15 Books (Sorta Kinda)
From @ani george: “Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I’m interested in seeing what books my friends chose….”
Well I guess I broke all the rules as (1) I actually had to go over to my bookshelf to remember what books I have, and then got so caught up that a mere list would not suffice, and ended up thinking way too much (2) It took me more than 15 minutes, and the whole concept of books only really came back to me when I started thinking about my life in chronological order (3) I don’t think I have 15 friends who read books …
But here goes:
1. Tootle
I think this was my first *ever* book. I couldn’t read then, but my mum would read it to me almost every day. It’s a story about a young train in engine school, who would love to hop off the tracks and go and play in the meadows, despite the official rule of “never leaving the tracks no matter what”. When the headmaster learned about it, he arranged for the villagers to wait in the meadows and when tootle came near, they’d put up a red flag. To a train, the red flag means STOP IMMEDIATELY, no matter what. The only green flag, which meant GO, was back on the tracks so tootle eventually had no choice but to return back to the tracks.
I remember chanting “Never Leave The Tracks No Matter What” when I was 2-3, and now I wonder how much it has shaped my early thinking.I kind of expected life to follow a track, and you just follow it, and it leads you to the next station. You go to school, do your exams, go to college, uni, get a job, car, get married. I kind of always knew what the “next station” was, and essentially life was just about getting there. Since the destination is never considered when you’re on a track, challenges along the way were just problems to be overcome, I never really thought about changing directions for the fun of it, or wondered about where I was really heading.
I sometimes wonder what the meadows are like.
I’m not sure I want Alia to read this book.
(Ok this is way too much philosophizing for a book list)
2. Walt Disney Peter Pan Pop-up Book
I must have got this from one of my uncles a a birthday gift, probably around age 4. Yeah, it was 3D and all, but I never really thought much about it … until one day they screened Disney’s Peter Pan on TV, and I realized my book was on TV! It was my favourite bring-along-everywhere book after that.
Oh god, how I succumbed to marketing.
That’s it, more CBeebies and less Playhouse Disney for Alia.
3. Usborne book of Star Travel / Usborne Book of Future Cities
My friend Robert Spykerman introduced these to me in Standard 2. Until then i was kind of content with today, but these books made me really wonder what the future would be like. More importantly, I think was probably the spark that set my imagination going … in the future, anything was possible, and I spent a serious amount of time with an A3 block designing the ultimate house, the ultimate plane, the ultimate anything. I was pretty much happy with designing anything new, or at least “my version” of something existing.
I wonder if any of those blueprints still exist anywhere.
4. Usborne Book of World Geography
My Uncle Peter bought this for me. It covered the countries of the world, and the diversity of people who lived in it … from the food they ate, their cultures, their beliefs, the economies they lived in. I would spend hours pouring over the maps and reading the same stories over and over again.
Having kids appreciate diversity is important I think; they need to know that there are more people different from them than like, and that it’s ok to be different. It’s ok if they don’t match their local group, as their local group doesn’t match the global group anyway. And being different is just different, and in no way implies being lesser or greater. Get these ideas into their heads before the media fills it with “ketuanan” and “pendatang” ideas.
Somehow i don’t feel those travel channel documentaries have the same effect. Maybe when you read, you subconsciously pick up the differences between your culture and others, whereas on tv, you’re fed the differences between the mat salleh traveler and the local cultures.
Strangely, I never picked up the travelbug … the desire to wander around and see the world. I blame Tootle for this.
5. Usborne Outdoor Book
It’s strange that I spent so much time with this book, given that I’m not really an outdoors person at all. But I carried this book around with me so much that all the pages came out of the binding. I mean just look at the icons on the cover … so not me! But I loved reading about it anyway … and it’s useful knowledge.
6. The Great International Maths on Keys
This book actually came free with a TI calculator. It covered how to use the calculator, and went through all kinds of interesting things you could do with a calculator and mathematics. There was algebra, trigonometry, statistics, physics all applied to real world issues, and translated to calculator functions. Not to mention loads of puzzles and games.
An eye opener that mathematics can be fun after all, despite what you experience in school.
7. Cosmos by Carl Sagan
(finally some real books!)
This book really opened my mind to the fascinating world of science. It’s not a science book, but rather a book about science, it’s history, and the fascinating universe we live in.
I think it should be required reading for all children.
There’s a TV series that I downloaded recently, but I found that not as interesting as the book. Somehow my imagination conjures up better visuals than 70s special effects could.
8. Programming Pascal by Peter Grogono and Apple II Assembly Languge by Marvin L De Jong
Have to through some computer books in there somewhere right? Not particularly great books, but significant for me.
The first book, I bought in Manila while on holiday for about RM10, and is where I learned what proper programming was about, from decisions, loops, procedures and functions, recursion and all the way up to dynamic data structures. Nothing particulary remarkableabout this book, but having messed up my mind with BASIC and GOTO, I think this book set my my right about what programming was all about. I’m still using the essentials of what I learned in this book every day, except maybe for genericity and the object-oriented stuff.
Apple II Assembly Language … is kind of at the other end of the chart. This book covered assembly language, i.e. the inner code that drives the CPU. “Welcome to a world where your vocabulary is limited to 56 three-letter words — LDA, STX, EOR, and PLA to mention a few. It is amazing what you can do with this limited vocabulary … It is the author’s hope that you will enjoy studying 6502 Assembly Language. Read the book for fun…”
Hmm! In contrast to the rather “conceptual” world of high-level languages, this book made me also understand how the underlying bits (hehe) of the computer actually worked. I think having knowledge of the two really sets the right perspective … I don’t really see how anybody can realistically really understand dynamic data structures or code efficiently in high level languages without a lower-level perspective.
Sadly, with today’s computers, the lower level stuff is way too complicated to understand, and the high level stuff has gone way too far into imaginary stuff (OO, Design Patterns).
10. Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll
Truly fascinating book! You might have seen Cliff Stoll’s TED Talk (go look it up if you haven’t), and if you thought he was an interesting character, you should read this book.
It’s his account of a real-life story, when he was trying to find work as an astronomer, but ended up being a system admin. From an accounting error of few cents in his computer billing system, he ended up tracing a hacker across the early internet all around the world.
11. George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
Ah, real grown-up books. About the Future again.
Grown-ups have really dark, miserable stories about the future don’t they, compared to the stories kids read?
Brave New World is is set in a future world where Ford’s (yeah, the car maker) ideas on specialization have been applied to the human race, where people are bred in factories and divided into castes, and generically engineered to suit them for the tasks they perform, including arresting the mental development or growth of certain levels of society who do not “required” those capabilities, to mak them more “manageable”. Children are subconsciously educated from young to fit into their place in society. To maintain the economy, citizens are conditioned to consume (buy a new one instead of fixing) . And they’re all given free Happy Drugs.
Fahrenheit 451 … is about a world where books are outlawed — the idea being that books lead people to thinking subversive thoughts, which is dangerous. The main character of the book, Montag, is a fireman … but in the future world, a fireman’s job is to burn books, by torching down entire houses (which have since been made fireproof). One day he meets a neighbour, who possesses some free thinking ideas, like asking why something is done, rather than just how. The neighbour, who soon meets a fatal car accident (yeah right!) sparks of something in Montag, who happens to wonder what it is in the books he is burning, and why he has to burn them. He soon becomes addicted to reading the books, and starts to wonder and think about what society has become. Discovered, he becomes a figutive …
1984 … I was curious after the Apple Ad *grin*. It’s about a totalitarian future world where the government keeps tabs on everything you do, and through mind control and propaganda, conditions you to support all their actions (sounds familiar?).
Animal Farm … is a really short story, about a revolution. Like any revolution against tyranny, it sets out with great ideals, and works for a while, but eventually, greed and corruption set in, and things have gone around one full circle. The only thing is this story is set on a farm, with the characters being the different farm animals.
13. Douglas Adam’s Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; So Long and Thanks for all the Fish: A trilogy in four parts
I read this in Form 1, and totally loved and adopted Douglas Adam’s sense of humour. I drove my English Teacher nuts.
It is so hilariously funny, that I don’t think I can even describe it.
Except to say that Alia never leaves home without her towel.
14 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices
I went into an indian authors phase for a while, though after a few, the storylines tended to be similar — old-world to new-world, culture shock, family issues.
I found this book captivating though. It’s about a woman who is trained and sent out into the world, to use the magical power of spices to help others. Each spice has a certain property, and when used in the correct situation, can help to heal, and satisfy people’s desires. The main character, Tilo, finds herself in a shop in the bay area, and is devoted to using her spices to help the local population there. A mistress of spices, is supposed to be selfless, and help only others. Until she falls for someone herself …
They made a movie out of this, which while was visually appealing (aishwarya rai!) somehow didn’t do justice to the book itself.
15. Meera Syal’s Anita and Me
A story of an English Punjabi girl growing up in the midlands, and her white english friend, Anita, and growing up caught between two contrasting cultures.
16. the curious incident of the dog in the night time by Mark Hardon
Asperger’s Syndrome is a form of autism characterised by significant difficulties in social interaction, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviours and interest. The main character of this book, has Asperger’s Syndrome, and the book is written about how he see’s a developing murder mystery and goes about solving it.
It’s quite well written … the honesty can be terribly moving and funny at the same time.
There.
It’s been an interesting exercise, and I am aware that I read less and less books as the years go by. Interestingly thought that, except when asleep or driving, I am pretty much reading something. It’s just that it’s not in the form of a book. I wonder if books (as we know it) will still exist in the future?
