Starting with a Comic Book…

A number of bookstores have closed their shutters for good over the past year or so.  While we lament the current abysmal state of affairs, I couldn’t help but feel a little guilty that I too have in a way contributed to their demise by not patronizing the local bookstores as much as I could have in recent years.

While I am not a fan of e-book readers of any sort, I have not been buying physical books much either, at least from the local bookstores.  Call it the convenience of technology, I find myself buying most of my books, CDs and DVDs online.  They are cheaper (sometimes, even with shipping charges), faster and have a much wider range than the local stores.  I had to turn to the Internet because the local stores don’t have what I want, or so I can attempt to justify…And given my poor reading speed leaving me with far more unread books than I would like, I figured that it isn’t particularly wise to keep buying so much stuff…

But if I don’t want the bookstores to continue disappearing, I’d better start buying more books, locally.  So for a start, I spotted the local comics version of “A Dream of Red Mansions” and decided to buy it.  It’s not much of a literary pursuit but I figured that I’d probably never get started on the original anyway, so why not support the young local illustrator and at the same time try to gain a bit more understanding of the story that I had more or less picked up in a haphazard fashion when I watched the “贾宝玉” musical last year?