I brought my wife and son out on an errand today– my dad left me a watch that he’s had in his possession for decades, but it’s slightly too small for me, and I finally decided it was time to bring it to the shop and have it adjusted. I was never really a ‘watch guy’ growing up; I was always more into computers and guitars and video games. My dad’s watch is a little old-timey, but I’m starting to get grey hairs in my own beard, and I’m reaching the age where I like the idea of having decades-old possessions, especially as everything around us seems to get more ephemeral and fleeting.

Anyway, after we were done with that, we headed over to Kinokuniya, which is one of Singapore’s largest bookstores, and I’d like to devote a post to thinking and feeling about one of my favorite activities: browsing a bookstore. I’ll just list out some ‘bullet segments’:

i. according to my iphone photos app, I have 1835 photos and 86 videos that fit the search result “books”. My first thought about seeing these numbers is, “those are rookie numbers, I gotta get those numbers up.”

ii. When I go on ‘friend dates’ with twitter mutuals, one of my favorite things to do (often before or after having coffee, or a meal) is to bring them to a bookstore, where we can browse together while chatting. I’ve always loved books, and have lots of opinions about books, and the people who have good chemistry with me often tend to love books as well, and so there’s something fun and generative about exploring a bookstore together.

iii. I’ve spent the past 12 years of my life in Yishun, which is one of the less desirable neighborhoods in Singapore. I’ll tell more about this story in a later post when I write about our upcoming move. But basically one of the depressing things about Yishun is there aren’t really any good bookstores. The only decent one is Popular, a chain store at Northpoint City (the local shopping mall), and it’s one of the smaller chains, without much of a selection to speak of. Even so, I make it a point to drop by Popular almost every time I happen to be at Northpoint, just to see what’s new.

iv. Even though I haven’t bought magazines in years, I enjoy looking at magazine racks. It actually kinda feels like scrolling through a twitter feed. I suppose it’s no different from how fashionistas enjoy window-shopping, browsing and perusing through the stores to see what the wider scene is coming up with.

v. I understand there are authors who don’t agree with this, but personally I think that browsing bookstores is actually an important part of being an author yourself. Some people feel that this is marketing-brained– I do resonate with what Ray Bradbury says in Zen In The Art of Writing (1990) that went, “...if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.” But I think this is a matter of emphasis. Bradbury wasn’t someone who wrote in isolation. He considered himself ‘completely library-educated’. He would steal magazines as a boy, read them and then return them. According to his Paris Review interview, he “immersed himself in popular culture, from cinema to comic strips to traveling circuses”. So yeah, I cosign both parts of this. I think immersion in culture is important, and I think being deeply in tune with your own excitement and enthusiasm is also important, and the author’s job is to be as an alchemist of the two. Bradbury’s warnings (he also had a sign on his typewriter that said “DON’T THINK!”) are designed to prevent the problem of excesses– an author who’s overly fixated on what the market wants will struggle to produce work with animating spirit. But an author who’s completely disconnected from the market will produce work that’s incomprehensible. It could be that your work might be posthumously heralded as profound genius that nobody could understand at the time, but I’m one of those authors who’d prefer to be at least somewhat understood in his own time.

vi. When I had a layover in Frankfurt on the way back home from New York, I even enjoyed browsing German bookstores despite not knowing German– it was interesting to try and see what I could parse and infer from the words and images. Here are some pics from my camera roll– there’s a book about Confucius, translations of xkcd and Yuval Harari, a translation of Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money, something about Gen Z, books about Tesla and Einstein, Goethe and Montaigne, '‘the first romantics and the invention of the self”. It’s interesting to get a snapshot of what different cultures and language groups might focus on. I also found the categories interesting– aside from psychology, philosophy, and religion, there’s also ‘esoterik’ and ‘wissenschaft’, the first which i seldom see a direct equivalent of in mainstream bookstores– there tend to be dedicated esoterica bookstores– and the latter meaning something more general than science, roughly ‘knowledgeship’ or ‘the construction of wisdom”? It’s all fascinating to me and I could spend hours exploring any good bookstore or library anywhere in the world.

vii. One of the interesting things to notice in larger bookstores is how the way they’re laid out hint at the existence of some very distinct ‘reader profiles’. For starters, I think everyone would note that most people aren’t avid readers. There are large swathes of any population who simply don’t have any interest in going into any bookstore, period. But amongst the people who do read heavily, I think it seems like people tend to read heavily within a genre or set of related genres. The people who read extensively about the histories of Byzantium or the latest new history of the Silk Road are probably not the same people reading the supernatural romance stories. Probably. But actually, having said that, I do think it’s moderately common for readers to try some books outside their ‘core genre(s)’. But the very existence of genres and scenes around those genres is something I find fascinating. Personally I like to be the guy that connects with people across scenes, such that I get people saying “wow, what is this crossover?” My first two books that I’ve written arguably fit in the ‘self-help’ category, but I’d like my third to be something different. Maybe media theory, maybe pop history, something of that sort. I don’t like the idea of spending decades of one’s life stuck in just one section of the library or bookstore. Kubrick made films in practically every genre, and I think that’s the kind of love I have for books. And now I’m thinking again about The Canterbury Tales (~1392) and its descendant Hyperion (1989), books that are made up of different stories written in different ‘genres’ because they’re told by different characters. I’d like to accomplish something like that in my lifetime, though at present moment it feels like such a daunting, overwhelming project. Slowly, slowly.

viii. I’ll end by talking about the joy of browsing. Below are 9 random books- wait, 10, actually– that caught my eye over the years as I’ve browsed in libraries and bookstores. I don’t think I’ve actually bought or read any of them, but they were all interesting to me, and I’m happy to keep a record of them in my camera roll. Revisiting these, I’m particularly curious about The Book of Doors, and Grant Snider’s Thinking about Thinking, both of which feel like they might be particularly relevant to Frame Studies. But it doesn’t even matter even if they weren’t. I like being surprised by interestingness that I wasn’t expecting, that I didn’t set out looking for. There’s a bit of a paradox when it comes to “seeking surprise”. It’s like “planned spontaneity”, which sounds like an oxymoron, but it actually doesn’t have to be. It’s an oxymoron if you’re planning each action that you’re taking, but it’s not if you’re making an effort to carve out time and space and energy to break from habit and routine. In the absence of such an effort, people tend NOT to be spontaneous. Similarly, the way to “seek surprise” is to have some vague idea of what you’re looking for, but be open to noticing anything that catches your eye.

When I look back on my life, I find that a lot of the most joyful moments where when I was psychologically, emotionally, spiritually in that sweet spot between certainty and uncertainty, knowing and unknowing, even sense and nonsense, and let’s also say seriousness and unseriousness. And when I look back at the dreariest times, I was often way too sure of myself, way too fixated on some particular idea of how things are supposed to be, what I’m “supposed to be reading”, what I’m “supposed to be writing”. That’s a kind of hell, a kind of self-tyranny that I’ve occasionally lapsed into. And I know that the way out of that isn’t to get mad about it, but rather to find the humor in it, to look for the cracks, to subvert, to foil, to disregard the lesson plan and dive headfirst into the unknown.