read?

One of the peculiarities of life here is that you find yourself exposed on a fairly regular basis to the great and good letting you know how important reading is and encouraging you to do some (as in the annual Read Singapore campaign) yet, as far as I can tell, it remains a pretty unpopular activity, at least as far as actual books are concerned. (Though I'm sure there are statistics somewhere letting you know how successful the campaigns are, despite all the signs to the contrary.)

One such sign is the lack of any genuine coverage of what might be termed the world of books in the press here. Over my twenty years of residence I've become vaguely aware of a steady decline in the number of column inches allotted to any kind of book reviews in the 'serious' newspapers The Straits Times and The Sunday Times. This morning saw a sort of apotheosis of such.

Usually there are two pages in The Sunday Times (in the appalling Lifestyle section) that seem to be given over to books. The fact that they have a little caption in the top corner saying read points to this, and you certainly needed that pointer today since there was little in the way of hard evidence that the pages had anything to do with reading at all. (In contrast, seven pages were given over to food, under the nifty heading taste.)

The first of the purported book pages was largely given over, I'd estimate between seventy to eighty percent, to an advertisement for the 4-Speed Automatic Chery A5 Saloon. Roughly half the remaining space featured a picture of the writer (local) of a couple of recently published picture books for children. The actual material on the books was essentially an account of how the books came to be written and how they were to be marketed. I must say I found the car advertisement quite interesting.

The second book page had half its space allotted to an advertisement for some promotion selling apartments at Marina Quays featuring the memorable adjuration life… is for living. Of the remaining half, a significant portion was lost to lists of the 'bestsellers' in Singapore for Fiction, Non-fiction and Children's books. (On my count six of the books on the non-fiction list were related to how to make money.) There was a short but intriguing piece on a writer called Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit priest who's just put out a collection of short stories, each set in a different African country. This was lifted from The New York Times. This little nugget was wrestling for elbow room with an article in a sort of series the paper runs called Bookends. This is based on the brilliant concept of asking sort of vaguely famous people here who obviously don’t read very much what they are reading. Today it was Magic Babe Ning, a professional female magician, the only one in Singapore it seems, who informed us that she is now reading No Such Thing As Over-Exposure - Inside The Life and Celebrity of Donald Trump, which she bought cheap at a book fair. Good for her. And the book she would save if her house were burning down? Undoubtedly, Uri Geller - My Story. Enough said, I think.