The latest book reviews this month include Run for Your Life! The Complete Marathon Guide, Singapore – Sketches of the Lion City, The Adventures of Mooty – Books One to Five and A Fraction of the Whole.

Run for Your Life! The Complete Marathon Guide
Dr Ben Tan
Marshall Cavendish

Running has taken off amazingly in Singapore, particularly in the past five years. This comprehensive guide is not only timely, but comes from someone eminently qualified to put it together. Olympic-team sailor Ben Tan decided at the age of 35 to become a serious runner – which, incidentally, required him to reduce his weight from 78kg to 64kg – and the story of his determined journey towards becoming a sub-three-hour marathoner will inspire anyone who has ever gone out on the road in these sweaty conditions.   

Eleven informative chapters include: Measuring Your Performance, Run Like a Kenyan, Nutrition for Distance Runners, Race Strategy, Run Injury Free, and Amazing Overseas Marathons-Cum-Holidays. Contributions from top local physiotherapists, sports doctors, podiatrists and others add to the usefulness of this book. The cherry on the cake is Ben Tan’s excellent writing style – a pleasure that can be hard to come by in Singapore.

Verne Maree

Singapore – Sketches of the Lion City
Lorette E. Roberts
Bridge House Design

Already known for her sketches and watercolour paintings of Hong Kong, Lorette E. Roberts has now turned her attention to the Lion City with this new coffee-table book.

Aside from the quality of the art – shophouses, hawker food and gardens are all delightfully rendered – there’s a wealth of quirky history and trivia in the accompanying handwritten notes, which wrap like tendrils in and around her pictures. This is more than just a visual feast.

Roberts has done some legwork with her sketchpad and paints, too: not just the city centre, but Ang Mo Kio, Pulau Ubin, Kranji and MacRitchie Reservoir all get the water-colour treatment, as do kids playing on the beach at Sentosa, and even a Hooters girl at Clarke Quay.

Though she lives in Suffolk, England, Roberts is a regular visitor to Singapore and her love for the place is palpable from these pages.

Shamus Sillar

The Adventures of Mooty – Books One to Five
Jessie Wee, illustrated by Kwan Shan Mei
Marshall Cavendish Children

Here’s something refreshingly different for the under-5s. When they were first published in 1980, this series of lovely stories was something of a groundbreaker: As opposed to the diet of Western children’s literature that had hitherto been all that was available for youngsters, loveable Mooty the Mouse and his animal friends are subtly but unmistakeably in Singapore.

For example, we have Mooty and the Satay Man, and in Mooty Plays Hide and Seek, instead of hedgehogs or foxes, Mooty’s best friends include baby lizards Tchitchik and Tchitchak; high drama ensues when one of them loses his tail.

Delightful illustrations reflect the location, too: when Mooty gets lost in the city, he hides under what looks just like Cavenagh Bridge. Each of the five soft-cover books contains two stories.

Verne Maree

BOOK CLUB CORNER

A Fraction of the Whole
Steve Toltz

I normally select a book based on its weight, because I read on planes, at bus stops and in taxi queues. This 700-page tome breached my cardinal criterion, but proved captivating, funny, reflective and moving.

The story about a dysfunctional father, Martin, and his son, Jasper, is told in a series of novels, diaries and letters. Martin slips into a coma at the age of four and comes out of it four years later. His brother Terry is obsessed by sports as a child, until he is crippled in an accident, and later ironically becomes revered by the Australian public for killing sports celebrities caught cheating.

Bizarre adventures through prison, Thailand and the Australian Outback follow, described through Martin’s keenly negative eye. Complex characters and a beautifully interwoven plot meant that, despite its weight, I could not put this book down.

Alix Burrell