Bookish obssession

 As an avid reader of fiction,i go thro phases of obssession with certain authors and read their whole collections.The British Council and Kuala Lumpur City Hall Library was like my second home when I was growing up.Our family couldnt afford to buy a black n white tv in those childhood days but it was a blessing in disguise because i immersed myself in the world of books whether fiction or non fiction.

  The libraries were like a gold mine of knowledge and the more i dug,the more treasure it unfolded.i loved history books and biographies n devoured the Rise and Fall of Civilization by Arnold Toynbee."Civilizations die from suicide,not murder.".Toynbèe also looks at the power of dialogue in his discussions with Japanese Daisaku Ikeda in his book Choose Life..The other book that gave me a bigger picture of humanity was Will and Ariel Durants "The Story of Civilization." Will and Ariel Durants life reads like a fairy tale love story as the soul mates love preceded that of Emmanuel Macron n his wife.Will was a teacher in the middle school when Ariel was his student.He resigned from his job to marry 15 year old Ariel who rollerskated to the wedding venue.Their romance lasted a lifetime despite naysayers.She co authored the Story of Civilization with him and was his intellectual equal and the rest they say is history.Edward Gibbons History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is another very analytical look at power and the loss of it.Of course,the Chinese were one of the most diligent keepers of books and writing as the inventor of paper and the systematic public service of governance and bureaucracy.Sima Qian Records of the Historian and Confucious Analects testify to the practice of preserving knowledge in the written form.of course the other great civilizations with a,reverence for preservation of knowledge was the Indians and the Egyptians.so world leaders need to read widely to broaden their perspectives on the place of power in shaping societies.

Ive also another addictive habit that if i read an author whose writing moves my heart n stirs my imagination,i will read all copies of his or her work.one was DH Lawrence and Daphne Du Maurier.The other writer im hunting high and low for her work is Eurasian writer Han Su Yin.I read her book The crippled tree and have been hunting for other copies of her books which are out of print now.She wrote both fiction and non fiction and was an extraordinary woman well educated as a medical doctor,studied in a Chinese university,University of Brussels and University of London.Her dad was Chinese and mom a Belgian.She wrote on Asia and South East Asia and introduced Asia to the West and the West to Asia as she wrote in English n French..Shes a pretty tough lady.She married her Chinese husband who was a Nationalist general and a domestic abuser who beat her up to curtail her ambition to be a doctor.She married a British intelligence officer Leon Comber in then Malaya and moved to Johor to stay and wrote her fiction And the rain ,my drink here.Her last marriage from 1960 until the death of her spouse was to an Indian colonel and engineer and she lived in Bangalore with him.Such an educated and talented multinational citizen of both East and West,The tragedy in her life was the loss of the greatest love of her life ,an Australian journalist she met in Hong Kong who was killed in the Korean War.He

r novel Love is a many Splendoured thing was a famous Hollywood movie.

Im searching high and low for her out of print books Destination Chungking and her biography of Mao Tze Tung and Zhou En Lai.Anotber out of print writer im looking for is Lin Yu Tang.

With the popularity of history in movies like Mat Kilau,perhaps its time young people read historical records rather than view creative interpretations of history in cinema.Munshi Abdullahs Hikayat Munshi Abdullah should tell more about the past as Isabella Birds The Golden Chersonese and the way thither.JM Gullick A history of Kuala Lumpur was a book I lost in the midst of moving houses . Young Malaysian s should also read up on Dato Bahaman,Rentap of Sarawak and Dato Mat Salleh of Sabah who were all anti colonialists so its ironical to call a white guy Mat Salleh.Read up on Ibn Battutas travel to Melaka from Acheh or Fa Hsiens stay in northern Malaya and i believe Hindu traders from

Chola kingdom kept records of travel to Malaya.Read from multiple perspectives to see how globalized Melaka was due to trade and Malaya was en route for Chinese traders n pilgrims.i found from The society of rare books India a copy of travels of monks Song Yun and Fa Hsien to India to obtain the buddhist scriptures.