Sunday, August 13, 2006
Saturday -vvv vvw

A good day. The late afternoon was cool with a light breeze, excellent weather for a slow 6km jog in the park. On my way home after the run, I saw Wendy, my ex-piano teacher, carrying her daughter who must be in kindergarten by now. I haven't seen her for a while but she looked pretty much the same as she did a decade ago when I was still taking piano lessons. Yeah, she's one of the rarer women who didn't turn into an "auntie" after having children...yet.

In the morning though, I went to the Singapore Expo for the National Library Book Sale with my father. We arrived about ten minutes after opening and we were already about 150 metres from the front of the queue to enter the hall. Of course, some people just got in without queueing amidst the chaos. Shuquan must be quite early since he was inside when I got there.

You really get to see some disgusting people there. Hoarding tonnes of random books and then selecting those that one really wants is one thing but tossing unwanted books carelessly and throwing them on the floor is just unforgivable. I know some books suck but that's no excuse. These people don't even deserve to own books.

The place was extremely packed. I saw a woman manoeuvring through the crowd and pulling her toddler behind her. Poor kid, his head kept knocking into bags and butts and half the time, he's getting stepped on. He was on the verge of crying but his mother just ignored his pleas for help.

A lot of people left with a bag full of books. However, being the slow reader and shopper that I am, I only bought 4 books.



I bought Momo because a close friend told me about it many years ago. It's a fantastical tale about mysterious grey men cheating people of their "time", making cigarettes out of it and smoking it away. Surreal huh? It's written by Ende, the author of The Neverending Story so I consider this a tried-and-tested book. For someone who reads very slowly, it's important that I only get started on books that are mostly tried-and-tested.

A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper is the kind of book I think many people should read but only geeks will be interested in, so there's really no point in justifying my preference here.

As for the Chinese book, I just love artwork in children's books. Actually, I don't recall seeing any artwork in adult fiction, except for the ambigrams in Angels & Demons.

I bought The Once And Future King because Magneto was reading it in his plastic prison and Charles Xavier was talking to his class about it at the end of the movie. I mean, if Professor X uses it in his classes, it's gotta be good, right?

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Yiheng made 1:01 PM

3 Comments:

I initially had trouble finding books because the fiction ones were just bad romance novels and non-fic ones were either old travel guides or computer programming textbooks. However I still managed to get some interesting titles...went off with 9 books! Surprisingly most those I took home were non-fic books on business.
By  Anonymous, at 9:54 PM  

Quite a lot of good fiction ended on the side of the hall where people throw away books that didn't make their "second round" of selection. After the first two hours, most of the can-make-it books migrated to the mountains of books at the sides.
By  Anonymous, at 9:58 PM  

hi,

struck by the cool ambigram on the top of your page!

may we know what it reads exactly: timemaker ngaihung?

sorry if we got it wrong.. ;) buts it's cool just the same!

we design ambigrams too..

salam,
nagfa
singapore
By  nagfa, at 8:45 AM  

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