How I learnt to stop worrying and read a book

This year, I've finally brought my reading habit up to speed. If I can even call it a 'habit'.

I'm not an avid reader. My attention span is too short to finish an entire book.

But even then, I'm getting better at it. So far, I've read 9 books, between 200 and 500 pages each.

The first book I've ever read was actually a novel - The Firm by John Grisham. That book was very sentimental to me. It was 2008, I was a schoolboy at KL about to start the mid year school break at kampung but I had missed the Airasia flight to KT. I called my father to inform him of the situation and he asked the help of his cousin to pick me up at the airport and give me a place to stay for the night. In that confusion and while waiting for my rescue (I totally lacked resources.. I could have taken a shuttle bus to KL and find a cheap hotel to spend the night), I was drawn towards a WH Smith shop at LCCT. Specifically, I was drawn towards the pile of books on display. I felt that if I was gonna wait for long, I should kill the time with something - maybe read a book.

I can't recall the price of the paperback but I think it was around RM30. Which compared to today's paperback prices, was very cheap. And this was the airport price!

Anyway from the first page, I was drawn into it. It was love at first sight. The language and style that Grisham used was very easy to read, and even to a Malaysian schoolboy who didn't speak or write or read English outside of a classroom, no dictionary was necessary. That was the first time I knew I could read an English book LOL The story itself was a page turner and I finished the novel within a week, since I still had no reading routine and only read when I had time.

Back to 2023, the best book I've read this year is The End of The Nineteen-nineties by Hafiz Noor Shams. An excellent book IMO that deserves a prominent place in the Malaysiana genre. It not details the journey of the author (an economist) through the 1990s Malaysia from his upbringing in Keramat KL to his 5-year sojourn at Kuala Kangsar Perak to his uni life in Michigan USA and then back again to Malaysia in the early 2000s, albeit to a country that he in some way had not recognised. It discusses about the history of Malaysia as well, especially the origins of the concepts of Malayness and Malaysianness. The ideas of Milnerian Malay, Andersonian Malay and the Platonic Malay are heavily discussed in the book, citing the discussions by earlier scholars and from the author's point of view himself. This is a book that I will definitely re-read sometime in the future.

I'll talk about other books later. I already have a dozen that will inevitably be read only in 2024.