"Can You Suggest Me A Book To Read?"

Being, perhaps, the one eyed in the town of blind, I get this asked of me a lot.

“Can you suggest me a book to read?”

I most certainly could, I would suggest that you first start with the classics. Maybe with Dickens, read Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield. Dickens, after all is not hard on the comprehension, might make a good start for anyone into reading. The trip, of course should ideally have started a long time ago. Being prepped up by Famous Fives, The Secret Sevens, The hardy Boys.

(To some I have been inclined to tersely suggest Wren & Martin. I have have been able to control that urge seeing that while that would one finger pointing at them, the rest would be showing my direction.)

Having started reading early is simply, having started well.

Because books, like events, are best read at a particular time, they have that much more significance; their impact is that much lasting.

Imagine for a moment, not having read Dickens in early teens? The character of Mr Pickwick is a whole lot different when you are fourteen of fifteen. Or not having read Tess of the D’Ubervilles, when puberty has just struck you? The romantic in you takes over, you wistfully look at the clouds and make up your mind you are going to marry a milkmaid when you grow up. Can you imagine not having read Two Men in a Boat in teens?

All of Dickens, Maupassant, Hardy, and Shakespeare must be read between the ages thirteen and twenty. Only then you can happily graduate to Thoreau, Sartre, Rand.

Only then you can, feast of everything else you can lay your hands on. Even the telephone book.

But alas, the person asking the question is not one who has, so to say, come up the ladder. He needs a book, which he probably will read it in a long protracted laborious way. He might understand what he has read or he might just sigh and feel happy that he read it.

I have flippantly answered that question many times. “Vatsyana” to a particularly prudish lady. “Gibbon”, “Hemingway”. I had the feeling that if they have not read so far they probably are going to read much.

There was a thought too, clawing at my mind. What if, there was one serious potential reader, a late blooming Tiger Woods of reading and I thwarted him by my flippancy or a wrong choice of book I gave him?

It sometimes is an agonizing thought; believe me. One I have never been able to decide. Should you start a newbie with bestsellers, racy fiction of Dan Brown, maybe go back a little to tried and tested ones by Harold Robbins, Arthur Hailey? Robbins’ A Stone for Danny Fisher bordered precariously on literary fiction.

Or would you rather take a risk and ask him to read Life of Pi, God of Small Things, Midnight’s Children, A Hundred Years of Solitude…

Must ask Tunku Halim, Eric Forbes, Sharon Bakar, Zafar Anjum this question.