The Nightingale

As December comes to a close, we cap another year of reading and another year of providing good books to our reading community with a roundup of ten of the best of 2025.

This year, it gives us booksellers immense pleasure to announce that by popular vote, the 2025 Wardah Readers’ Choice is Why Palestine.

Discussion in a book club circle about mental health experiences, recovery, and the book at hand adds layers of resonance, relatability, a shared human experience, and feelings of being understood.

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.