The Nightingale

If you put people with common purpose in a room, they become comrades very quickly, especially after trading war stories. With all the reports of closures and downsizings, Singapore's independent bookshops were not having a good year in 2024. We needed to come together, if nothing else, for solidarity and to rebalance our thinking. During the course of the discussion that night, we realised that we needed to cooperate in some way.

Adult Singaporeans need to come home to reading, otherwise they will lose the skills they honed at school. Change is possible. We only have to look to Islamic history to see how the moment of Iqra brought about an efflorescence of learning and literacy to a culture that had not placed that much value on learning and knowledge during the Jahili Period.

The best-sellers from each category for the year 2024.

Some have decried bookshops as anachronistic, that the march of technology has replaced not only the bookshop, but the book itself. But perhaps, like Aladdin's servant, they are too quick to trade new lamps for old.

For our current purpose, it is important to understand that both the medium of the novel and of music is realised in time, not space. A novel unfolds its words in time, even when asynchronous. A song unfolds its notes within measures of time. Indeed there is a resonance, even synergy, between books and music.

I have found that the practice of writing a reading journal leverages on the catharsis one experiences upon completing a reading. Revisiting and writing out annotations in the reading journal help to synthesise concepts and therefore aid learning. You get more out of reading by writing.

To stretch Postman’s ecological analogy, the new media of today is like an invasive species carelessly introduced into a habitat. What results is often ecological collapse that leaves a wasteland in its wake: nothing survives, not even the new species.

Books and print may not be central to the structuring of public discourse, as it once was, but I am thankful that in bookclubs such as ours and in many others, small groups of people gather to partake, for themselves, in the intellectual effort to understand.

Novels make us recognise, reflect, and subsequently enact change in ourselves and in society: books are personal as well as social.