The Reading Culture

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Once my friends and I were all in the cinema...to watch Lord of the Rings 1. Just as it started my other friend, who came late, raced in, and then promptly announced quite audibly, 'Eh what are we watching?! Lord of the Flies ah!?"

That was our high school Eng Lit book, by William Golding!

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Look around you. Go ahead. Do you see anyone around you reading?

It is sad, but the truth is, Malaysians sorely lack a culture of reading. Now before you jump up in arms to protest, I am just making a sweeping and general statement describing the majority of Malaysians. Those of you who are educated, and, if you are reading this blog, are probably well read and extremely literate, most likely more so than me. If we go to Starbucks, Borders, etc, we can see many readers. But how many people actually go there? If we discount such places, we don't see people reading. Even though the majority of those in our circles read a lot, the entire sum of such of us are a miniscule % of the country's population as a whole.

If we go overseas, say Singapore, and Melbourne, it is an extremely common scenario to see people reading everywhere. In parks, in buses, on trams/MRTs, bus stops etc. The culture of reading is heavily manifested. Granted, other countries are much more well managed, and as such, have many beautiful parks conducive for such activities, but thats a story for another day. Meanwhile, back to reading.

I don't understand how people can go through life without reading. Perhaps a wise man once said it right when he said how can you feel bad about missing something when you don't know of its existence? People who don't read miss out so much.

I remember I hated reading as a kid. Then one day, when I was in Primary..2 or 3...when I was in my Bahasa Malaysia class, I was bored out of my wits. Then, I peered into the desk I was sitting at (BM classes were held in classrooms which were not our normal classrooms) and found an Enid Blyton book, 1 of those in 'The Famous Five" series. Class was THAT boring I actually started to flip through the book instead. I read for a few pages... and a few pages more...and when I got home... a few pages more.

Now, for the more sophisticated readers out there, please bear (JA - NOT bare) with me for a while.

That particular book was about how George's (Georgina) mother fell sick and her dad (Quentin) had to rush to the hospital to be with her and Mrs Stick and her son Edgar and their dog Tinker were hired as caretakers of the kids. So these caretakers were up to no good, and the Five (George & her cousins) decided to run away to George's private island. There they have great fun, but soon a series of mysterious events happen at night. The way they described the night escapades seemed mysterious n exciting. For a little boy of that age, especially one who has just stumbled on the world of reading, suddenly, the book seemed interesting. When I got home, I whipped it out, and read some more. It was late at night, when everyone in the house was asleep, when I got to the part about the late night escapades. It was thrilling! In the late silence of my already dark house, in my room quietly reading under the blanket, I could so totally imagine the whole scene unfolding.

Eventually my apetite for books grew and grew. I devoured the entire Famous Five series, then moved onto the Secret Seven, all her other stories and fairytales, and basically, by the end of Primary School, I can safely say I have read most of the stories which I could get my hands on. My favourites was "The Little Brown Bear", The Magic Faraway Tree series, The 2 Golliwogs, and The Wishing Chair series. Each of them bring back their own memories. As I grew, I revisisted several of these books. However, there came a point in time where they lost a bit of their lustre, but still, the value in them is that they help to transport me back to a wonderful point of my younger days, a feat that only they can do.

I moved onto Dick King Smith, the Hardy Boys, Moby Dick, various other books, Roald Dahl (still my ALL TIME FAVOURITE), Robert Jordan, Raymond E Feist and his Krondor series (who can forget Pug growing up in Magician, and the excitingly depicted scenes of escape from the Dark Elves). So many, I can't even remember. I read voraciously, across all genres, covering Stephen King, Patterson, Grisham, even Nicholas Sparks. I covered Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn & Tom Sawyer series, Hemingway's To Kill A MockingBird, CS Lewis' Narnia series, RL Stevenson (Treasure Island, Crusoe), Jules Verne, Poe. Then there was Pearl Buck, Dickens, I even read the Little Women/Men, Heidi, Nancy Drew (just a few b4 i got bored dead) books. So many, I can't even name them all. Theres the Black Beauty (Walter Farley) series, The Worst Witch series (Jill Murphy), those Enid Blyton boarding school (e.g. Mallory Towers, Amelia Jane) series, Sherlock Holmes series (Conan Doyle), Jack London's The Call of the Wild, DH Lawrence, Kipling's riveting Indian jungle stories, the Reader's Digest Condensed Short Stories, Ballantyne's Coral Island, Hercule Poirot, David Eddings, Lord of the Flies, Dickens' Oliver Twist/A X-mas Carol, and weird ones like Mrs Peppermint, The Borrowers...

I could go on and on but I better stop.

I can already hear you guys going yea you better.

Actually, I am a bit embarrased about this but I even tried RL Stine/Christopher Pike and VC Andrews. Stine = lousy cheap thrills crappy. Pike = just as bad but tries to juice it up with XXX bits. VC Andrews = literary skill n plot aside, too much unnecessary XXX and incest.

Some of my best childhood memories involve racing home from school, throwing myself onto the armchair with my newly borrowed from the library collection of books. I would sit there, absent mindedly feeding myself while my mind devoured book upon book, and I could finish a thick book in a day (in retrospect, no big deal). Then I'd fall asleep. It was great!

How about those nights sitting up in my room all by myself up until the wee hours, reading, and it felt like no one else in the world was alive but you? Ahh...or coming home, shower, hop into bed clean fresh and tired, and reading til you dropped dead? Nothing like sinking into the covers with a good book and just physically rotting while your mind roam free. With a Calvin N Hobbes comic. This reading habit still continues today... when I eat alone.. I MUST read.. be it a newspaper or whatever else I can get my hands on, even cereal boxes.

In Melbourne, when it was a good day, I loved grabbing a book and heading out to the lawns for a good solid read.

You learn so much when you read. Your ability to think, to consider other angles, to debate with yourself, etc etc, improve so much.

How can people go through life not experiencing the joys of reading? And no wonder our country is run by such narrow minded ineffective inward looking visionless blockheads.

Bottom Line: To start educating a country's people, to start improving one's ability to see beyond their current horizons, to open up people to a whole new world outside, to enable people to be exposed to new ideas, the government should encourage more reading by reducing the prices of books, not simply banning books, have MUCH better libraries, and have clean public facilities for people to read in.

OK, long post ends here.

10 Favourite Stories That I Can Remember RIGHT NOW (non comprehensive, in no particular order, and probably there are more but these come to mind right now):

1. Daddy Long Legs - Jean Webster (grandniece of Mark Twain)
2. Ludo And The Star Horse - Mary Sterling (brought alive by Mr McCauley, my Pri 3 teacher)
3. Shane - Jack Schaeffer (used in Year 7 lit class)
4. The Notebook - Nicholas Sparks (first book to make me cry, darnnit)
5. All the short stories of Roald Dahl (the best ever..6 feet 6, served in WWII)
6. Calvin n Hobbes - Bill Watterson (I know its not a book but its my blog)
7. The Magician - Raymond E Feist (if only they had Jimmy the Hand)
8. Peter Pan - JM Barrie (beautiful)
9. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (jim caviezel made for a fine count)
10. Everything by - Tony Parsons (love the style)