On Fiction

Someone asked me, “What kind of book do you read?” The answer can be from Mars to Venus to Scientific American or Bulugh al-Maram. Maybe someday I’ll write on that, but this is just on fiction, and it’s not in details.

I picked a spot at the veranda of the restaurant as I wanted to breathe the stale, homely air. I reclined myself on the chair and I put The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society on the table. The waiter looked quizzically at me, as though he was expecting something out of the ordinary to happen – perhaps me conjuring some magic?

“Sorang je?”

In my mind, I was like “patut la...” and I smiled politely at him. I thought about replying the sarcastic “Oh I’m here with my book”, but I decided to be a bit nice.

“Ha’ah sorang je.”

I guess the sight of a young lad arriving at midnight with just a novel and no one else to lepak with, was not something mundane for him. I looked around to do a ‘survey.’ True enough I was the only person sitting at this coffee shop alone with a book. Around me were families, groups of friends, and the lovebirds – hopefully they were married. For the record, I’d prefer to be with friends, but during that time none of them were available.

“Ipoh White Coffee cold satu.”

“Ada apa-apa lagi?”

“Tu je, terime kasih”

I don’t like hot drinks; that is part of my eccentricity. I immersed myself with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society for a couple of hours and decided to call it a day.

I think fictions are like chocolates: I like to let them melt in my mouth slowly. But I always marvel at people who can speed read – simply because I can’t do it. Plus, speed readers are useful people to be around with. When a highly-anticipated book comes out (i.e. Harry Potter), everybody wants to read it first and nobody likes to wait. Since I like to taste a book like a chocolate, it means I always have to go through the agonizing wait. Hint: We don’t buy so many Harry Potter books at the same time.

So my sister and my cousins will lock themselves up in their rooms when they get their copies of Harry Potter, and they will emerge out of their respective fortresses before dinner with “dah habis baca dah” pronounced on their lips – I have to simply wait for the fastest reader to get my hand on the book. The only thing I will say is “shut up, don’t give me the spoilers” and I’ll take two or three days to finish the same book.

The genre of fiction that I like changes from time to time. When I was small, I like sci fi, fantasy, and detective stories in particular. I read the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy plus The Hobbit way before LOTR became popular on the big screen. I was also a Conan Doyle buff: I read every story that he wrote on Sherlock Holmes, including The Hound of Baskervilles and His Last Bow.

But as I grew older, my penchant for fantasies and thrilling plot wanes, and I started to read novels with more emotion and bigger themes. Plus, during college, my literature teacher was an advocate of satirical classics. So I started to read the works of Orwell, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Harper Lee, Gabriel García Márquez, Fitzgerald, and the likes. I also started to read classic chick lit as I tried to figure out The Other – I still don’t understand them and I don’t think I ever will. Ops... Hehe...

Currently I’m on holiday, and I’m reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Fountainhead. The Fountainhead is fast becoming one of my favourites, I think I’ll write something about it in the future when I’m done with the novel.