I only started reading fiction seriously after I got married to Kat.
For most of my childhood, my reading diet was a mix of encyclopedias (my favourite was this absolutely gorgeous set of Peanuts encyclopedias by Funk and Wagnalls – oh how I loved Snoopy and Charlie Brown and their friends!) and game books (Lone Wolf, Assassin, that kind of thing). A chance encounter with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire (Bel Riose! The Mule!) in my cousin’s room set me up for science fiction for the next 20 years of my life. (I haven’t read much sci-fi since my late 20s).
In high school, a growing fascination for politics led me to a steady – and so far unquenched – milieu of reading political biographies. One of my most treasured memories of a book is a hardcover copy of Shaw’s Tun Razak biography that was gifted to me by a high school senior who had won it in the national-level Perdana Quiz competition. I graduated to harder stuff in university – Locke, Machiavelli, and a procession of biographies and autobiographies on Churchill, Thatcher, Clinton, Blair, and other luminaries of the 20th century.
By the time I graduated, I took on heftier tomes in the tradition of political biographies in my 20s: Robert Caro’s excellent biographies of Lyndon Johnson. Schlesinger’s hagiographies of JFK and the Camelot era. In one of my most memorable feats of reading, I finished the entire 1,000-page biography of Truman by McCullough in one week, while recuperating at home after having four of my wisdom teeth removed.
Alongside these political chronicles, I started reading more corporate stuff. I must have been one of the earliest buyers when Jack Welch’s Straight From The Gut appeared on the shelves in Kinokuniya KLCC. Classic works by Porter and Christensen. Graham and Buffett on value investing. Cringe-worthy titles like “How to Think Like a CEO”. (Kat judged me hard for that latter one!)
So when I got married at the age of 30, I was very clear about what kind of reader I was: a realistic, grounded reader (kununnya!) with a twin passion in politics and business – all this, of course, preparation for that glorious career that I imagined I was going to have, in those years when I was naive enough to think that intelligence and hard work was all it took to get to the top.
Marrying Kat was, in hindsight, opening a door to a new vista in my own intellectual and emotional education. Not only because of the usual delights and challenges of sharing your life anew with another human being, but particularly because while we were both avid readers, our formative reading experiences were so very different. Both of us grew up wandering through the shelves of bookstores and libraries (something we still enjoy doing today, together), but while I was content with gobbling up facts, with a side helping of sci-fi, Kat’s own childhood reading was almost exclusively literary fiction – Dickens and Austen and the Bronte sisters and all that.
It took me awhile to get it, but after several years of Kat waxing lyrical about the joys of literature, my reading habits finally turned a proper corner in 2014, when we were both spending the year in Boston. I was back to being a student again, and while the course load and getting to know my fellow graduate students was a constant source of fascination and intellectual stimulation, I realised that I had the time and mental space now to start cracking on all those classic reads that I had wanted to get through. After a few aborted attempts to read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, I finally got to finish it during my year in Boston. Kat and I both got ourselves a Kindle each, which kickstarted a new phase in our reading habits.
I began to realise, around this time, that reading fiction was not just about baca seronok-seronok: literature was Art as a mirror to the realities of our daily lives, a simulacrum of human experience in which pithy and poignant observations of philosophy and existence can sit cheek by jowl with the most poetic depictions of nature and life and sadness and joy and peace and pain.
Another milestone in my ongoing transformation as a reader probably occured about a year or two after coming back from Boston. I got myself a copy of Robert Gottlieb’s Avid Reader. His memoirs were remarkable to me, and such a milestone in my reading life, for two reasons.
The first was that while I had of course known about the publishing industry and its denizens – the publishers and editors and literary agents and authors and proofreaders – reading Gottlieb’s account was my first deep encounter with the idea that you could spend a lifetime, and make a decent living, out of reading. Professionally. This alone was already mind-blowing.
But the other discovery was even more astounding for me: the idea of reading as a feat of achievement. One of the most vivid episodes in this book, was how he spent an entire week, during his time as a graduate student in Oxford, reading through all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I remember him writing about this episode in his memoirs with the relish of a schoolboy who had scored the winning touchdown in a championship football game, or a college boy who managed to score a date with the prettiest girl in school. It was an amazing idea.
It was this latter discovery that spurred me on to my own bouts of Olympic reading. Hugo’s Les Miserables. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Conrad’s Nostromo. A Samad Said’s Salina. Stories by Chekhov and Tolstoy and Cheever and Maupassant. Poems by Whitman and Dickinson and Chairil Anwar. My proudest achievement in my reading list is definitely reading the final five volumes of Proust while on cross-continent train journey across Asia and Europe.
Along with these deep dives into the classics of literature, I also began to dabble with literary criticism. Bloom’s polemical exposition of the Western canon. G. Wilson Knight’s essays on Shakespeare. Lydia Davis and James Wood.
The joy of reading is also tinged with the sorrow of knowing that any one human life would never be enough for a person to read through everything there is to be read. Every minute of one’s reading is an opportunity cost against reading something else that could turn out to be majestic or educational or life-changing. But there is also comfort in this knowledge of life’s limitedness, knowing that for the rest of one’s life, there remains an ocean of literary delights to be explored and enjoyed.
If you are reading this, and you start thinking: that’s all very nice, but have you read this one yet?? – Drop me a line, anytime – from your ocean to mine!