Click for Menu

Print is NOT dead

4 years ago / personal / singapore

Bibliobibuli: (n) Those who read too much.

The partner has since moved to Tiong Bahru and after dropping by for lunch, whilst checking out the most mainstream hipster enclave in Singapore (what an oxymoron seriously...), I discovered PS Cafe Petite - which although having the cosiest of interiors (the classic PS Cafe vibes) and a pretty cute restaurant manager, is licensed only for takeaways. This means that while you get to sit and probably take more than just a few photos in the VERY Instagram-worthy restaurant, everything is served in takeaway boxes. But honestly, their sticky date pudding however way you serve it, is always awesome.

One sticky date pudding and too many scoops of ice cream later, we ended up at BooksActually, this gorgeous independent bookstore nestled between yoga studios and more hipster cafes.

Maybe cause it's a weekday afternoon so they weren't too crowded but I had SUCH a glorious time ploughing through their carefully curated collection of travel narratives and literature selections... and ending up picking up a copy of The Stranger's Stranger which is essentially a compilation of poems by by Terry Ong and John Clang. I'm obviously not done with it yet (contrary to what you guys think, I do NOT read at the speed of light lol) but when I flipped through it, several - if not all - the poems resonated with me.

To be honest, I find it quite a sad thing that people these days don't read much anymore. My companion remarked this afternoon that "most kids" would rather spend more time on their digital devices than on a book - I don't know what is he talking about seriously. Am I not a kid still??? Hahaha. But yeah, as much as I am so reliant too on my devices in this digital age (I'm typing this on my laptop - duh? Whilst surfing Facebook...), books still have this magical effect on me where they simply transform you to another world - no? Sorry, I know now we have CGI and whatnots but even Emma Watson doesn't bring Granger to life as much as actually reading about Hogwarts yourself... though I got to admit that she did make a very cute Hermione.

So anyway, my point is simply - Print is NOT dead.

As a child, I loved books more than any toy anyone could give me. These days, on the rare day that I can steal a longer lunch, I'd dash into a bookstore (which sadly, are all closing down one by one) and pick up something so I can enjoy it with my cuppa and comfort food in my mouth (hot carbs are da best...) and even though I own a Kindle, there is nothing quite like the smell of crisp, fresh pages of a new book! I'm not going to pretend that I'm only into literary classics... I read so much chick flick it's embarrassing hahaha. I'm also kinda ashamed to admit that I'd completed the entire Twilight series wtf.

BUT ANYWAY, I'm by no means a book reviewer for the New York Times and if I were to pick a few favourites for anyone who wants to go back to reading, here's what I'll recommend (and you're NOT to judge me by my booklist...):

  • The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
  • Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
  • The Maze Runner by James Dashner
  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  • The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
  • The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  • Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
  • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  • A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

And of course the entire Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.

Happy reading!
https://floraisabelle.com/print-is-not-dead/
floraisabelle.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-43
18504
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:W7XTA6QHCZ2BNC3M5BWY23NUNXJV2WY2
<urn:uuid:c16afb3f-a616-4388-9d55-ee1c5617a400>
2019-10-18T19:51:41Z
104.31.87.241
text/html
sha1:DXFQAAV6OJFH77Q3D3ZO3UFGVFR6AYB5
<urn:uuid:20d449f9-984d-42cd-9752-dd4f162a600b>
https://floraisabelle.com/print-is-not-dead/
response
<urn:uuid:fede6e7d-62f3-425a-8e7a-a7b6b2fcfc04>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-43
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-206.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/