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Epigram Books’ Staff’s Favourite Books

The Request:
Make a list of your top ten favourite books.

The Result:
We are not very good with numbers.

Some were good and stuck to the ten requested. Others, cheated with parentheses. And then, true to the love we have for books, many just could not whittle their list down. Just as we all have different favourites, we all had different ways of expressing ourselves as well so here are our lists, with parentheses, comments and all.
Aditi’s Favourites
Drown by Junot Díaz
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Matilda by Roald Dahl
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
Christine’s Favourites
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
Anansi Boys (and The Graveyard Book and Neverwhere heh) by Neil Gaiman
Ender Series by Orson Scott Card
Chrestomanci Series by Diana Wynne Jones
A Fractured Mind: My Life with Multiple Personality Disorder by Robert B Oxnam
Drina Series by Jean Estoril
To Sir, With Love by  E.R. Braithwaite
The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien
Heart of Darkness (not exactly a favourite but a stuck in my head book) by Joseph Conrad
Dan’s Favourites
After the Fire by Boey Kim Cheng
Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
Complete Plays by Sarah Kane
Complete Works by Harold Pinter
One Fierce Hour by Alfian Sa’at
The City of Forgetting by Gopal Baratham
The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Three Theban Plays by Sophocles
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
Edmund’s Favourite Books of 2012 and 2013
The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud
The Dinner by Herman Koch
In One Person by John Irving
Big Brother by Lionel Shriver
The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
The Infatuations by Javier Marias
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Hothouse by Boris Kachka
HHhH (debut novel) by Laurent Binet
May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes
A Hologram for a King by Dave Eggers
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
Ancient Light by John Banville
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
Ilangoh’s Favourites
Fav African author – Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart.
Book I read every Dec – Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal.
Fav Book that was made into a Play – Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.
Fav Singapore published book – Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story, From Third World to First.
Fav Philosophical Book – Michael Sandel, What Money Cant Buy.
Fav Parable – Spencer Johnson, Who Moved My Cheese.
Fav Biography – Allan Hoe, David Stirling, the Authorised Biography of the Founder of the SAS.
Fav Thrillers – Tom Clancy, Rainbow Six and The Hunt for Red October…I took almost four years to read the former.
Fav Non Fiction Title – Victor Ostrovsky, By Way of Deception.
Fav Indian Author – Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things.
Fav Classics – Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Charles Dickens, Great Expectations and Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo.
Fav Jeffrey Archer – Prisoner of Birth and Not a Penny More Not a Penny Less.
Fav Author I followed and then gave up on – Richard Marcinko, The Rogue Warrior Series.
Fav Self Help Book – Yu Dan, Confucious From the Heart.
Fav Ian Fleming – From Russia With Love.
Fav Mafia Themed Book – Mario Puzo, The Godfather.
Fav Author read during my childhood – Franklin W Dixon, The Hardy Boys, think read ‘em all till 1983.
Fav Singapore set book authored by a Caucasian – Noel Barber, Sinister Twilight.
Fav Flawed Characters in crime literature – Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus and Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander.
Jason’s Favourites
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
The City and the City by China Miéville
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories by Vandana Singh
Corrupting Dr. Nice by John Kessel
The Five Wonders of the Danube by Zoran Živković
Alabaster by Caitlín R. Kiernan
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Drawing Out The Dragons: A Meditation on Art, Destiny, and the Power of Choice by James A. Owen
UBIK and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Lydia’s Favourites
At Home by Bill Bryson
Issola by Steven Brust
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy by  Douglas Adams
The Way Back Home by Oliver Jeffers
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan
The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories by Joseph Gordon-Levitt
You Cannot Count Smoke by Cyril Wong
Fool’s Fate by Robin Hobb
Mira’s Favourites
About a Boy by Nick Hornby
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
Room by Emma Donoghue
Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke
One Day by David Nicholls
Man and Boy by Tony Parsons
Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho
Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
Ruth’s Favourites

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem
Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Riechl
Wild Swans by Jung Chang
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Understanding People by Larry Crabb

Sheri’s Favourites

 

Bear Snores On by Karma Wilson
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr., John Archambault and Lois Ehlert
Henri’s Walk to Paris by Leonore Klein and Saul Bass
The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
Wonder by R.J. Palacio
Room by Emma Donoghue
She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb

(NB: It’s very hard for me to whittle my list down to just these…and these are some of the ones that I am remembering at the moment…and I’m sure there will be more favorites that I have not yet read….)

Wei-Ling’s Favourites

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
To the Wedding by John Berger
Impossible Object by Nicholas Mosley
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami
Turtle Diary by Russel Hoban
Teacher by Sylvia Ashton-Warner
Broken Vessels by Andre Dubus
The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka
The Inland Sea by Donald Ritchie

 

Wen Yeu’s Favourites

Sam, Sebbie and Di-Di-Di by David Seow
Monsters, Miracles & Mayonnaise by drewscape
The Girl Under the Bed by Dave Chua and Xiao Yan
Scenegapore by miel
Myth of the Stone by Gwee Li Sui
真的假的阿？ －几米
一年甲班34号 － 恩佐
妖怪模范生 － 恩佐
The New Sweater by Oliver Jeffers
The Rock and the Bird by Chew Chia Shao Wei
Curious George Series

A Day in the Life of Wei Ling

Here at Epigram Books, we’re blessed to be surrounded by what we love best: books! So what better subject to have Wei-Ling, our editorial assistant, write about? Here’s the latest A Day in the Life, with a literary twist!

As someone who works at a publishing company, I often find myself surrounded by books—whether in the office, at my work desk, or at home. I regularly max out the loan quota on my national library card (and then resort to begging my parents for their cards).

These past few months, I’ve been borrowing as many cookbooks as I can lay my hands on, in order to get some inspiration for the Plusixfive Singaporean Supper Club Cookbook that I’m editing. Currently on my desk is the Momofuku cookbook, Everyday Harumi, Tartine, Tessa Kiros’ Falling Cloudberries, and the beautiful food memoir Shiro: Wit, Wisdom and Recipes from a Sushi Pioneer. Shiro is as beautiful to hold as it is to look at, with wonderful illustrations, old photographs of Shiro’s childhood in Kyoto and of his working life in the sushi restaurants of Tokyo and later, Seattle. I also recently read Kenny Shopsin’s hilarious cookbook, Eat Me, from beginning to end, and could appreciate how well-written and entertaining it was. Kenny runs the New York City West Village institution Shopsin’s, which boasts a menu of over 600 items, each of which is offered all day, every day. In addition to describing his philosophy of cooking and food, the book is also about Kenny’s staunch belief in the importance of developing a relationship with one’s customers, leftover from his days running a small grocery store in the West Village. Closer to home, I’ve been using Cooking for the President (designed by Epigram) as a resource, sometimes even resorting to referring to the glossary of our children’s book series, Sherlock Sam, which contains helpful descriptions of various Peranakan dishes.

At Epigram Books, we’re also blessed with a huge in-house collection of books, many of which our boss, Edmund Wee, buys almost immediately upon release. During my lunch break recently, I read two beautifully illustrated children’s books: Henri’s Walk to Paris (designed and illustrated by legendary designer Saul Bass) and the delightful Waterloo & Trafalgar, by Olivier Tallec. And when I’m not reading for work, or reading my own books for pleasure, I’ve got my eye on Edmund’s copies of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing, Christopher Hitchen’s Mortality and Big Questions from Little People: and Simple Answers from Great Minds, as well as Chris Ware’s graphic-novel-in-a-box Building Stories, which is lurking somewhere in the office.

Oh, and if I’m still lacking for reading material, there’s always Epigram’s wall-to-wall shelf of design books, archived design magazines, old cookbooks (conveniently filed close to the microwave and coffee maker) and lots of books offering… dating advice? Hm… well, staff here know that’s a favourite topic of Edmund’s (just catch him at lunch time), but more about that another time!

March 18, 2013 by Epigram Books Admin
https://shop.epigrambooks.sg/blogs/news/tagged/woo-wei-ling
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