I recently got a physical book in the mail. It cost me twice as much as the Kindle version and took three weeks longer to arrive (I live in Sri Lanka), but I bought it anyways. Why?

I finally walked into the Colombo Public Library. It’s about as bad as I imagined it. The periodicals room is OK, it has all the newspapers and you can stand around reading them. Not too much else that’s new. It’s mainly the selection of books that’s depressing. I did a random walk around and the newest book I could find was from 2006. There was some non-fiction about the Chinese economy in the 80s. The fiction was even worse.

My friend Shehan Karunatilake has won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature at the Jaipur Literary Festival. Damn well deserved. Chinaman a thoughtful and entertaining book about Sri Lanka, unlike the self-pitying war and araliya tripe many authors produce. Give it a like on Facebook, or better yet buy the thing. It’s fun, sad and strange – truly repping the country.

This is only one column, cause I think I got fired from the Leader. They weren’t happy about a critical piece (critical of The Sunday Leader) I blogged a year ago. They also weren’t happy that I was also writing for The Nation, which I have been doing for months now. The latter I guess I understand, but I think I’d rather be free to write what and where I want.

One of my favorite blogs is Rice & Curry, a food blog that mostly covers Sri Lanka. It’s interesting stuff, and all quite cookable. Thus I was pleased to see that the author, S.H. Fernando, has published a cookbook – Rice & Curry: Sri Lankan Home Cooking – which seems to be out now. It’s gotten some good reviews:

Sociologist Robert Bellah says that religion may be like play. The rules don’t make sense in the abstract, but they can create meaning and better people if you just play along. I’ve been in enough religious debates to conclude that God is not in the details. It’s like having an extended argument about how logical an LBW is and claiming that this refutes the game of cricket. But it doesn’t. These somewhat abstract rule based systems can lead to higher level awesomeness, but viewed in isolation, the rules may not make much sense. Like Java.

Like Deshan says, if books are going out, they might as well go out like dinosaurs. There’s a lovely bookshop in Mount Lavinia that sells pop-up kids books for less than Rs. 2000. These exemplify the art. The place is called Serendib Books. It’s not on FourSquare so I geotagged it on Twitter. Where are some other places to get books in Colombo.

This is a storybook pillow, available at Colombo’s House Of Fashions or Amazon. Not available on the Kindle. This is not the diary of a Japanese courtesan (an instance of Zuihitsu, a precursor to the modern blog). Neither is it an erotic film of the same name. It’s quite literally a book sewn into a pillow.

My friend Deshan often tells me that books will go out like the dinosaurs, magnificently. I agree in theory, but it doesn’t seem the be the reality. It seems that most publishers are content to go out like litigating lemmings. This was until I saw ‘Modernist Cuisine’, a multi-million dollar adventure in cookery by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvol and his team. The five volume book weighs 43 pounds, has four pounds of ink and cost around $500. It is also has some of the best photography I’ve ever seen and gives me a distant thrill at the thought of how much knowledge and experimentation has gone into the work. This book is a dinosaur. It is magnificent.

I’m reading this new Kaplan book, so forgive me if the blog reads like a disjointed review. He speaks very highly of the Omani sultan (dictator in its non pejorative sense). However, he asks, “what happens if – or when – power shifts to a less vigorous or enlightened one? Then such extreme centralization can signal disaster… Nondemocratic countries like Oman often evince efficiency when things are going well, but when problems arise in such systems the population, especially if it is young, can become quite restive.” That is, democracy is not always better in the short run. To serve specific ends, despots are often in order.