The Star Online: Resolve to read!

If you find picking up a novel intimidating, why not kick off a year of regular reading with short stories?

THE Galeries Victoria in downtown Sydney is a beautiful building. It is even more during this holiday season with books falling from its high ceiling, literally. That's what this department store chose as its Christmas decoration: books hung in mid-air, as if Santa had clumsily tripped, spilling piles of books from his sack and leaving them behind to remind shoppers that books make great presents.

Look, a book, I pointed out to my daughter. She giggled, less at the majestic sight than at the fond memory of the book I had read to her the night before, Look, A Book! by Libby Gleeson and Freya Blackwood. It is one of her favourite Christmas presents. "And then we can read it again and again," she lilted gleefully at the concluding sentence of the lovely book.

If you take the stairs up from the Galeries' basement where the food court is, the books appear to be wide open right above your head. I could nearly read the words. Books have replaced baubles, and with the help of sunlight from the glass roof, they need no lights to shine. There, in the week before Christmas when the streets in downtown Sydney were swarming with shoppers, I sat on a bench in the Galeries, looking up and admiring the spectacle. I went up to the second floor to admire it further and, of course, to buy some books from Kinokuniya Bookstores.

Book bounty: How can you not be inspired to read when a department store chooses books as its holiday decor? The lovely sight at Galeries Victoria in Sydney. — Photo by Abby Wong

The sight of the bookstore bustling with activities and crowded with shoppers evoked a strange melancholic feeling. I used to be part of this noble job of choosing books, recommending favourites, and prescribing them for ailments only books can heal. But now, I only buy them. Like those ailing customers I used to serendipitously consult, I might easily get lost among the tens of thousands of book while seeking gems. Yet, I had a plan. Short stories were what I was going after, for they can be read "again and again" and still give the same degree of pleasure as if they are being read the first time.

I needed to venture no further than the front of the store to find my first book. Right there as I stepped in was Alan Garner's Collected Folk Tales. Garner is an old man who tells frightening urban fantasies. My son and I screamed like little kids at the sight of this new book, evoking in our minds the screaming habdabs we read about together on a winter night in Garner's The Owl Service, a fantasy that, in my opinion, is one of the spookiest books I have ever read. This new collection of previously unpublished work and out-of-print folk tales handsomely produced with a gold-embossed purple cover is surely a book to be read and be spooked by it "again and again". I placed it in my basket, still giggling.

My son strode toward the children's section, while my daughter faithfully tailed behind me as if she, too, wanted a shared moment of laughter about books similar to ones I always have with my son. Red being her favourite colour, she quickly picked out the red cover of There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbour's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales.

It looks like a children book, but it is actually a collection of Russian short stories for adults. Eeriness abounds: a woman fills a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a colonel, heedless of advice, lifts the veil from his dead wife's face; and a despairing father eats human hearts in his dreams to bring his daughter back to life. And it's the perfect time to read this book, when the weather Down Under is schizophrenic, with coldness reigning over all and summer light struggling to pierce through the gloomy clouds. I placed it in my basket, my daughter cheering.. ...

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