Shelfies #41: Zen Cho

These are my most presentable shelves, in that they are only barricaded by a relatively small amount of crap, most of which is decorative. The top shelf is “books by friends, or else just random books” and the lower two are Malaysiana and research books respectively. There are two more shelves in the bookcase, but they are occupied by my partner’s books.

My Malaysiana shelf is also a research book shelf, but not exclusively. It houses my Malaysian comic/graphic novel collection, including my copies of Lat’s iconic Kampung Boy and Town Boy. Lat is our most famous comic artist and his illustration style is immediately familiar to most Malaysians. These lovingly rendered illustrated memoirs of his childhood, first in a village and then in the town of Ipoh, are gentle, funny, charming reads. I can’t wait to introduce my kids to them, though – as a friend has done – I will have to buy extra reading copies for them to dog-ear and crease.

I have relatively limited shelf space – my “to be read” pile is literally a teetering pile on top of another bookcase, too messy to be shown off – so most books get moved on once they’ve been read, either to the loft or a charity shop. I’ve kept Samit Basu’s The Jinn-bot of Shantiport and Karen Lord’s The Blue, Beautiful World to hand, though. Samit and Karen are both friends, but also, in my unbiased opinion, two of the best writers working in Anglophone science fiction right now. Their books are smart, funny, warm, bursting with ideas, and globally-minded in a way science fiction so often fails to be.

I’m on a Naomi Mitchison binge at the moment. Of the ninety books she wrote in her extraordinary life, SFF fans will most likely have heard of Travel Light, a slim fable about a girl raised by bears and dragons (it’s name-checked in Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar’s This Is How You Lose The Time War). The book’s as marvellous as Time War’s time-travelling agents say it is, but I’ve been exploring Mitchison’s historical fiction, for which she was best known in her lifetime, and – dare I say it? – it’s even better. Mitchison is interested in the ways people think, the ways they live, and how perhaps they should think and live differently. She’s also interested in a lot of other things – from farming to war, Marxism to marriage. I was pleased to be able to get hold of this extremely 70s edition of Cleopatra’s People, signed by the author herself. I’m not much of a book collector, but you bet I’m going to hold on to this.

Zen Cho writes fantasy and romance. Her newest novel, Behind Frenemy Lines, is a contemporary romance set in a London law firm. Zen is a winner of the Hugo, Crawford and British Fantasy Awards and the LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize, as well as a finalist for the World Fantasy, Ignyte, Lambda, Locus and Astounding Awards. She was born and raised in Malaysia, resides in the UK, and lives in a notional space between the two.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. For more Shelfies, please join us on Instagram at @shelfiesplease.