Haha…I thought this was a nice shot.
I think I picked up reading first from my father. I remember finding him spending hours reading the then still revered New Straits Times from end to end seated in his easy chair by the window. Later, he would bring home the old Straits Echo daily for us to read.
He had a small collection of books including “The Quiet American” by Graham Greene. This is the exact same cover I recall from way back then.
Somewhere in the old bookcase too was a Hindi-English translation of popular words. I did manage to get around to reading a few of the others before they vanished without a trace. I miss the Hindi book the most.
But what triggered off my own reading adventure was one particular issue of the National Geographic magazine from 1958. On the cover was a giant dinosaur, I think it was a brontosaur staring out looking directly into my eyes. I was hooked. Line, and sinker.
In Standard 6, my friend Kim Chuan would bring Enid Blyton’s entire series to school. Being unaffordable to the rest of us, the book would do the rounds. As we finished one, he would bring another, and it went on that entire year.
Meanwhile in Form 1, we had to read Animal Farm as part of English literature. I was dumbfounded. What was going on here? I couldn’t get my head around it. I was 13. It was a mighty leap from Blyton to Orwell. But then Mr Kok Quan our Form 1 teacher peeled open the allegories, layer by layer, and lo behold…. an epiphany – George Orwell was god! I understood then the mighty power of the humble pen.
This is an old dogeared copy of the book that kickstarted the fortnightly bicycle rides to the Butterworth library, where for a measly RM5 membership fee, one could borrow books at leisure. That old library is no more, being part of the collateral damage having to make way for the Butterworth Outer Ring Road which runs along the coastline now.
There is a new kid in town though, the Butterworth Digital Library.
The Internet has a vast resource of reading material, many of them free.
Listed below are some of my favorites.
1. The Internet Archive is an American digital library founded on May 10, 1996, and chaired by free information advocate Brewster Kahle. It is a vast online repository that captures and preserves web pages, books, videos, audio recordings, images, and software, among other digital content. It offers free access to these archived materials for researchers, historians, scholars, and the general
2. The Marginilian, formerly known as Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week’s most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children’s books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning.
3. Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. It is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital librarry.
4. Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Their mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it.
5. Feedbooks is a digital library and cloud publishing service for both public domain and original books founded in June 2007 and based in Paris, France. The main focus of the website is providing e-books with particularly high-quality typesetting in multiple formats, particularly EPUB, Kindle, and PDF formats
6. ManyBooks was established in 2004 with the vision to provide an extensive library of books in digital format for free on the Internet. Many of the early eBooks are from the Project Gutenberg archives, which means you will be able to find a lot of classics on the site.
7. LoudLit is a collection of books in text and audio format, under a Creative Commons license.
8. JunkyBooks lauds itself as an access to all kinds of educational, motivation and career books to keep you going.
9. Classic Literature Library Read some of the best classic literature books ever published completely free
10. The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, films and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.
11. O’Reilly Open Books Project has published a number of Open Books- with various forms of “open” copyright–over the years. The reasons for “opening” copyright, as well as the specific license agreements under which they are opened, are as varied as our authors
12. BookXcess Online is a leading book retailer, offering great books at affordable prices. We deliver books to online customers worldwide from our fulfilment centre in our home country of Malaysia, where we also operate a chain of major book stores. What is more, we offer our customers discounts of up to 80% off the recommended retail price on the majority of the books that we stock
13. Open Library is an online project intended to create “one web page for every book ever published”. Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization.