and then there're my books

and then there're my books. i've been reading since i was a kid, cultivated by the regular trips to the library with my mum, who would also never refuse to buy me a book i wanted. book shopping was a weekly event till sometime in my late teens, when magazines and hanging out in malls interested me far more than words and stories, and i stopped reading. but even then, those reading days were a big blur - i could read, and i read, but i never knew how to read until i discovered winterson, who through her exuberant prose, taught that language was more than words strung together to convey meaning - it was also about style, lineage, rhythm, effect, beauty, and above all, poetry. to paraphrase blake: she taught me /to see the world in a grain of word/ and heaven in a wild letter/. and through her novels, i learnt how to appreciate serious literature, and the shelves after shelves of fiction in the bookshops were strangers and daunting no more. through her i could go on to read and appreciate the great, the canonical, the sublime.

and to think this was a mere three years ago. when i returned from melbourne i brought back with me my one stack of books packed into a courier box with much space leftover. how much i've accumulated the last few years; that one stack of books grew and started threatening to topple, and was soon shifted into a new shelf. i still remember thinking, on the way to ikea, if i really needed to buy a bookshelf (that money could go to buying at least six books!). but i think i was buying books at a rate of twenty, even thirty a month (those 30%, 40% borders coupons aren't helping), and not long after a bigger bookshelf had to come, and then an even bigger one. when there was no more space for yet another bookshelf the books had to be double-shelved, and they were bursting off the planks.

unlike walter benjamin, who wrote a lovely, touching, essay on unpacking his crates of beloved books, and installing an exquisite library in his new home, i've had to pack up my beloveds the last few weeks. preceding this was two months of agonising over what books to bring with me to sydney. so for the past forty days or so i was swinging between bringing all and bringing none, and bringing some-of-what in between. brutality works, really. singpost charges me $90 per 20kg, and that meant i could only afford to send down what i need (academic books), and what i really need (some literary tomes; ok, very few). the rest have gone, all eight boxes along with the three bookshelves, to a dear friend's house; they went this evening, and jp and i spent the next few hours unpacking and shelving the books in his room. it was surreal, seeing my familiar loves, a few more than a thousand of them, standing nonchalant in a foreign room, as if they were angry with me. my room now looks, feels, and is, bare. in a way it seems to have lost its soul. this is one reason i find book-less houses a horrifying and depressing affair - is it all about the newest home theatre system and slimmest laptop computer? what does it say about the person who thinks so? i think not much.

i shan't see my books for the next four years, but i know they're in good hands, that they would be read and appreciated, homage adequately paid; and i take comfort in these, as well as the thought that in a way, i'd be reading them vicariously, over oceans and timezones. and four years is a long time for another personal library to not be erected down under, what more with its more established literary culture and rows of small independent bookshops (who genuinely care about books). but this time, at the end of it, they'd be coming home, and we'd all reunite, and live happily ever and ever after.