By Tok Kai Xue (26A01B)

Before TikTok and doom scrolling became a thing, one of my staple pastimes was flipping through the neon-coloured pages of Geronimo Stilton. I would pluck a book from the endless rows of Popular bookshelves, quietly tuck myself away into a corner, and dive headfirst into another of Geronimo’s spellbinding adventures.  

This fascination (and maybe borderline addiction) towards Geronimo Stilton shaped most of our childhoods – for every morning reading session in school, almost half the student population would pull out a Geronimo Stilton book to read, whether it be tales from the Kingdom of Fantasy or The Journey Through Time. The craze was essentially unstoppable – we all succumbed to it one way or another. 

Perhaps what made the “Geronimo Stilton phase” such a canon event in many of our childhoods would be its ingenious formatting and design. You had the wacky fonts and coloured text, the (highly misleading) mouse puns with words such as “Marvemouse” and “Famouse”, and – most importantly – the diversity of stories the series could tell.