i love 2 read...

okay, so here goes, my next passion... i'm keeping true to my promise, see?
i love 2 read, i really do...i guess being born in a family of teachers as parents really engraved in you that particular interest. but seriously,i remembered when i was in primary school i used to like reading malay short stories in magazines, could finish a whole book of translated enid blyton's series in a day and started to read complicated short stories from those highly literated dewan sastera, dewan siswa, bla...bla...bla...
and then i remembered when i was twelve or thirteen years old, my eldest sister gave me my first english novel as a birthday present. anne of green gables. she gave that particular book to me since i love watching the story so much on tv. but then i couldn't really read it yet, because it was a thick book and i didn't come from an english-spoken family.
but then when i was in form 3, i had this teacher, an english teacher who really helped me to love english more and that sister of mine, bless her, kept on buying me english novels, this time a francine pascal's sweet valley series, and before you knew it i was hooked. i was tightly, unavoidably and irreversibly hooked on the language and fell madly in love with it... hahaha... i wish i could say the same for a man...
but anyway, so there went my journey in discovering this particular passion of mine... i ended up buying a complete set of anne of green gables series and more sweet valley series, even my sister, instead of buying them, she borrowed them from me and when i was finishing secondary school, she introduced more books. this time, judith mcnaught's... hahaha... i know what you're thinking... because of judith, i could shamelessly call myself a hopeless romantic...
well, you couldn't possibly help it... that's what a novel does to you... it opens up a whole new world (Aladin and his magic carpet flew into my mind rite now) of imaginations, hopeless dreams, hopeful wishes, dashing heroes and dazzling heroines kept grinning at you in your head, tempting you to dream and dream and there goes my imagination... flown away so far, even Aladin's magic carpet couldn't catch up...
and not just judith, there's also jane austen, although i couldn't really finish up pride and prejudice and i've bought persuasion for almost a year and still did not read it but i pretty much know the stories.
it's a habit i have, you see... i tend to read the synopsis of the story, a little bit of the beginning and i zoom straight to the end... everytime i go to buy books, i do that... it's like breaking the rule of reading or something, but that's just the way i am...
so,back to reading, not only judith and jane who caught me, there was also once upon a time when i went to buy a whole series of meg cabot's, the chick flicks of a particular shopaholic by sophie kinsella and much more down-to-earth reality fiction by cecelia ahern...
but then i remembered once upon time i used to read a book entitled princess by jean sasson in my school library... a story of a brave Arabian princess trying to change her tradition... i ended up buying the book and its two sequels... and i started to read more reality stories...
and it turned out i love those dynasty sort of stories... i read last empress of china by anchee min and was impressed by this small woman who held such power over a dynasty known to be the most powerful in its era... and now i'm collecting knowledge on the tudor's famous queens and its particular dissatisfied king, Henry the eighth, written in a few books by philippa gregory...
but i have to admit, just like the case from anne of green gables, my interest in that particular kingdom started from a movie, the other boleyn girl, based on a book with the same title by phillipa... so i ended up buying the book and reading it and there i go again... tightly bound and head over heels in love... damn, really wish i could say that for a man...
never mind that, but now, judith mcnaught's seem a million miles away... i mean, yes, she wrote great stories, really did sweep me off my feet, and hey she gained bestsellers after bestsellers... and yes, i read more historical romances too, not just hers...
but really, how long could you live by depending on a fairytale ending to color your life which might or might not happen truly?
so, now basically, my hopeless romantic self had turned into a bitter devil-may-care self...
it's just my way of sticking to the ground, my way of trying to bring me back to reality whenever i dream out loud in silence too much, my way of telling myself over and over and over that my life is not and never would be a story book, let alone one with a fairy tale ending...
the reality in those books i read now, anchee min's, phillipa gregory's, jean sasson's caught me back to the ground and slammed that Aladin's carpet pretty much back to where it belongs... those books were real, and they scarcely ended happily...most of them ended with tragedies and these were stories of great people, of princesses and queens, much like disney's cinderella and sleeping beauty and snow white, but they were real. they did live. and their lives were so colorful and some of their deaths were so painstakingly abrupt and terrible, it got me thinking...
seriously... is fairy tale real? the answer is a hard no... it's a tale of fairy, for heaven's sake, and do we have fairies buzzing around us rite now? nope.
so, okay, i read romances, chick flicks for the fun of it... i read real life stories for the lesson in them... and i learned a lot... seriously...
so, what i'm trying to say is (gosh, really, after this long lecture, you would think i have already said what i wanted to say) that i love to read...
i've come a long way to appreciate this particular passion i have... it teaches me a lot of things and still do...and i have to admit i learn more from story books and novels than i could ever learn from pharmacology textbook or guidelines of antibiotics...
these textbooks and guidelines tell you hard theories, something you couldn't avoid, something you have to take point blank without argument, but with novels or story books, particularly those real life story ones, they tell you hidden lessons, something you have to think over before you can decide on, something about life...
simple as it may sound, novels and story books i read teach me about life...
and i found new novels teaching me about life too. this time, surprisingly, the novels are in malay, written by a malaysian as ebooks before she/he (i seriously suspect it's a she, from her blog) published them through http://www.jemariseni.com/... hlovate was her pen name and although what she'd written could be called romances in its own wicked way, they teach quite a tremendous lessons of life... i seriously want to meet her... because from her one particular book, aA+bB, i could say i was hooked, tightly, unavoidably and irreversibly bound, and fell madly and hopelessly and head over heelsly in love with a man...hah, finally, i could say that... sadly, this man is not real...a hero in a book (and in this case, it's Benz Alif Sulaiman from that book) can never be real...
if i'm lucky, and i mean, very, very, very lucky, i get to meet a man like him...the way hlovate portrayed him to be in that book is the way, the very traits i look for in a man, all this time i've been searching...and i haven't found one yet... i found it in a book, instead, in a work of fiction and i realize i'm not the only one then looking for a man like that... hlovate, if she's truly a girl is the same as me, if she hasn't already found one...
so rite on, i really want to meet her... and the real life honest-to-goodness version of Benji...
so here goes, my passion of reading... it got me something, didn't it?hm...