, 2022); the shattering Palinodes in Koh Jee Leong’s Inspector Inspector (Carcanet, 2022); and the alluring mix of short essays and reflective lyrics in Yong Shu Hoong’s music-infused Anatomy of a Wave (Dakota Books, 2022). Still, the No. 1 book of the year for me has to be Boey Kim Cheng’s The Singer and Other Poems (Cordite Books, 2022), a stunning masterpiece and a reckoning of a person’s past, present and future, roaming far and delving deep. His words, wisely understated and luminescent, are always in their right places, but this time, beyond semantics, I’m listening to an inner rhythm, a fundamental sense of pacing, tapping, and breathing that stops you in mid-air, suspended between beauty and fleeting mortality. Take the poem ‘Santa Maria del Popolo’, which must be studied in schools and out in the streets. Covering centuries and countries, switching between art history and spirituality with exquisite ease and humility, it tastes “the body” of Thom Gunn’s own poem ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’, reminisces Boey’s own revelry as “a young man awakened to the power of words…in the British Council,/ evening bringing on the halo of lights around Clifford Pier,” and, latterly, casually acknowledging “the first tourists/writing their shadows” in the Popolo Square. Kim Cheng is a poet who writes with every ounce of his humanity.
Meira Chand, novelist. The highlight amongst Singapore literary publications for me this year is Suchen Christine Lim’s new novel, Dearest Intimate, published by Marshall Cavendish Editions (2022). The novel’s central importance lies in its deep knowledge and illumination of Chinese opera. This dying art, once ubiquitous as street opera or Wayang in Singapore, is almost no more. Dearest Intimate not only brings to life this centuries-old profession and its history for a modern generation but explores the sense of dedication any serious artist must feel to their craft, be they poet, painter, writer, or dancer. ‘Opera is my lifeblood. Much more important than a daily bowl of rice,’ says Master Wu, on the day he founds the Golden Phoenix Cantonese Opera Troup. As with many of Suchen Christine Lim’s novels, Dearest Intimate draws attention to dying ways of life and the onslaught of change. The book’s many layers cross back and forth over time, history, and culture. Woven around the central theme of Chinese Opera, the novel is a deeply felt and sensitively probed exploration of human connection and experience, in difficult marital situations and courtship, loving sisterhood, and family relationships. Above all, this is a book about love in its many guises, in all its brutality and tenderness. Dearest Intimate is an important book for Singapore, and perhaps Suchen Christine Lim’s best.
Thum Ping Tjin, historian. My book of the year is undoubtedly The Food Of Singapore Malays: Gastronomic Travels Through the Archipelago by Khir Johari (Marshall Cavendish, 2021). It's a historical textbook about Malay food, presented in coffee table/cookbook form. He uses food as a lens to look at the hugely diverse archipelago—history, culture, heritage, society—and the level of detail, care, and love on every page is staggering. It's so huge I have to confess I still haven't finished it. But honestly, if this book had been about Europe or China, it would be winning awards and accolades everywhere and he'd have his own TV show by now. But it's about our part of the world and we should be celebrating this monumental achievement. It's not too late for Netflix or MediaCorp to pick it up and turn him into our own Anthony Bourdain!
Ruby Thiagarajan, writer and editor. I’ve spent a lot of the last year in Australia and its bookstores. Our literary scenes bear a lot of similarities — relative size, age, the desire to escape the colonial hangover — but as an essayist myself, I really appreciate the respect that the form commands there. (The essay has yet to become a popular form here in Singapore, for reasons I can’t quite identify.) My favourite find this year has been Root and Branch: Essays on Inheritance by Eda Gunaydin (Australia: New South, 2022). It is an exquisite collection that foregrounds personal histories against larger political structures. Gunaydin’s voice swings between sardonic and compassionate, making a strong argument for ditching the sentimentality that usually characterises diaspora writing. Personal essays have become formulaic — disclosure of traumatic experience, theory or art history reference, pivot to a greater comment about capitalism/white supremacy/the patriarchy — and while I often find these valuable in their own ways, they are getting tired. Gunaydin avoids this; her confessions are not ways to manipulate the reader's emotions but tools to prompt deeper thinking about the stories we tell (about) ourselves.
Samuel Lee, poet and cultural worker. Shawn Hoo's stunning debut, Of the Florids (Diode Editions, 2022), is one of the most original volumes of poetry engaging with the historical imagination and the legibility of archives in Singapore. One gets a sense of the poet's glee in pointing at the sedimentations of language, knowledge systems, and temporalities right in front of our faces, then re-sensitising us to the deep wells of feeling and wisdom to be found in our connections to ecology and the nonhuman. There is never a dull moment in this series of poems and I'm thrilled that a voice like his has emerged in the literary scene as it stands today. Turning to the neighboring field of visual art, a renewed attention to the literariness of art writing has surfaced in a variety of publications, and not least in Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's I Am An Artist (He Said), which was previously published in 2005 in Thai, now translated to English by Kong Rithdee, and edited by Roger Nelson and Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol (National Gallery Singapore, 2022). The strange and beguiling text—which reads like a personal memoir, novella, prosody, critical theory, and gossip column all in one—strikes me as extremely generous in its insight and anti-didacticism, reminding me of why poets and artists would probably do well to read more of each other.
Teo Soh Lung, retired lawyer. 60 Years at the Singapore Bar: Reflections and ruminations, by TPB Menon (Talisman Publishing Pte Ltd, 2022). Written by a lawyer who graduated from Singapore’s first law school, it gives a personal account of how the legal profession developed. I was surprised to learn that our first prime minister Mr Lee Kuan Yew was not at all proud of the University of Malaya and called it a “colonial” university! Menon’s disagreement with several decisions of the Court of Appeal, including those of Kenneth Jeyaretnam’s questioning the propriety of the US$4 billion bilateral loan to the IMF and of Law Society’s case against lawyer Lee Suet Fern makes for interesting reading.
Sudhir Vadaketh, writer. World of Wonders: In praise of fireflies, whale sharks, and other astonishments, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Milkweed Editions, 2022). There is something magical and personal at the same time about the writing that makes me feel like an animal while also remembering lots of stuff about the human condition. The Food of Singapore Malays, by Khir Johari (Marshall Cavendish, 2021). Cook books and food books are the only books I still buy in hard copy. For many years I felt the best Singaporean ones lagged far behind. Not anymore. I've started telling people that this is not just the best food book here, but just one of the best, period.
Tania De Rozario, writer and artist. 2022 was a year of comfort-reading for me, by which I mean it was a year of re-reading. And one book I returned to consistently for comfort was Marian Churchland’s The Hchom Book (Image Comics, 2018). A beautiful collection of illustration and writing, it examines the act and ache of wanting as a joyful, monstrous, inherently human quality — even if the creature that guides readers through its pages is a delightfully grabby goblin with a penchant for hoarding. It is peppered with written glimpses into the author’s personal relationships with gender, fashion, food, fantasy and forests, and filled with gorgeously drawn objects of desire — both magical and everyday. Imagined dwellings, “impossible” jackets, video game larder, crystals (now and forevermore known as “shinies”) and so, so many slices of bread and pie — there is something about Churchland’s drawings that speaks directly to my heart and I never tire of revisiting their images. (Side-note: don’t read this book hungry. All the food in here is drawn so damn delicious. Which I guess comes as no surprise. As Churchland explains, ‘“Hchom” is the sound of something tasty being devoured’. Personally, I believe it’s also the sound you’ll make when you devour this book.)
William Phuan, arts administrator. What do you get when you put a translator’s own writings alongside her translations of another author’s works that inspired her writing? The book may look very much like Clan by Yeo Wei Wei (Math Paper Press, 2022), which is by turn evocative, thought-provoking but entirely enthralling. Wei Wei had started translating short fiction by Soon Ailing, but felt compelled to respond to some of the female characters in these stories. She then took a narrative turn and created her own fiction based on these characters. What resulted is a fascinating literary pas de deux between two authorial voices that enriches the translations and the narrative world created by both.
Ng Yi-Sheng, poet, playwright, and fictionist. Paradise (point of transmission), by Andrew Sutherland (Fremantle Press, 2022) is a pretty amazing debut collection. It focuses on a highly politicised moment of personal trauma—how in 2014, the poet, as an Australian student in Singapore, contracted HIV, severely limiting his future theatre-making career. Yet, as I wrote in my initial review, it has "all the angst and power of a first collection and all the polish and sophistication of a mature writer", invoking a huge range of cultural references, from Norse mythology to Julia Kristeva to Paddy Chew (the first Singaporean to be openly HIV+). Full disclosure: I was approached for advice on the manuscript, and received a complimentary copy. Also want to reach across the Causeway to praise The Girl and the Ghost, by Hanna Alkaf (Harper, 2020). It's an internationally distributed Malaysian children's book about a girl making friends with a little-known Malay hantu, the pelesit, and it plumbs the horrifying depths of jealousy and family trauma while being ultimately affirming about the value of trust and healing. Plus, it's *extremely* Malaysian—kampungs & pawangs coexist with iPhones and hipster cafes!
From the Singapore Unbound team:
Janelle Tan, Assistant Interview Editor. My Book of the Year is Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe (Milkweed Editions, 2022). The poems are instructive lessons in layering sound, making sensual images complex, and how to write sensuality with both heart and intellect. This collection has everything I look for in a book of poems.
Jee Leong Koh, Founder and Organizer. Jenny Xie’s second poetry collection The Rupture Tense (Graywolf, 2022) is a significant advance over her first book, the National Book Award finalist Eye Level. Grappling honestly with the ruptures of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, emigration, and a grandmother’s suicide, the book is transfixed by what cannot be known from such records as the photographs of Li Zhensheng, text messages, and one’s own memories. The collection deserves the wide attention given instead to another sophomoric effort, Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother. My second selection, Lovelier, Lonelier, by Daryl Qilin Yam (Epigram Books, 2021) is one of the best novels written by a Singaporean that I’ve ever read. A mesmerizing story about four friends brought together in Japan by a comet, it accesses the mysteries because it understands suffering. The plotting is intricate, the invention daring, the feeling delicate. I lived in its spell for days after putting down the book.
Sharmini Aphrodite, Fiction Editor. My book of the year is Teren Sevea's Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps, and Guns in Islamic Malaya (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Labour and landscape, work and worship, all converge in the practice of bomohs, pawangs, and miracle workers in colonial Malaya. Taking us from the tin and gold mines of the peninsula to its jungles, to padi fields and beyond, Miracles and Material Life is an evocative reading of Malayan history through its rich and diverse spiritual ecology.