Rebecca Toh is a photographer and the accidental founder of Casual Poet Library, a shared community space in Singapore inspired by a trip to Japan, where she stumbled upon Minna no Toshokan Sankaku in Yaizu City, roughly translated as ‘everyone’s library.’ The project is a social experiment to reimagine how we live, learn, and care through a space built on trust, generosity, and the quiet strength of community.
Which three books would you recommend?
The Solitaire MysteryJostein Gaarder
I would recommend this book to anyone who overthinks about life (haha). It's one of my favourite books. It's about existential madness, destiny, free will, and the search for self in a chaotic world. I’ve always seen the world as a fantastical adventure, our human experience as a mythical journey, and life as a multi-layered game, with God knows what at the base level. This book manages to express these ideas through a fable-like story that unfolds like a puzzle, and yet, by the time we reach the end, we’re left with what I can only describe as a cool breeze. A feeling that everything is going to be okay, and we’re just here to experience it all.
Educated Tara Westover
You’ll be interested in this book if you care about education, knowledge, truth, and mental freedom. It’s a brilliantly written memoir of one girl’s journey to escape her family’s deeply rooted ideologies and reclaim her mind. The writing is nuanced and continually pushes us to question the delicate balance between truth and story. In the end, how do we tell them apart? Or is that even possible?
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes Rob Wilkins
I had never read anything by Terry Pratchett before picking up his biography, but this book really blew me away. I came away feeling a lot of love and awe for Pratchett and his irrepressible spirit, which allowed him to eventually write over 50 books (he wrote to the end, even after he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease at the age of 59), sprinkling them with humour, intelligence, unparalleled imagination, and human warmth. This biography felt the same--thoroughly warm, joyful, and irrepressible, like the man Sir Terry Pratchett himself.
What is your favourite bookstore or library?
My favourite library is Ang Mo Kio Public Library. I grew up near it, spent countless hours there alone reading, and it was there I found comfort, respite, and a place to hide from the world. It feels like home to me.