Reading these days...and back then

I love cleaning a bookshelf, taking everything off the shelf, clean the books, clean the panels, rearrangement is most fun.

Except that too reminds me of the number of the books unread. Bought in with excitement and eventually left on shelf, still untouched.

Last night I found my pocket guide to opera at J's family books cabinet, thought I lost it forever since more than a year back. A gift from him in 2005.

I took home with me two Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At The End of The Universe & Life, The Universe and Everything; Daniel Quinn's Providence (curious..); The Prince of Darkness, The Devil In History, Religion and The Human Psyche and George Orwell's Down And Out In Paris And London.

At home, on my own shelves, I have plenty unread...

pics by SeeMing. (right) was reading Siddhartha (Herman Hesse) at the serene cafe in National Art Gallery but the lovely cafe is no more :( seeming n I used to order the rose tea there all the time..

In these times, I don't have the luxury of `quality reading time'...or rather, I think it's more like I haven't been allowing myself the luxury of that. I read during my solitary meals at home or outside, sometimes before bed and of course, in the toilet.

I have vivid memories of those days when reading is something I do on ITS OWN, not something I do in a by-the-way manner like now. In the early 90s back in Taiping in my home, school holiday didn't mean family vacations or pocket money jobs in the shops...all I did was lots of lazing away in my room, reading copies after copies of old Reader's Digest. Then I had just picked up on my reading efficiency of the English langusge -- like stumbling upon a gold mine, reading was a bit like an endless joyride to infinity.

Sigh. Nowadays free/leisure time is scarce that I find myself replacing reading with something else...when I have half a day free or the day free I'm doing something else rather than reading.

...hahah, and then I'd complain that I haven't got time to read those books lying round my house.

A person who reads is never poor, the wealth of all the worlds in books will never leave us, those who read.