Tag: reading

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On These Slim Volumes

Within these slim volumes
Entire worlds beckon

Swim through the eddies of the brightest minds
of this evanescent civilisation
Skim through these words
Read them with deep introspection

They glimmer with Wisdom's lustrous glow.
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On Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

I just read this recently, and finished the book satisfied but also deeply ruminative.

The clue to this book is in the title: it is about a collection of people living in a poor rural town in the South of the United States of America, each plagued by loneliness in their own way.

The bar owner who loses his wife. The young girl making her way awkwardly into adulthood, and nursing a passion for music that she can share with no one else. The vagabond who sees too keenly the injustices around him, and is bursting with rage and socialist righteousness. The black man who worked his way up to become a doctor, only to find himself seething and raging against the continued oppression and privations of his people.

They all gravitate around John Singer, a man that most call simply “the mute”. Indeed, The Mute was supposed to be the original title of the novel, written at the age of 23 by a precocious young author. Almost unique for her time, Carson McCullers wrote of the sorrows and joys of simple people, and masters that very difficult art of shading each character’s narrative so that the reader can almost feel themselves living in the minds of these persons as they make their way through unremitting sadness and misfortunes, in a time when very few cared for the plight of the black man, or the poor.

I enjoyed this book. Each character was believable in their own individual loneliness, and as each of them sought the company of the mute to pour out their worries and sorrows, the reader gets a sense of how difficult life can get. The mute himself, even as he plays the oblique role of being the receptacle of others’ deepest concerns, is struggling with his own loneliness, which culminates in a tragic and senseless ending.

This was a 4-star read. Some rough edges here and there, understandable in the context of a young author finding her footing, but still miles ahead of many writers out there. Recommended.

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On Literary Heroes

This week has seen the passing of two of my literary heroes: Cormac McCarthy and Robert Gottlieb. This essay will serve as an inadequate eulogy to two people who have, in different ways, shaped my recent literary tastes and sensibilities.

Cormac McCarthy is today celebrated in the public mind mainly for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road, which depicts a father-son relationship in a harrowing dystopian world.

But the core of his oeuvre, and I think what will make his legacy truly lasting, is what I think of as his “cowboy” novels – the Border trilogy (which is made up of All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain), No Country for Old Men, and what many consider to be his masterpiece, Blood Meridian.

All these novels have a shared style and mood: taciturn protagonists, terse dialogue, stark depictions of nature and beauty, and an almost tyrannical approach to punctuation (no quotation marks, no semicolons!)

The distinct style of Cormac McCarthy’s novels have often been described as “cinematic”, which probably explains the profusion of Hollywood productions that have been based on his novels: the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, The Road featuring Vigo Mortensen, All The Pretty Horses featuring Matt Damon.

Sometime late last year, his final two novels were published, a twinned publication of Stella Maris and The Passenger. I was not impressed by the novels on the whole, sadly: the digressions on mathematics and physics were fascinatingly geekcore, but the fantastical elements felt like a warmed-up version of Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden, and the supposedly-unspeakable love at the core of the story did not feel entirely fleshed out or believable. This does not, of course, detract from Cormac McCarthy’s legacy – I still believe he is one of the most important novelists in the English language of the late 20th and early 21st century.

Robert Gottlieb, in contrast, lived a life mostly in relative obscurity, even though, in the literary world, he is a veritable rockstar. The list of those who have benefited from his wise editing is littered with household names and acclaimed authors: Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, John le Carré, Michael Crichton, Robert Caro, Doris Lessing. He was editor of the New Yorker. And he had an unexpected side gig as a longtime member of the board at the New York City Ballet.

I encountered Robert Gottlieb for the first time some years ago, when copies of his memoirs, Avid Reader, hit the shelves of my local bookstore. It still remains emblazoned in my mind that he had finished all seven volumes of Proust over the course of one week while in university!

Both of these men, in their lifetimes and in their own way, changed the ways in which people see the world. The community of readers across the world, of whom I consider myself to be an enthusiastic member, will mourn these men and cherish their legacies.

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On Adventures in Reading

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!

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On Buying and Reading Books

Hi, my name is Ziad, and I am a bookaholic.

Like, yeah, addicted to books.

I should be specific, of course. I have been a reader since I first learnt my alphabet, back at the age of 3. (My mother never fails to remind me of the story of how she was told by a pediatrician that Yes, your son is short-sighted, and Yes, you need to teach him his ABCs real quick so that we can get him tested. And that’s why all my toddler photos are of geeky Ziad in too-large glasses.)

So yes, I have been reading for as long as I can remember. And it makes my reading habit even more inevitable that my mother was, for many years, a librarian at a teachers’ training college. My entire childhood has been surrounded by, comforted by, engulfed by, and flooded with books.

But around about the time I had just finished graduating, and started to work, I fell prey to a related, but far more pernicious disease: I became addicted to *buying* books. The constant logic is that Oh, at least I am spending my hard-earned money on Knowledge, rather than frivolous things.

And that is how my books at home kept piling up.

When I moved into my in-laws’, and later on when I moved into our own home, I kept up the habit. Whenever I got depressed, my usual destinations would be McDonald’s, or Kinokuniya. On really bad days, both.

It got to such a ridiculous level that I now have books piled up on bookshelves, by my bedside, on my working desk, and on the floor, flush to the wall near our patio. I have books in the car, books on my working desk. Everywhere. We have started to donate books to charities and non-profit bookstores, but it has hardly made a dent in our ever-growing pile of books.

So, as a New Year’s Resolution for 2023, both Kat and I resolved not to buy any new books for the entire year. The only exception was for books that we could buy if we were travelling overseas. (I have recently discovered a loophole – downloading books on my Kindle! – but I reason to myself that I haven’t broken my resolution since no money is changing hands. Yeah, very Clintonian, I know!)

It helps that I now try to focus my reading via my Kindle, which of course is more portable, and can contain many more books that my bookshelves at home ever could. I miss those moments of “bookbathing” in Kinokuniya, and I still make my way there from time to time, though so far I have been very steadfast with my resolution.

Yes, my name is Ziad, and I am, indeed, a bookaholic.