A Gal After My Own Heart

[Richard Romeo]

Copyright 2001 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
                            The Straits Times (Singapore)

                                 January 3, 2001

SECTION: Pg. 1

LENGTH: 2149 words

HEADLINE: Lament of a book addict

BYLINE: Clarissa Oon

BODY:
I HAVE always prided myself on being a woman of prudence and few excesses. I 
do not smoke. I top
all food orders with veggies. I live in terror of the sleepless nights that 
come with falling in love. At a
drunken, slut-themed New Year's Eve party the other night, I was the only 
guest who had not shed a
single item of clothing. Recently, I paid a visit to one of my old 
Literature tutors in the university. After
admiring her wall-to-wall collection of books and discussing the relative 
merits of shelving books
according to period (medieval vs. 19th-century) or publisher (Penguin 
Classics vs. Routledge), she
slipped me a thin paperback with a wink. It bore the title, Biblio holism, 
which its American author, Tom
Raabe, defined as 'the habitual longing to purchase, read, store, admire and 
consume books'. I was
speechless. The state of my bedroom at home flashed through my mind: 
volumes, half of which I have
never read, spilling out of bookcases. Tomes piled high on my bedside table, 
obscuring some light from
the window. Suddenly, what had been just a tendency to hang around bookshops 
had a name. I was a
dirty little book-buying addict. It had not always been like this. As a kid 
growing up, my family practised
thrift and never once shelled out money to support my reading habit. My Dad 
and I made weekly trips
to the neighbourhood branch library - located, conveniently, just downstairs 
from our flat. We pooled
the entire household's library cards and carted back 10 books, all of which, 
incidentally, I read. In
university, prodded by lengthy reading lists for every course, I began 
buying books. It turned out to be
expensive, since I was one of those disgusting students who read everything 
that was remotely required.
I combed through 800-page novels like George Eliot's Middlemarch (wishing 
fervently that Dorothea
Brooke and her overactive imagination would get a life) and Thomas Pynchon's 
Gravity's Rainbow
(giggling and sucking in my breath at America 's most reclusive author's 
depraved world of sexual
hi-jinks and rocket annihilation). My other major being Philosophy, my 
well-worn volumes of Plato's
The Republic and Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason - I refused to photocopy the 
required chapters like
everyone else - have detailed notes in the margins like 'hmm', '?' and 'what 
the f%$ * does this mean'. In
the past three years, however, being a no-life journalist has shot all my 
diligent reading to pieces, while
giving me the disposable income to buy yet more books. Dramatic changes have 
also happened to the
book-retail landscape in Singapore. Borders and Kinokuniya turned 
book-browsing and buying into an
exhaustive social activity, inducing grown men to park themselves for hours 
on fat plush armchairs or
slim Zen-style benches just to read. Travelling to London, Frankfurt and 
Adelaide on work assignments,
I returned home with more books stuffed in between overcoats and underwear 
in my bulging suitcase.
My biggest find occurred while ro aming the streets of Tel Aviv, passing 
soldiers carrying arms and the
austere, grid-like lines of the city's Bauhaus-style buildings. I turned a 
corner of shops with Hebrew
signboards, and, unhesitatingly, entered a little hole-in-the-wall bookstore 
called White Raven Books.
For 50 shekels (about S$ 20), I cleaned out the store out of all the 
battered, pulp science fiction novels
of cult favourite Samuel R. Delany. The titles date back to the 1960s and 
are now out of print. Nor do I
throw any of my books away. All my acquisitions, from Architecture: A Reader 
In Critical Theory
(unread) to Don DeLillo's novel Underworld (bookmark resting halfway through 
its 827 pages), are
hoarded in my room. I take them out every now and then, admire their jackets 
and thumb through their
freshly-cut pages. I dip into some every now and then, but the actual 
reading from cover to cover is
forever deferred. It is enough for them to be mine, really; as though, 
through the sheer fact of ownership,
I have abs rbed their repositories of knowledge. SINCE Big Brother of 
today's age is the mass media,
the private, patient act of reading has become something to be eulogised, 
with a force once reserved for
old lovers. Journalist Anne Fadiman wrote her delightful collection of 
essays, Ex Libris, for the
like-minded soul for whom the 'textures and colours and smells (of old 
books) have become as familiar
to us as our children's skin'. In November's issue of Harper's Magazine, 
essayist William Gass wrote an
eloquent defence of the 'enduring pleasures of paper, type, page and ink'. 
He wrote: 'Unlike the love
we've made or the meals we've eaten, books congregate to form a record 
around us of what they've fed
our stomachs or our brains. These are not a hunter's trophies but the living 
animals themselves.' Already,
however, more people are buying books through point and click - the number 
of books for adult
American readers bought via the Internet nearly tripled in 1999. In 50 to 
100 years' time, booksh ps
and even books themselves, in physical form, will become dinosaurs and 
collector's rarities like vinyl
records are today. As sure as Sunday church-goers have already begun 
scrolling through e-bibles
stored in their Palm Pilots, the signs are that in the not-too-distant 
future, you will no longer 'pick up a
book', only 'access a database'. When that happens, the fact of the 
'library' will become like a surreal
Borgesian fantasy. The word itself will come to mean something different 
from the rows and rows of
bound leather and paper that I surround myself with, the reality of which 
will only live on in dim
memories as an absurd, precious, incorruptible echo.



LOAD-DATE: January 4, 2001




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