Top shelf of Essential Reads, immediately by Fresh Reads adjacent Cashier A:
The Secret Garden. Black Beauty. Emma.
It keeps the books alive, the chap stacking responded smilingly when the roll-call was remarked.
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 Bugis mall, the less said about which the better.)
The junction outside Takashimaya needs to be seen to be believed: the lolly-colours of the gigantic screen and its babble washing over the shoppers below with their bags hooked on arms. Space & time travel cannot offer more extraordinary, even in the galaxies outside the range of Hubble. Space-walks going cheap...
Therefore the titles face-up in 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 make-believe.
Reassuring cuppa on the cover in good china. No need the Bex in that receptacle.
The soothing all in 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 & banner names. (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 tags goes down a treat here more than anywhere else perhaps on the globe.
Winterson. Chatwin. Almost a touch of royalty purely in the compounds on offer. Like soft garnished pastry on the palate. 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.
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