New books!

Two weekends ago, I bought two books from Borders and one from Kinokuniya @ Bugis:

1. Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation by Cherian George
2. The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw
3. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

The last book is still wrapped in plastic. I haven’t torn away the plastic because I know it will be some time before I get on to it. So I might as well leave it as that, so that it will stay in its pristine condition. The other two, I have dutifully attached a protective plastic sheet over its exterior cover, as I do for all the books that I’ve bought.

My friend once remarked that it is wasteful to buy books. Why buy them, especially novels, storybooks, when you are only going to read them once? You can get them from the library.

Actually, she kind of replied her own questions. I buy books because I, as someone who enjoys reading, like to possess books. The library is a wonderful place, but past experiences have shown that the books that I want are somehow always on loan. I am too lazy to take note when the loaned book would be returned, too lazy to make another trip to the library to get the book if and when it’s available. More important, when I look for a particular book, it is most likely that I want to read it there and then, not some weeks or months later. I am that impatient.

And whoever says people only read books once? I make sure the books that I intend to buy are worthy keeps. And every now and then, I do browse my bookshelf, pick a book, flip the pages and perhaps read a few paragraphs. There are other books which I do read all over again, still others which I would read once more had I the time and the mood.

These are sufficient reasons for me to buy books. I told my friend that compared to buying clothes and fashion accessories, or indulging in other pastimes that can be equally, if not more, expensive, buying books is a worthy investment and hardly qualify as wasteful. The pages of a book yellow over time, yes, but the contents do not diminish in value, as compared to clothes and other things which depreciate in value after awhile. Instead, a great novelist’s work remains intact and is ripe for a revisit anytime.

Finally, I suspect that buying and maintaining a shelf of books is also something egoistical, to satisfy a book lover’s sense of snobbish pride, as in, ‘I read all these books, you know.’ So yes, I read all those books I have, you know...except that quite a couple of them are, err, half-read. Ah, all pretences fall apart…

On another note, I’ve started reading Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory, and it certainly looks promising. The front cover has a quotation from the respectable writer, Doris Lessing who writes, ‘What a storyteller Tash Aw is. Unputdowntable.’ I got acquainted with the writer through a Straits Times feature quite a long time back and I recalled that his first novel was quite well-received. Then I came across the book at Borders that day – I was specially there to utilize two 30% discount coupon which I ravenously cut out from the papers – I flipped a few pages, found it rather interesting after reading the synopsis and a few paragraphs, decided that I shall buy it. And you know what, walking out from a bookstore with a good book that one has just paid for and is now its proud new owner, makes one silently jubilant, as if one had just surreptitiously witnessed the embarrassment of a foe and delighting in the fact. All right, I’m not sure if this is exactly the best of analogy though. Whatever.