Confessions of a Book Junkie

Today, I'm comfortably seated at the O'Brien's Cafe, having a nice pot of hot Earl Grey while munching my tropical salad. It has been a full 5-day week for me as I did not take any leave. Next coming 3 weeks, I'll take my Fridays off as I have a lot of leave to clear before year-end.

I've been doing a lot of reading, despite my heavy work schedule. I treat my readings as meals, making sure that I have a healthy diet of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. I cannot imagine a life without books and looking back, reading has been the enduring constant in my life.

I am lucky to have grown up in a household filled with a reasonable amount of books. I know my father was fond of books, even though he did not spend that much time reading them, preferring the accessibility of the daily newspapers. 

Like most kids during my time, I was recommended by the elders to read children's adventure stories by Enid Blyton, but unfortunately I was never fond of them. I found them too mild for my taste: preppy British schoolkids holidaying in a castle and stumbling onto some kind of mystery, was a big yawn to me. My taste was slightly more 'mature'--I preferred adult stories of spies and espionage, even though I was actually too young to really understand the Cold War and the political background of these tales.

I was a huge fan of James Bond and watched every single one of Connery's and Moore's depiction of the character in the cinema. At the age of 11, I read my first James Bond novel--The Man With the Golden Gun. It was anthologised in one of those delightful hardcover Reader's Digest Condensed Books series that were immensely popular then. My dad had a subscription for it, and kept them under lock and key inside a glass showcase, and all I could do was gawk at this splendid display of volumes. 

I would spend my days just reading the intriguing titles I could see on the spine of these books. Titles like Fate is the Hunter, All Men Are Lonely Now, The Days Were too Short, Airport, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, To Kill A Mockingbird, I Take This Land, Mistress of Mellyn, Naked Came I, and many other titles of bestsellers masterfully condensed by the good folks at Reader's Digest. 

There were like 5 condensed novels in each of these hardcover volumes and each story contained wonderful illustrations by a different artists--a main one for the title page and interspersed within the text, illustrations of key scenes in the story.  Later when I was allowed access to these books, I would spend hours poring through every illustration. To me the art themselves were worth the price of the book. I was thrilled and inspired to see the many different styles of different artists, ranging from pen sketches to impressionistic and photorealistic ones, done using various mediums. I learned so much about art from these illustrations themselves.

I remember Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy--a fictional biography of Michelangelo as being very inspiring to me. I even devoured The FBI Story, a non-fictional story about the founding and history of the FBI. With my then limited vocabulary and understanding of world affairs, I barely comprehended its content but I took pride in being able to hold a thick hardcover book in my hand like and being able to pore through every single word and sentence which the author wrote. My lack of comprehension did not deter me. What's important was that I was bona fide book reader!

As I grew into my teenage years, I went through an Alistair MacLean phase, where I devoured most of his published fiction. Many of his titles were adapted into blockbuster movies, notably The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare. My favourites were the lesser known ones like Night Without End and The Satan Bug which was published under his pseudonym, Ian Stuart. 

When I progressed to my upper secondary school, I started devouring more non-fiction and even serious works of literature. I imagined myself Pip in Dicken's Great Expectations and later in the year 1984, I read George Orwell's book of the same title, which he wrote in 1948, about a dystopian vision of the world 36 years' in the future. 

Later, a series of influential popular books on science, religion and philosophy set me off then on a path which determined most of my reading diet for my adult years: The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

Other memorable milestones of reading during my early years of adulthood include Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera and A History of God by Karen Armstrong.  And that was just the beginning of my reading journey. I have amassed a huge amount of books which I've yet to read, but hopefully I am able to tackle them within my lifetime. 

What an inexhaustible source of pleasure reading is! I do not really read to better myself, even though, I'm certain that all my years of reading had made me more aware of my many flaws. Instead I indulge in it unashamedly, purely as a hedonistic act. I certainly make no apologies for it. It is my drug of choice. And I'm comforted by the fact that, with some amount of confidence, that my supply of books will never ever run out.