Kinokuniya Reads

Thur. 27 October 2011 Top shelf of Essential Reads (immediately beside Fresh Reads), adjacent to the chief Cashier station, A: The Secret Garden Black Beauty Emma - It keeps the books alive (the bright new editions), the chap stacking responded smilingly when the roll-call was remarked upon. Anywhere other than Singapore? Fraid it will be the very same the world over. While we burn and drown and war. Kinokuniya. Takashimaya building, on the entry behind Orchard Road. (There is a second store in Singapore, in the Bugis Complex, the less said about which the better.) The junction outside Takashimaya needs to be seen to be believed: the lolly-colous of the gigantic screen there and its babble washing over the shoppers below with their shopping-store bags hooked on their arms. Space and time travel cannot offer anything more extraordinary even in the galaxies outside the range of Hubble. Space-walks going cheap.... Therefore the titles face-up in pretty covers to tempt on the shelves. King of the Badgers - one along on the same row within Fresh Reads. - No guffawing permitted. This aint playfulness! Not a jot of make-believe. ....Reassuring cuppa on the cover in good china. No need the Bex in that receptacle. The soothing all in pure design. Marco Polo's Silk Road. Derby Day. Under the Sun (Chatwin). And last but not least: Why be Happy When You Could be Normal (Winterson; pale English child on the sand holding a retro parti-coloured beach-ball to camera). Titles, covers and banner names far more important than content. Every bit sufficient to blot any hint of sexual politics too, even in Singapore. Close by Orchard MRT there is Somerset, Red Hill, Clarke Quay, Farrer Park - a certain cache in the author tags goes down a treat here more than anywhere else perhaps on the globe we inhabit - by a smidgeon. Winterson. Chatwin. Almost a touch of royalty purely in the construction of the compounds here on offer. Win, winter & son. Chat and win. Like soft garnished pastry in the mouth. You couldn't go wrong following your nose with those alluring hints. Horsey love story in Singapore!?... (Good a read as it is for teenage girls.) An enchanting secluded health-giving garden for the blighted of spirit?... Sorely needed here as anywhere else. Vicarages, visits, slow romance under the tropical heat??.... Ten thousand times better than Borders notwithstanding. Picked up the other Murakami's Sixty Nine to see how that marker went down with the first post-war generation in old-new Nippon.