Reading

I’m going to stop reading books for a while and see what happens. There’s this website where I logged down the number of books I’ve read. I’m about to hit the figure of 500.

There’s nothing wrong with spending a good part of your youth reading books. Everybody knows that male 20-somethings get kicked around like footballs. Women think that you’re stupid. Whereas if you look older they’re more likely to believe what you say, so long as you have that gravely voice. Even if you’re talking shit all the time.

I always was a slow reader. I put that down to my attention deficit disorder. My stream of thought is always highly non-linear. I can begin with point A, and end with point B, but my stream of thought from A to B could be 10 different paths. That’s OK, because it makes me more creative. But it’s a nightmare for people who have to follow that train of thought. Well, sorry, guys. So if there’s a page of words in front of me, and they have to go that way, it’s hard for me to tame my head and ask it to please follow that book.

OK, from young my parents did the right sort of things to me, read to me and stuff, and I also read books, although not many. I think they’ve always wanted me to read a lot of books, but I was never a good reader. I used to bluff my parents, they’d ask me what the book is about, I memorise the blurb, read 1 chapter, and pretend I’ve read everything.

There were other people getting ahead of me and everything. Perhaps it’s also that I never got the books that I was interested in. I never read enough books, never mastered the skill of finishing an entire book. If you put a 3-400 page book in front of me, I would probably take 6 months to finish it.

I didn’t really like the arts subjects at school. They were the big pains in asses because they involved so much rote memorising. They weren’t like the science subjects where you memorised the underlying logic, and suddenly the number of questions you could answer was unlimited. When I studied for my ‘O’ levels, I spent half of my time on 2 subjects – Geography and Literature. And this may surprise you guys – I only studied sample questions for the “Merchant of Venice”. I have never read the thing all the way through.

Yes, at this time I was a playwright. I merely pricked up my ears when my literature teacher was explaining to the class about literary devices. I watched TV and I saw how plots worked. I didn’t become a playwright by reading books because I hardly ever did that. Reading books does not make you a playwright. The ability to think and synthesise ideas does.

And in JC, I never really needed to read. I aced all my subjects at the ‘A’s, although I must remind everybody that around 1000 people of each cohort do that every single year. At the same time, I was intrigued by the people from the Arts stream. They seemed to be so much more fluid, confident and articulate. Of course, in the end I feel the way that scientists and engineers think is a great asset, even though it doesn’t get easily expressed.

At the same time, though, my sister started accumulating a huge amount of books. I think maybe her literature teacher was more inspiring than mine was. I had a literature teacher who genuinely cared for her subject and her students but at the same time she was too much of a misanthropist for anybody to ever like her very much. Seeing all those volumes somewhat fascinated me. I tried to read some novels, but I was such a slow and laborious reader. And I suppose that literature is still not a favourite subject of mine because I don’t really read novels well. Let’s make a distinction between literature and writing plays. In the former, you’re supposed to be good at listening to stories. In the latter, you’re supposed to be good at telling them. Being good at one is no guarantee that you’re good at the other.

Still, I persevered. I tried to read Henry James. A big mistake, I think. It took me forever to get through “Wings of a Dove”. Other books like “Catch 22” were easier. I didn’t catch what was going on in “Crime and Punishment”.

I ended up attending a good university. Some others may have slogged all their lives to end up there, I found myself there almost by accident. Although my major was Maths, I took the liberty to just indulge in anything that fascinated me. Looking back, this may not have been the best idea because there are some people out there who will never understand why I never focused on Just One Thing and made myself Very Good at it. Those people will never understand why I valued a broad education so much that I was willing to sacrifice depth for it.

Whatever it is, I ended up taking up a lot of reading courses. It was just as well that I was in a place with a very inhospitable climate, because I spent plenty of time indoors, just trying to get through a paragraph of inscrutable words. It was craziness. I had to endure mediocre grades for a few semesters, until magically 1 semester onwards, I just got an “A” or “A-“ in every arts subject I took on. Considering that there is grade inflation in the US unis, this is not fantastic. But I managed to take on and master a skill.

Suddenly, the written word changes its appearance. A 2-300 page book used to look like a wall, then it started looking like a garden hedge, and after that, a hurdle you just jump over. Years later, I would experience the same with running. First 5 km seems like more than enough running for a day. Eventually, the first 10km of your super long run seems to pass by without much thought.

And at the same time I was introduced to a whole world of ideas. My brain became the equivalent of a hot chick who had started growing tits. I delved into the great ideas. I took a course from every subject because the first course you take is the most difficult one, and the one that introduces you to the great ideas. I liked it. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, that was around 10 years ago, and one of those times in my life when I was truly happy.

After I graduated I knew a little from many different subjects but there was never enough time to flesh it all out. I kept plugging away, reading. Hoping one day that it would be useful to me. I don’t really know if it ever would. Maybe I knew, eventually that all my ideas would come head bang against reality. Or even sooner than that, my ideas would come head bang against my very limited ability to spread them to the wider world.

I spent a lot of time reading. First I read the books that I wanted to read. Then in the end, when they spilled onto the floor, I read the books so that I could clear some space for myself in my room. I think, today, I have spent the last 2-3 years reading. As in, when not working, eating or sleeping, reading. Reading in the MRT, in the toilet, even in the kopitiam when an EPL match is on, during the 89 minutes of the match when goals are not being scored.

It’s so easy to convince yourself that there’s something to reading. It feels like real work. You can tell yourself this is not idling (even though when you do it on a scale that I do it, it is). You can tell yourself, you don’t really know when it’s going to be useful. Even though, when you discuss the knowledge from your books with people, more than 90% of the time you will get blank stares. Unless that book is the bible or Harry Potter, more than 99.9% of the people would not have read what you are reading.

I could kid myself that a lot of the knowledge I got is relevant. In a way, I do read less arcane subjects. But it’s a slippery slope. I could read about the world economy in the 19th century and kid myself that it’s relevant. I could read about poverty in Africa and kid myself that other people would be interested. I could read about the invention of the internet and kid myself that 99.9% of the people who use the internet give a damn about how it was invented.

It was too easy to shut myself away from the world. I set up this blog and was largely successful in avoiding writing too much about my own books. So when you consider that I wrap myself in books most of the time, I’m really not telling you that much about my life.

Unlike other hobbies that you can get sick of, you can never really get tired of what you read. I only got tired, in the end, of shutting myself away from the world. It’s not an addiction, because it takes effort. But I knew this is unsustainable. I could be like a caterpillar in my own cocoon, eating like a pig, and forgetting that the whole point is that one day I’m supposed to be a butterfly.

Unfortunately the next few plans I have for myself involve reading: an IT education. A financial education. OK, fine. I’ll live outside of my cocoon for a while and see how it feels. For something that seems to be so cerebral, binging on books is rather mindless. You reduce the entirety of your life into a lot of book and a few other essentials. Who gives a shit about what friends you see and what you say to them. Who gives a shit about what clothes to wear, you just wear what you wore last year. Who gives a shit about family, they’re just a bunch of old farts who will never learn how to use a computer and you have to baby them like they babied you. You’re just thinking which 4 books to stuff into your bag when you go out. You're just waiting for the weekend to come so that you can make that pile of books smaller, so that you don't have to confine your reading to the MRT.

And sometimes I look in the mirror, what do I see? I see a guy with a mask staring out at me. He’s wearing a black cape, he’s breathing noisily through that mask. “Come with meeee to the daaaark side ….” And I say, does the dark side have any more geek porn for me? Complicated computer diagrams? Arcane academic dry language? Boring statistics about the quality of life in 1898? If so, I’m all for it! Yippeeee!

And so I delve into all of that, for the same reason I tell off-colour jokes – to make you cringe! There’s something hideous about all this excessive erudition. It makes your skin crawl and I know it!

OK, I’ve had enough of this. I’m paring it down.

I think: maybe over the last few months, as a result of my excessive reading, I think my brains got quite scrambled. They got quite scrambled too when I was in the uni, getting the drinking from the firehose treatment. You barely have the capability to process that amount of knowledge, and definitely don't have enough mental resources to do it on a meaningful level.

I once was at a bus stop near my house, and I looked across the road at a building I had probably seen hundreds of times. It was dusk, at twilight, and probably the building looked a little strange in that light. It was in a hospital, the same hospital where my sister and I were born and where my sister underwent a very very major surgery - an event that probably as much as any other influenced her choice of a career. It was an old building, a missionary building, and it had large windows, and stark yellow light pouring through them. What suddenly struck me was that it was probably the hospice I was looking at. A building where old people come to die. Just as the maternity ward is a special building because so many lives have begun in there, so is the hospice a special building too, because so many lives end in there.

I suppose, after all, there are new things that we can learn and see. Yes - the unpleasant fact of turning 30 is that all the novelties that adulthood has for you - the sudden freedom, the maturity, the mastery of your own life - all these no longer are novelties. From 30 onwards, it's basically the same shit over and over again, year after year. But I suppose there are new things to learn and see. It is possible that for me that a new adventure is there for me, not really around the corner, but growing closer day by day. Especially after I put down my old bloody books.

Question is: was I addicted to reading? I don't think so. What I was really addicted to, and probably still am addicted to, is procrastination. Reading is one of those things. If it wasn't reading it would have been something else. Blogging. Arcade games. Porn.

I'll probably write about procrastination some other time but not today.