Last week I caught Opera Siam's Thai ghost opera Mae Naak, composed by Somtow Sucharitkul. While I may not always rate Somtow as a political commentator, I thought his opera was really rather good. So who, or what, is Mae Nak? I'll rip this little snippet from Wikipedia: According to tradition, the events happened during the reign of King Mongkut. …

After mentioning that I had acquired a copy of a book by Dr Iain Corness, I felt a little bad that I haven’t actually had time to read it. So I did the next best thing and contacted the author to ask him to write a little something here. Here is a guest post from the Doc. —– It was …

In every foreign-language book store in Thailand there is a section devoted to books written by foreigners about their new home. I sometimes pick one up and read through a few pages, only to be greeted with re-hashings of some bloke’s sexual exploits or else anecdotes that would be better in the form of a blog than in a book. …

I‘d never read anything by Bill Bryson before and so I decided to buy The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid. The book is a memoir and takes the reader through what it was like living in post-WW2 America. It’s a fascinating and also an incredibly witty account. Here’s an excerpt from page 64: “Can we come?” they’d say. …

They come, they get naked, they run around the dessert for eight days just for the hell of it, and then they burn a 40 foot effigy of a man. No, it’s not a David Lynch movie. And no, they aren’t insane. This is Burning Man, the annual art festival that most people can neither explain what it is nor …

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