The book that made me

A personal anecdote

Wait! Just Listen is a weekly Sunday newsletter on living a purposeful and meaningful life, in a digitised world of opinion polarisation, gratuitous commentary and click-bait.

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‘Still life with books and glasses’ by Alex Levin

I’ve not always been an avid reader. In fact if you ask my parents they’d tell you without hesitation that I had an unexplainable aversion to reading in the early years of my schooling. It always seemed like a chore back then caked with tediousness and notions of unending scholarly labour. Plunging into the ocean of words seemed suffocating for my wandering mind - a mind squarely fixated on football and sports trading cards.

My mum would devise novel ways to pique my interest in reading, one of which involved placing books strategically at the family dining table, sometimes with its pages delicately open, with the faint hope that I’d unknowingly immerse myself in a text if I found it engaging, through the distraction of wolfing down whatever was on the homecooked menu for the day. While her culinary skills were remarkable and still is, her efforts in instilling a reading habit in me were ultimately futile- either that or I saw right through them - I can’t remember.

But time and circumstance have an uncanny way of reorienting our minds and waking deep-seated unrealised interests out of their slumber. In my late teens, I came to learn that the vitalizing process of becoming is rife with struggle and difficulty. Youth for me proved to be an uncomfortable but necessary rupture in the passage of growing up that precipitated the breakthrough of the free spirit, and the fine line between constructive and destructive rebellion. I soon developed an insatiable desire to seek a clarifying force in my interior life amidst the perplexities and paradoxes of growing up in a society that, at the time, funnelled aspirations and dreams into fixed moulds. I wanted a life granted with the dignity of truth; one open to engaging with the world’s disquieting realities. Books became a primary source of intellectual and emotional refuge; they were tilling the soil of my becoming.

The first ever book that left an indelible imprint in my mind, cajoling me out of my self-imposed shell of teenage awkwardness, was a recommendation by my father, a formidable bibliophile himself.