10 march

i watched The Book Thief today, and it was a rather nice movie. i watched it because zixin and huangxiao were presenting about the Pen and the Sword and they used the film as a starter/grabber for their essay presentation. another reason was because i had already downloaded it a few days ago and was just waiting for a time to watch it.

it is a pretty decent movie. one of my favourite scenes is when Liesel was welcomed into the rich man’s house by the rich man’s wife, and she walks into this room and the entire room is filled with books, and the look of awe and excitement on Liesel’s face is unimaginable. the film is set in pre-WWII, so you can imagine what a girl would feel when she sees a huge library full of books, especially after she just took part in a book-burning ceremony a few days (or weeks) before. for Liesel, a girl who loves to read, this might just be paradise.

i tried to link it to real world situations, like how we’re faced with a host of options in our lives, and how we’re given a choice whether or not to read this book or that book. in the past, people couldn’t read. they couldn’t read books which they wanted to read, perhaps because they were banned or considered against (Hitler’s) regime. or they just had no money to buy or to procure the book for reading.

just two days ago I visited Clementi Public Library. you might think that the advent of iPads and eBooks and the like must have kept readers back within the comfort of their homes. but I walked into the library and there were many many people sitting around, reading books with their children, reading the papers, looking for books at the bookshelves, and some were using the multimedia resources available. it gave me a very warm feeling. most of us complain about the lack of time to read books that we like, and we might have forgotten how it felt like to visit the library on a cool weekend afternoon or evening and to just spend one to two hours searching for nice books to borrow. I remember in the past my mother used to pay an additional $8 a month so that we could borrow double the amount (8 instead of 4) of books. i saw a young girl scouring the bookshelves at the library, her arms wrapped around 4-5 books. perhaps she was looking forward to borrow and read them at home. i wonder what might happen when she grows up and begins to forget about what it feels like to read.

i borrowed a book that day. it’s called Marcovaldo: The Seasons in the City by the famous Italian author Italo Calvino. I read 1/3 of it while on the bus home.

let me end off with this youtube video of Lucy Rose singing Shiver. It is really nice.