Almost Delicious

 

"Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise."

Miranda July ~ No One Belongs Here More Than You

Our Favourite Things (Books)

 

  

 

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,
bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens,
brown paper packages tied up with strings,
these are a few of my favorite things.

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels,
door bells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles.
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings.
these are a few of my favorite things.

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes,
snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes,
silver white winters that melt into springs,
these are a few of my favorite things.

When the dog bites, when the bee stings,
when I'm feeling sad,
I simply remember my favorite things,
and then I don't feel so bad.

The Sound of Music ~ My Favourite Things

We will Travel You

 

Travel is the movement of people between relatively distant geographical locations for any purpose and any duration, with or without any means of transport.  Movements between locations requiring only a few minutes are not considered as travel.

The word originates from the Middle English word travailen ("to toil"), which comes from the Old French word travailler ("travail").

Conde Nast Traveler ~ Book of Unforgettable Journeys

The Penguins

 

 

"Read Any Good Books Lately?"

Ronald Searle ~ The Terror of St Trinian's and Other Drawings

plant nothing else, and root out everything else

 

Fact #01: All Polar Bears are Left-Handed

by Karen Wai

 

Fact #02: Sea Otters are called 'Old Men of the Sea'

by Karen Wai

anti-fashionable

 

 Invisible Cat Hiding In The Cellar 

by Kenny Leck

  

 Slender Fingers French Fries 

by Kenny Leck

a glass of orange juice and a picture

Dick Bruna (b. 1927), Dutch creator of Miffy, is also an excellent book cover designer. He designed more than 2000 book covers for A. W. Bruna & Son (A. W. Bruna & Zoon), a publishing company founded by his great-grandfather. Miffy is famously known for its minimalistic graphic design--the unapologetic use of primary colours, simple lines, dots and crosses for expressions.

 Havank, The Secret of the 7th Key

Georges Simenon, Maigret en de Onbekende Werker

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Leslie Charteris, The Saint in New York

 Robert Courtine, The Cooking Guide of Mrs. Maigret

Wendy Savory, You Can Eat Tea: Recipes from the English Kitchen

"Dick Bruna is one of the most unassuming men you could ever meet. In company he is rather shy. The thought that he must speak in public, gives him nightmares. He uses a fixed schedule, full concentration at work and people around him he trusts to give him the safety and security he needs.

Every day he rises at 5 or 5.30, squeezes a glass of orange juice for his wife, Irene, and draws her a picture about things she has done, or reminders of things she is planning to do. He cycles along the Utrecht canals and goes to a cafe for a coffee."

~ Horatia Harrod, The Telegraph 

“I would love to be able to draw like a child, so spontaneous, so open-minded on those big sheets. As an adult you start to draw and then hope that you make something good, something beautiful. A child is not like that, they start and see what happens... I draw things you will see close to home, things that I also like. Maybe I still think a bit like a child, I have a childish mind, I think. There are a lot of things I don’t understand.”

 ~ Dick Bruna

The Man Who Made Paper

T'SAI LUN
The Man Who Made Paper

Stone tablets had become a drag. And silk sheets were better for sleeping in than writing on. Enter T'sai Lun, the second-century eunuch who revolutionized the way we read by introducing paper to the Chinese court circa 105 A.D. Lun, a court official, was later promoted by Emperor Ho-Ti for his concoction of boiled-and-pressed tree bark, hemp, rags and fishnet. While some dispute whether Lun was the first to make paper, he was certainly the smartest: He got it in writing. Since then, every world-class writer has gotten between the sheets. After all, said William Faulkner, paper was one of only four things needed in his trade--the other three being "tobacco, food and a little whiskey."

~ 'Authors of Invention', Book magazine, Issue No. 19, (magazine now defunct)

princes and paper engineers

  

  

   

 

 

 "For me," the fox said, "you're only a little boy just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you have no need of me, either. For you, I'm only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, we'll need each other. You'll be the only boy in the world for me. I'll be the only fox in the world for you..."

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Slouching Towards Didion

 

"To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed...The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind...The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture."

~ Joan Didion

Black Can Be Handy

 

Romy Madley Croft
Oliver Sim
Jamie Smith

Baria Qureshi (ex)

XX

"When I go out the pier, gonna die and have no fear. Because you, you just know, you just do".

~ The XX, lyrics from the song VCR

You, Me & Moderate-Voyeur

 

 

"He opened all the cupboards and examined the canned goods, the cereals, the packaged foods, the cocktail and wine glasses, the china, the pots and pans. He opened the refrigerator. He sniffed some celery, took two bites of cheddar cheese, and chewed on an apple as he walked into the bedroom. The bed seemed enormous, with a fluffy white bed-spread draped to the floor. He pulled out a nightboard drawer, found a half-empty package of cigarettes and stuffed them into his pocket. Then he stepped to the closet and was opening it when the knock sounded at the front door,"

~ Raymond Carver, 'Neighbors', Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

books in brown paper bags

 

days of bookstores and apple-milk are finally coming true.

if ever you stand (exactly) in the middle of our bookstore, you will find that beneath the wooden floorboards, there is a cafe: one where certain dreamers spend long hours sampling exotic fare and sip cups of vittoria coffee. if you look out the long vertical windows barely reaching your knees, you may see a certain white cloud, fluffy and slow. the left-most window frames a pretty streetlamp, which it is in love with. but the streetlamp is shyly bowed towards the park, away from you.

i chose, yesterday, to dance awkwardly in the middle of our bookstore - one that is yet-to-be. the room echoes, the walls bare, electricity barely flows through its veins. we are waiting, for that saturday morning - for its pulse to finally arrive. we are nervous; we are excited; we keep our fingers crossed; we ran a half circle around the room (two people, on only a pair of legs). he stops by the window in the middle (the one where you can see the cloud), i smiled at the cloud. once, or twice, we observe the other room. the creepy one with the sink, the disabled window, and the bathrooms. our favourite is still the room with the wooden floorboards. we like the stairway too (the stairs aren't too steep for tiny children). steepness is very important as small, excited people should try not to miss a step while skipping two-steps-a-time. we have big plans in our heads, too huge for small hands like ours. but we believe in the cloud.

so if ever you decide to stand in the middle of our bookstore, and place your ears against the wooden floorboards, you may hear the tinkle of teaspoons and porcelain cups. and you can probably imagine a handsome dreamer sipping vittoria coffee, and a window which is very much in love with a streetlamp.

*

written in 05 Oct 2005
24 days before the birth of BooksActually bookstore at 125A Telok Ayer Street.
 

What the Chinese Don't Eat

Asia Literary Review magazine

Volume #14

In this issue, Gao Xingjian speaks: "Everyone knows I encountered many difficulties getting published in China. Besides the limits on publication by the authorities, the writer also to place limitations on himself and exercise 'self-discipline'. But in China, even when I showed self-discipline, my works were still banned. So I rejected it as ludicrous."

*

As much as open as China is today, it is also as closed as Japan's Sakoku period of isolation.

D-I-S-S-E-C-T

 

  

  

"THE BODY WAS NEVER A FREE GIFT; it gives temporary shelter to our aspirations on a finite lease. We try to preserve and commemorate its tenure. In our age of increasingly narrow technology, we still begin with the body, the province of schools of art and schools of medicine, heirs to our first struggles against mortal limits."

~ Benjamin A. Rifkin, 'The Art of Anatomy', Human Anatomy: Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today

On Being Suchen Christine Lim

BooksActually
presents

On Being Suchen Christine Lim
a dialogue series by BooksActually
moderated by Dr. Gwee Li Sui

D I A L O G U E

Date // 5 February 2010, Friday
Time // 7.30 pm
Venue // BooksActually, No. 86 Club Street

____________________________________________________

ON BEING is a dialogue series by BooksActually featuring visionaries 

who discuss their lives, influences, and art. 

Moderated by Dr. Gwee Li Sui. Organized by BooksActually.

____________________________________________________

SUCHEN CHRISTINE LIM is the inaugural recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize for her novel, Fistful of Colours (1992). Her fourth novel, A Bit of Earth (2000), and a collection of short stories, The Lies That Build A Marriage (2007), were short listed for the same prize. A co-authored play, The Amah: A Portrait in Black & White (1986) and a children’s book, The Valley of Golden Showers (1978) had also received prizes. Rice Bowl is her first novel.

A Fullbright Fellow in the University of Iowa’s International Writers’ Program, Suchen has held several writing residencies overseas including International Writer-in-Residence, University of Iowa; University of Western Australia; Moniack Mhor Writer’s Centre, Scotland; and Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines.

Born in Malaysia, Suchen lives in Singapore but divides her time between Singapore and writing residencies abroad. Currently working on a novel, two of her books for children will be published this year.

We love Granta !

Granta, one of our favourite literary magazines from UK, curates new works of everything from essays, fiction, poetry, to photojournalism. We love it so much that we laid our hands on as many back-issues as possible; we thought we would burst with delight ! We would like to share them with you, also -- from now till the end of February, every issue of Granta magazine is at 20% off.

*

Granta magazine was originally founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University as The Granta, a periodical of student politics, student badinage and student literary enterprise, named after the river that runs through the town. In this original incarnation it had a long and distinguished history, publishing the early work of many writers who later became well known, including A. A. Milne, Michael Frayn, Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Now, it has moved beyond the walls of Cambridge to take over the world !

 

 

"He glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple."

~ J.D. Salinger, 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish', Nine Stories

 

"I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the gentle indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realised that I'd been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred."

~ Albert Camus, The Outsider (or, The Stranger, L'Etranger)