Books and The Reading Habit

"To acquire the reading habit is to construct for yourself, a refuge from almost   all the miseries of life" - W.Somerset Maugham (famous British novelist, playwright and short story writer).
    

"I am concentrating on staying healthy, having peace, being happy, remembering what is important, taking in nature and animals, spending time reading, trying to understand the universe, where science and the spiritual meet" - Joan Jett (American rock guitarist, singer, songwriter, producer and occasional actress).

"A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy" - Edward P.Morgan (American journalist, writer and reporter).

I learnt to read before I went to school. My adopted mum, limited though her education was, made some effort at coaching me to read and write before I started schooling. I was a fast learner at reading and writing and very soon I was able to read simple books in rumi as well as in jawi. The books were old school books from the neighbours' children. At that time buying books for leisure reading was simply non-existent in most homes in such small town as Sabak Bernam. At times, for lack of reading materials, I resorted to reading grocery packages which were then made from folded and glued old newspapers. Most of the time I would be disappointed as many of the wrappers and packages originated from Mandarin newspapers as most of the shopkeepers in the kampung were Chinese. When I was in standard 2, once a week at least, I used to make a detour upon returning home from school to go to the small bazaar in the middle of Sabak Bernam town, dragging one of my school friends with me. There was a small bookshop selling religious books and children books there. The children books were mostly local fairy tales or adapted ones with titles like Puteri Mayang Mengurai, Raja Dengan Baju Baru or Kisah Abu Nawas. They were printed on newsprint, in black and white with some illustrations also in black and white. I would save my daily allowance to buy the books and started a collection myself. Mostly they were thin books about 10 or 15 pages, in the size approximately 5"x 7" and would cost me 35 cents each.

As a kid I was not very active and was not much into sport. My favourite pastimes would be wandering around the kampung with my best friend Normah, hanging around her house or she at mine, playing marbles, batu seremban, hide and seek or galah panjang. The introvert in me was already apparent then. I did not have that many friends, but I had two or three who I really adored and vice versa. Budding narcissistic personalities could be found even in young children below the age of ten. In school there would be these groups of kids hanging around either a popular kid, the teacher's pet or sometimes even a bully. I just couldn't care less, you can be popular, or pretty, or rich, but if you were not my type I just didn't feel the need to be around you, period. There would be time when I would just take my collection of story books and just laying down on the hammock underneath the house, sometimes with Normah and one or two others, sometimes on my own, reading and re-reading to my heart content. It was also a tumultuous period in my young life. My adopted parents' marriage was beginning to deteriorate and they were always bickering and quarrelling. My adopted mum would be preoccupied with her marital problems, brooding and distracted most of the time. My adopted father, weary of quarreling with her would often came back very late and I seldom saw him. I found solace in my little books and in the books in the makeshift school library which one of my teachers created with her own effort. The library would have titles like Hikayat Awang Sulong Merah Muda, Hikayat Malim Deman, Hikayat Seribu Satu Malam, etc. In no time I would go through all the books in the library. My adopted parents quarrels and altercations culminated in their divorce when I was ten. It was a traumatic, hideous and bitter experience for me.

  

Upon finishing primary education, I went to a boarding school for girls in Johor Bahru. I was from a Malay school and thus have to go through one year of integration into an English medium school, known then as the Remove Class. All kids from vernacular schools had to go through this one year of preparation to familiarise and to equip us with using English as the medium for learning in every subject except Bahasa Melayu and Religious Knowledge. The language barrier was daunting at first but I learnt very fast. What prompted me to learnt English as fast as I could was because I fell in love with the many classical English literature novels available then at the school library. We also had good dedicated teachers.

I feel very much indebted to the English teachers we had in the school at the time. If my English is more or less okay now, they definitely had a part in it. Miss Teh and Mrs. Chan were Kirby-trained teachers and were very dedicated to their jobs. The teachers in the school would be rotated for preparation hour (known as prep hour) duty every school day from 7.30 - 10.00 pm. I loved the prep hour if it was Miss Teh who was on duty because we could discuss many things about our English literature lessons. I always admired Miss Teh who read widely and would always give us suggestions on what books to read. Those were the time when teaching was a profession that was truly multi-racial in the country. My classmates and I were a competitive bunch when it came to learning English and we would be challenging one another who would top the class in English. The fact that we came from all over the country and many from small rural villages, made us feel we must prove ourselves by conquering and mastering the English language.

Even in Remove Class we have English Literature lessons. We were introduced to Charles Dickens, Alexander Dumas, Jane Austen, Louisa M.Alcott, Mark Twain and the likes. To this day I still remember the books we used for English Literature classes in Remove Class and in Form One. They were The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, Emma by Jane Austen, The Old Curiosity Shop and Tale of Two Cities both by Charles Dickens. Of course we were using the simplified versions of those classics, meant for young readers. The books moved me. They were not always about kings and their very loyal subjects or princes and princesses. The impressionable young teenager in me was very captivated by those books. It made me aware that there were other worlds out there, with people, cultures and histories which were sometime similar to and at other time very different from ours. I was also reading books by Indonesian authors like Apa Dayaku Kerana Aku Perempuan by Nur Sutan Iskandar, Merantau Ke Deli by Hamka and Tenggelamnya Kapal Van Der Wjick also by Hamka. On the home front there were novels like Salina and Bulan Tak Bermadu di Fatehpur Sikri both by A. Samad Said and Jalan Pulang by Anas K.Hadimaja.

Books and reading are always important in my life. The five paragraphs above more or less described my natural tendency towards reading, as well as the conditions and situations that helped in making me a reader. Reading gives me solace, focus, peace, thrill, excitement, a connection with others, a tuning with the universe. Reading stimulates the mind, broadens knowledge, expands vocabulary, improves memory, strengthens analytical thinking skills, improves focus and concentration, reduces stress, enables you to have emphaty on others, boosts creativity, improves writing skills, helps with loneliness and boredom, experiences character's emotions, thoughts and beliefs, flexes imagination by taking the reader away from everyday life to enter a world of fantasy, suspense, curiosity, comedy, spirituality. It is a stimulant that has therapeutic qualities.

Nowadays I read whatever I like. My categories would include anything from biographies, memoirs, award winning fiction, to travel books, self-help books on various topics, humour, religions, spirituality, animals, nature, families, relationship, health, hobbies and even children books. There was a time when I was very much into Harold Robbins novels. I believed I've read each and everyone of his novels and I loved all of them. Once a friend commented that I was reading trash and I should focus on better materials like those found on the "literary fiction" corner of the bookshops. Well, never be intimidated by others on what you like to read. Reading is for pleasure and not for the sake of satisfying peer expectation. Of course I love some of those literary fiction too. For me, the thing about Harold Robbins' novels is that once you started reading them, you would find it difficult to put them down. Stephanie Meyers is another author whose books are irresistible to me. I finished the first book on the Twilight Saga in one and half days, despite the fact that forbidden love, star-crossed lovers and vampires are not really my cup of tea. Hence the power of good writing.

There is a saying that says "readers are born on the laps of their parents". Definitely there is a lot truth in that. My brother Mi is an avid reader and it follows that my nephew Ajun and my niece Syikin are passionate readers themselves. I can always have very pleasant conversations with them about books and many other topics. Both are mature, confident, very articulate young persons who are also promising young entrepreneurs. However if the reading habit doesn't come naturally to you and you are not lucky enough to have parents who inculcate that habit (no offence meant, some parents do not have the opportunity and means to do that due to many reasons) there are still things you can do to turn yourself into a reader. Will be writing about that in another posting.

To end this posting, I would like to add some fun facts (about me ha ha ha).
List of my favourite authors:
1.  Charles Dickens     2.   Pramoedya Ananta Toer     3.   Harper Lee
4.   Emily Bronte         5.   Pearl S.Buck                           6.   Harold Robbins
7.   Mario Puzo            8.   Dina Zaman                            9.   Kassim Ahmad
10. Thomas Hardy     11.  Hamka                                   12.  Kiran Desai      
13.  Khaled Hosseini  14.  Stephanie Meyers

List of books which I've read (a few a have even re-read) and which had touched me deeply and had left lasting impressions:
1     To Kill A Mocking Bird (Harper Lee)
2     Gadis Pantai (Pramoedya Ananta Toer)
3     Tess of d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)        
4     The Good Earth (Pearl S.Buck)
5     A Stone for Danny Fisher (Harold Robbins)
6     The Godfather (Mario Puzo)
7      I am Muslim (Dina Zaman)              
8      Mencari Jalan Pulang (Kassim Ahmad)
9      Quran and Crickets (Farish A.Noor)          
10    79 Park Avenue (Harold Robbins)
11    The Inheritance of Loss (Kiran Desai)
12    Bumi Manusia (Pramoedya Ananta Toer)
13    The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
14    The Prozac Nation (Elizabeth Wurtzel)

Last but not least, the question that most readers would ask one another "what book are you reading now?"
The truth of the matter is, I always have a few books that I am in the process of finishing. The one that gets most of my attention now is The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe. It is a memoir about a close-knit family relationship as they dealt with the mother being strickened with pancreatic cancer. The Schwalbes is not an ordinary or average family in that books and reading are part and parcel of their everyday life. I am quarter through the book, the impression I got is that every one of the Schwalbe is a passionate reader and especially so Will and his mother Mary Anne. Starting from the time Mary Anne Schwalbe was first diagnosed with the cancer to the time she was hospitalised, Will and his mother would form a kind of a book club, just the two of them. They would choose a book that they have read or they would both read and then they would discuss the book, the way a book club would, every time he accompanied her for treatment, or when he came visiting after she was hospitalised. It is a touching narrative on how a son deals with a mother who is terminally ill with cancer and how the two-member book club deepened their relationship.
In future, every time I finish a book, I will write something about it in this blog.
So ladies and gentlemen, what book are you reading now?