More than Words

After a series of seriously good and wonderful books, I am slowly overcoming my fear of spontaneously reading books. Let me tell you more about this weird phobia. This refers to picking out a book from a shelf at random and just well, reading it. I used to have such a phobia--of wasting my time on a lousy book, and feel cheated and suffer because of the aftertaste, which, come to think of it, is rather stupid. But I've only read book that are offered and recommended to me by friends. In other words, I lost my faith in writers. The first book I without someone telling me to, was Mister God, This is Anna. It was significant to me because during that time I was having a rough time with myself, and my relationship with God. It came at quite a timely time, I think. After this was the absolutely melancholy book, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. The next one was Becoming Madam Mao by Anchee Min, then Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui. This is a small number, seeing that this is over a pretty long (4years?) period of time. There are few like these books that will be special to me in that way, I think.

But I can feel the psychological barrier lifting. I guess my faith in (whatever it is that governs how we choose books) has been restored. And I have a few people to thank.

1. Mrs Selvam, who made me class librarian of 3/2.
2. Mr Tan, who made me class librarian of 4/2
3. Debby, who has well, weathered the thick and thins of library duty with me, and joined me in my few but precious literary explorations.
4. Aileen who has constantly been lending me great and better books.
5. Novita, whom I still owe a good number of books
6. Natsuki Takaya, who made me detraction from books seem not so lonely with her FB.

I suppose in many ways this problem has been a manifestation of my deep set insecurity. But it has, at the same time made me a kind of book snob--I don't know if that's a good thing, but at least I only read good books now.