Greatly Reviewed!

One good thing about Bandung Institute of Technology’s website is its being pragmatically beautiful. There’s no such design that offers us “beauty”. All are made on the basis of use. For example, instead of putting seven bars of menus, it shows seven boxes with active submenus surrounding the main text area. With this, we don’t need to point one menu and wait for quarter of a second or so to let the submenus pop up and click it; we just have to head to the active submenus available and then click it. That’s it. Most of the things there are presented so as to make it easiest for you to use it.

Another thing that needs mentioning is the marvelous digital library management. You see, you can go to its library, head to the thesis section and select certain years, certain major, or so, and you can find as many titles of thesis as the campus has and then you can read their abstracts. To this date, this is the most open hearted digital library in Indonesia. I’m sure it makes it easy for students to search for the availability of certain topics and then when the available abstracts do suit to their needs, then they can go to the library to really borrow the thesis.

The two strongest point of Bandung Institute of Technology’s website.

I just had quite a touchy story here. See, as a webmaster, I open my webmaster email day in and day out. Even at weekends–if I happen to let my self online, :D. Last week, I received an email from this guy. He told me that he had finished his KPC (KPC is a study group organized by a school appointed by the government, this study group is dedicated to those who never graduated from high school and want to have a high school certificate, classes are usually held six days a week in the evening, upon the completion of this program attendants can obtain a senior-high-school-equivalent certificate, which they can use to apply for a job–usually as factory labors–that requires them at least to have a high-school certificate, similar programs are KPB, which is for junior-high-school-equivalent, and KPA, for elementary school equivalent). This asked me whether it was possible for him, considering his certificate, to study in my campus. I directly asked the administrative office about it. They told me that it’s impossible for someone who has such certificate to study in our campus.

It was quite hard for me to start my reply email telling him that he can’t study in my campus. However, I was just a nozzle through which the information must go. I finally managed this. I told him in millions of difficulties any sentimental webmaster might find. It was done. I did it anyhow….

But, just now, I received a re-reply email from him. Know what it read?:

“Has the academic world given such a verdict to us KPC holders?”

Oh, man!

It’s very hard for me to talk about prose without touching on James Joyce’s Ulysses or a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners–well, Finnegans’ Wake is way too sublime for me to grab. And this time, I’ll only talk about James Joyce’s Dubliners.

As a short story collection, Dubliners is unique in that its stories are seemingly written by Joyce in order to be made a collection. They were indeed written separately in time as well as, possibly, place. But joyce himself had a general framework that guided him in choosing the theme of each story. As a result, the stories together imply a single message, that is, paralysis in the metropolitan called dublin. However, this very theme is implied through different stories, characters, settings, and conflicts.

Some stories (beginning from the first to the fourth) tell about the paralysis found among young children. Some stories about that in teenagers. Some are about paralysis found in adult’s life. And the rest are about paralysis found in social life of dubliners.

For those of you who want to write a short story collection and don’t want to write a so-so short story collection, reading Dubliners will surely inspire you to find a good way of presenting a specially designed short story collection. Wait for the more complete review here on greviewed.com.

The face of another shows yet kobo abe’s capability in transforming the experience of living in modern time (and also: radically modernized cum capitalized) Japan.

Yeah, people’s saying that capitalistic life makes people alienated is brought to its farthest intrepretation in this pocket-friendly novel. A scientist loses his face due to a chemical accident in his lab. At the beginning, he doesn’t find any trouble with it. But later, as his relation with his wife gets colder and worsens by the day, he decides to invent a man-face looking mask. Things get reasonably easy for him since he’s a scientist and knows the basic laws of chemistry (well, fyi, kobo abe himself was a doctor [who refused to open a clinic], remember?)

At this point, readers will find our narrator in a dilemma since he decides not to make a face-mask resembling other than his very own face. A study of the relation between complexion and character is presented quite elegantly here. And in the name of shockability (:d), I refuse to tell you the whole story, hehehe…

Still more, this book is presented in a quasi-scientific way, but it’s a good teacher for those of you wannabe writers: it teaches us to write a very emotional topic in a controlled pace. Well, if you often hear reviewers judge certain books whose endings are written in a rush, this time you’ll find how a writer can end (and even tell the whole) his/her story very patiently and with a controlled pace (mind the repetition, okay? Its just I can’t help re-typing the three words).

It’s time now to talk about thrillers. As a first-effort in novel writing, the brotherhood of the holy shroud shows Julia Navarro’s agility in making up conflicts and events. Her good command on the structure of this novel shows how, contrary to being first-novel writer, Julia Navarro is not a newbie in literary (or, more precisely, genre literary) reading.

Its structure (by this, i mean making a certain paragraph tell about ancient events and then telling present events in a subsequent chapter, which will be followed by another ancient event—the continuation of the ancient event told two chapters before—and then presenting the conclusion of the book in the last chapter where the answer of the present’s conflict is in the last event in the chain of ancient events) shows how she knows exactly how to make readers’ fingers so badly stuck on the book pages that they wouldn’t leave the book (or even hold it tighter when they go to the john. Hahaha…

Well, for me, a moslem who didn’t know nothing (previously) about the (magical?) history of the holy shroud, this book doesn’t even a bit make me lost in the history of the shroud. I could just enjoy it as an adventure story. As a thriller, it just is, it is!