she read little women in secondary one and enjoyed it tremendously. the four sisters in the story had so much fun though sometimes food was scarce on the table.
in fact she imitated their pickwick paper. and dreamed she would be a writer like jo. reading little women for the hundredth time on a hammock with a tin of home-made savoury keropok ubi kayu was paradise. on mellow evenings....
those days reading was entertainment. and undeniably educational too. reading gave one the polished flair in writing and elocution. the ability to utilize grammar, tenses etc. with such ease.
there were no laptops then, no mobile phones to distract attention from gathering invaluable knowledge that will equip her through tertiary education and later in her career.
in fact, there were no television sets in her grandparents' home. just a radio. and a cabinet full of books at the serambi. so she spent most of her time developing a taste for the classics. though she started them in the abridged versions. mark twain, dickens, hemmingway, r.l. stevenson, h. rider haggard, shakespeare, longfellow..... she loved them all though she was only in primary three then.
she then progressed to the unabridged versions of austen, the bronte sisters, elliot, du maurier, hardy, walter scott, byron. keats, the brownings, plato, homer, poe, hawthorne, d.h. lawrence, woolfe, steinbeck, tolstoy..... she was so lucky to be in a boarding school with a very well stocked library which became her favorite hangout.
and she started building a collection of such classics. but mostly second-hand books which she could then only afford. penguin classics with the orange and white covers.
and later sometimes one or two new books a month when she started working. funny but paperback classics were priced less than rm6.00 each then! (now it is only rm9.90) that was how she has a rather grand collection!
a good book,a cool evening, a long cold lemonade, a plate of keropok.....ah....what else could an introvert want in the gentle 60's?
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