Last Sunday, I discarded a whole bunch of books and magazines in my apartment in an effort to tidy up my surroundings. It took me more than two hours to sort through my bookcases, but determining which items to discard and which to retain was relatively easy, so I didn’t find the task too stressful.
I have rearranged my bookshelves in such a way that the books that are of current relevance to me and therefore I want to read the most are placed in front for easy access, with the remaining books placed further back. As my interests and priorities shift over time, it would be a good idea to rearrange my books from time to time.
Currently, I have books in Japanese, English, Chinese, and French—my favorite four languages—with Japanese books taking up the biggest proportion. My interests are mainly non-fiction and self-help books, but I also read novels occasionally for language-learning purposes. I also have quite a few manga comic books.
Up until now, the longest fiction that I have read is The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which took me five months to finish. It’s often cited as the greatest work of literature ever written, but I found some parts of it too arcane and difficult to slog through. Despite the sense of accomplishment I felt when I finished reading it, I don’t feel like reading it again, at least not in the near future.
Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm by George Orwell, on the other hand, are books that impacted me deeply. They had special significance for me because I had firsthand experience of living in Mainland China, which was still pretty much a socialist and planned economy with very little personal freedom back in 1986, when I first went to Shanghai to study.
I felt a general sense of unpleasantness and suffocation about the whole vibes of that society, but being a 12-year-old boy, I didn’t possess the vocabulary to put my feelings into words. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are remarkable in that the author successfully verbalized in precise and refined language the inner workings of a Communist regime and how they affected the way people lived and behaved in that dystopian society.
These two books resonated with me in a profound way decades after I lived in China. It feels like George Orwell vicariously expressed the discomfort I felt during the six years I spent there, validating my antipathy to living in a society that’s full of toxicity and hypocrisy. I am truly glad that I read these books, especially in the original English language.
Incidentally, unlike the bibliophile that I am now, I used to hate reading when I was a child. I grew up in a family where neither parent was good at tidying up and there was clutter all around me—hardly a conducive environment for any kid to settle down to read a book.
Having an extremely short attention span, I much preferred watching TV to reading. There was also this vicious circle of not having sufficient vocabulary to read through a book, hampering my eagerness to read, which further limited my chances of growing my vocabulary.
The turning point came thanks to my love for learning the English language. Pursuing my dream to become fluent in English, I studied tens of thousands of words and phrases from high school all the way to university. By the time I was 20, I had acquired sufficient vocabulary to read through English novels, either contemporary or classic.
It was then that I began to read in earnest, so my reading journey began in English rather than my native Japanese. As I gradually developed the habit to read, I branched out into Japanese and Chinese books, and much later, into French books too.
I’m glad that I was able to transform myself into a reader, after spending the first two decades of my life not reading at all. Reading always gives me new perspectives, enabling me to tackle various issues in my life in a more informed way and enriching my life immensely. I don’t know what the next few decades hold for me, but I’m determined to continue reading for the rest of my life.
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