Reading: Picking Up From Where I Left Off

In my IKEA 2x2 pigeonholes are the remnants of my revel in the hippy life: my paraphernalia of indie magazines. On the bottom left cuppy hole, are different titles, all one off purchases that functioned as my test drives to sample if the stories sate my reading appetite. Two in particular - Inventory and Cereal, did not.

But sitting on top of the shelf, the very short until-my-thigh kinda short shelf rests my mini album of Kinfolks, all six consecutive volumes from sixteen through twenty-one. Save for the last two issues, the rest have collected dust and developed a sallow sheen - true marks of an oldie, but still the pages inside remain fresh, crisp and white, as aligned with the brilliant stories written by the even more brilliant writers that I've looked up to in reverence. I had stopped buying them when the title went through a design and editorial overhaul, and mostly because it's gotten harder to justify to myself the regular dishing of $30 for luxury prints like that.

These days with the army, weekends have become important time for recuperation, to reconnect with the outside world, to read, to write, to do something. Despite that, just the thought of turning on the laptop or opening a book feels like a direct assault to my convalescence of sleeping and feeling of the midday drudgery.

Not that long ago, I had added another Kinfolk to my stash: issue 24, on relationships. I guess that's the power of cellophane wraps on a beautifully designed piece of work and words that ignite a wealth of emotions. It left it to me to decide what it could speak about, of course my impulse had encouraged me to but it - my curiosity and fascination with human connection -and more so the desire to be good at them had been a winning pitch as I took no more than two roundabouts in Kino to come to a decision whether or not to buy it.

In September, I had knowingly walked into BooksActually, more so to bask in the quaint ethos and sneak a few ootd(well, that had been the main purpose of it anyway.) But I left with $25 less and brought home with me Staple(and a lovely BooksActually brown paper bag) - a local production printed yearly 'for the curious' - ensconced itself with my growing collection of readables. I would assume my attraction to it was firstly its subtitle 'a magazine for the curious' and it issue title: The Dizziness of Youth, a timely phrase that identified so succinctly the predicament and sheer indulgent of being a budding twenty-something. But another part of me bought it out of support and envy, to taste how local indies fare in context to their international predecessors, as some sort of unexplained resolve of my own ambitions to publish an editorial idea with roots stemming right from my brain. Among the other local indie prints I saw and can recall were Vulture, Mynah and Sand, the last particularly for its big texts.

There would have been countless titles I must've seen but can't remember, and in efforts to recall some I stumbled upon this stockist and in this link the cover of all the independent journals from around the world. Every cover a product of a, or several visionary, creative-inclined mind's eye.

But what I really wanted to say is, I really should get back into reading more fervently. Not just to get through the story, but take every sentence as they are, listen in stride how each word is valued and chosen among the cosmic combination and synonyms of words in the English lexicon, learn how to write better, learn how to tell a story better.