my ambivalent attitude

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Was it the kiasu nature of locally-bred Singaporean or was it legitimate love for books that drew crowds to the BOOKS Warehouse sale at Expo this weekend? I hope it's the latter.

I wasn't expecting to purchase many books at the warehouse sale today, since I reasoned that buying fiction books was extravagance use of money (due to the ubiquity of libraries in Singapore), and none of the different varieties of non-fiction books seemed to strike a chord with me. I was quite right. When I reached the hall, the whole place was a veritable marketplace, less the clamouring of aunties bargaining prices and the fishy stench - there were many clusters of books arranged in an orderly fashion labeled with names like 'fiction', 'non-fiction', 'business', 'computing', 'intellectual reads' etc, and people were gathered all around the cluster, trawling through books like searching for the freshest among a whole carton of fishes. To let you have a feeling of how crowded the place was, let just say that I was nearly suffocated - literally. After spending an hour leafing through various books whose titles arrested my attention, I became bored and paid to leave, rather it was my mother who paid, because she had accompanied me to the sale. (sad right? I couldn't find any friends to go out with, and the thought of going out alone didn't appeal to me either, at least my mother became the financial source... Haha) The denouement of the episode: I left with a book that may be useful for my future studies, some text that explains the whole complicated theory behind NMR spectroscopy.

After which we went to Marina Square Cavana Chicken for dinner and I bought a protective case for my Zen MicroPhoto. Window-shopped for a belated present but couldn't set my mind on any particular thing. I shall leave it to the next few days then.

scribbled at 9:45 PM