A book voucher would be nice
Since my informal pact with Adri.an last Sunday to read more, I am happy to announce that I have renewed my zeal and passion for reading and even imposed a new regime on my reading habits.
Have I not been reading these past few months? No, I have. The problem was simply that I was taking too damn long to finish any book I picked up. Where my monthly average used to be five books (back in the heyday of university, when a girl had time to debate communism, capitalism and religion, take extra classes for fun, find new music every now and then and still had time to finish five books a month), it has lately dwindled to two, or maybe three in a really good month.
When did I realise I was driving myself into an existential crisis? When I walked into Kino with three of my favourite boys on Sunday (that would be Lia.n-Yi, Adri.an and Soo Hia.n) and didn't really feel like buying anything.
What?! you gasp. No!
But yes. It was true. I kept thinking, "I don't have space in my room anymore and I could always try the library."
Such filthy, obscene thoughts. I bought three books just to prove to myself that I hadn't yet sold all of my soul to the devil: Arthur and George, The Night Watch and The Architecture of Happiness.
Then when I got home I started reading A Transatlantic Love Affair, a collection of Simone de Beauvoir's letters to her American lover Nelson Algren, from the beginning. I had started reading it when Li.an-Yi first gave it to me for my birthday two years ago but because it's much too big and heavy to carry around outside and there's not much of a plot to stick to, I kept getting distracted by other books and eventually shelved it. Well now it's bedtime reading. Small, mobile books for day, chunky episodic epics for night.
My daytime reading at the moment is, as you can see from my book list on the right, The Trouble With Islam Today by Irshad Manji. I am almost done with it and it's not bad. I do wish she had used a less informal, less casual tone in her writing -- you can practically see her rolling her eyes and making wild gestures with her arms at certain punctuations -- but I understand that there was a reason for that, which was to speak particularly to the MTV-addled brains of westernised young Muslims.
But that aside, it has a nice historical summary of the death of debate in Islam, her arguments are backed up by credible sources and she makes a good case for questioning everything your parents ever taught you. I started reading this book pretty much already on her side, so nothing in it shocked or offended me, but I can see some of my more religious friends being scandalised by some of the things she writes.
I also do very much like the fact that she rages against the anti-Semitism that comes with every Muslim child's education. If I hear another "I don't like Jews" or "I don't support Israeli goods" or "You know what those Jews are like," at least now I have more intelligent things to respond with than merely, "But you don't know any Jews!"
On Wednesday I ended work at 3 pm (because I started at 6 am) and instead of going straight home to sleep, I went to Bedok Central. Actually, more than anything, I wanted to buy things from The Body Shop but when I got there I found that The Body Shop had closed down, so I ended up at the library. I told myself I should only borrow two books at most. Oh well, I went home with four: My Life As a Fake, Notes on a Scandal (before the movie comes out I want to read the book!), Pelagia and the White Bulldog (I've been eyeing this one at Kino but it's too expensive) and Half a Yellow Sun (I read the first chapter in The New York Times and was hooked, so this was a particularly delightful find).
Onwards, then.
