My Reading Journal

So, aside from writing my relentless mind out here, I also share about books.

You can visit my other blog rakbukucoklat, basically a journal about the books that I have read, or about reading itself.

My latest entry was about Julia Cameron's Sound of Paper and Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase.

I really wish I can be committed and consistently writing at least one review per week (not that I'd be able to finish reading one book per week, but I have read so many books and only managed to make no more than five reviews _ I know, such an achievement).

Wish me luck!

The "I" That Matters

I remember reading somewhere that writers are for whom writing is much more difficult compared to other people. 


I'm not a writer yet, though that has always been my lifetime dream. For now, I would have to satisfied with the title of a 'writer wanna be'. But I understand what it means to have this constant restlessness, to have this too many thoughts and emotions within you, to feel the urge to release them but somehow, the idea of materializing them in the form of rows of letters and words, scares you. I know how it feels to be trying to ignore the voices within you, calling and nagging, asking to be indulged. You long for the voices, you need to embrace them, yet you remain there at the other side of the river, refusing to follow the stream, afraid of being carried away, no matter how tempting the water is. 


I know how it feels to have this understanding deep down that you need to do something. Yet you're just too afraid. To worry. Too uncertain.


I have been constantly in such state of emotion for the past ten years.


I blame everything in my life now. I cannot indulge the calling, because right now I'm living the kind of life that would not allow me to do things other than the things that 'has to be done'. I cannot indulge the calling because once I do, I'd be carried away and get off the track of the life I'm living now. And going back is never easy. It is never easy to let go of the things you'd put your whole life and heart into. It's easier to pretend as if they don't exist. 


That has always been my excuses for not writing.


The life I'm living now is not the right environment for me to write. It fails to inspire me. I takes too much of my time and energy. Everyday it gets me drained right to my bones, until I have nothing more to write. I might still have many things to write, stuffing my chest and creates unbearable suffocating feeling, but I just can't write. Somewhere deep inside my heart, there's this small part of me questioning, does it really matter? Does it really matter whether I write or not? Does it really matter since there's always something more important to do? 


I blame them for preventing me to be what I always want to be: a writer. I blame the fast-paced environment of my current job for failing to provide the right kind of environment I need to be able to come up with something to write, for always keeping me away from silence and serenity, for constantly and persistently giving me chaos I don't need. I blame the life I'm living now for keeping my feet planted deep into the earth, unable to move, stuck with the kind of people (I think) I don't need, in order to help me write.


Until I read this book,The Sound of Paper, written by Julia Cameron. It's a book about personal struggles all artists experience, about the soul works artists must undertake to find inspiration.


I haven't read the whole book, but the excerpt I found on the back cover struck me.


"We must, as the elders advise us, bloom where we are planted. If we later decide that we must be transplanted, that our roots are not in soil rich enough for our spirits, at least we have tried. We have kept hold of the essential thread of our consciousness, the "I" that gives us the eye to behold."


It suddenly came down on me that none of the things I've been complaining about all this time deserve the blame for my persistently ignoring the voices within me.


I realized now that I should learn to see things differently. 


The fast-paced environment I'm currently working in could have been my source of inspiration all this time. They could have been the constant reminder reminding me how precious silence is. 


The people I think I don't need, they might have been the people I need the most in order to keep writing. They could have been showing me the reasons why we need solitude from time to time, why we need to appreciate our aloneness, to be able to dig deeper within ourselves.


All the chaos I don't need might have been there to keep my restlessness alive, so that I will not stop struggling, and questioning. So that I can keep this little flame alive and prevent myself from dying. So that I'm arrive at the comprehension I'm having now, that to dig deep into one's soul, one needs the chaos as much as one needs silence and serenity. That whatever world you live in, you just have to learn to bloom and rise to your maximum potentials, and that you actually CAN do that, because it's a matter of the "I" that is in you. It's all about you, what's in you, and what you are going to make of it. 


I think it's a form of true appreciation of one's self. It's the appreciation given by the owner of the self, the very self that has the highest authority to appreciate before other people do. The self that matters the most.

Library: a walk down the memory lane

You know what, I just got my membership card for a public library. Yay! 


I used to be a member there when I was still in college (and that was more than ten years ago), and I used to visit the library at least once a week.


That was before I was caught up with life; there were always something more important things to do than 'just reading books'. There were always some more important places to go, more important people to meet, more important life to chase. 


I still read books. I never really stopped reading. I couldn't do it. But I never visited the library again. I rarely went to the bookstore. I ordered books online and wait for them to be delivered to my office. I'd stopped having fun the way I used to do with books. To be around them. To walk among the high shelves in the library with tilted head, trying to read all the titles, because, honesty, most of the time I just went there with no specific books or topics in mind. I'd just stroll between the shelves until I find something that caught my interest. 


I usually went there with my sister and we could spend hours, browsing for books from one shelf to another, thinking of which one to prioritize because surely we wouldn't be able to read all the books that interested us within two weeks. And that, was such an important matter to decide.


Sometimes we went the bookstore, both of us were still in college at the time, walking slowly between the stacks of books, stopped every now and then at the title that we found interesting, and, most of the time, wishing that we could buy all the books that we want instead of choosing only one or two books to suit our college student's budget. We would go home dreamy-like afterwards, thinking about all the books that we couldn't buy, feeling sad yet excited to read the new books that we bought. We'd usually stopped by at a coffee shop to immediately open the new books and see what they got to tell us, and continued talking about those lovely books that we had to left at the bookstore. And we would spend our way home in silence, both with nose stuck deep into the book.


It wasn't until last month that I finally decided to register for a library membership again. I still order books online. But to be part of a library, a place where you can walk slowly between hundreds of books, where everyone speaks in hushed voice and thus makes your senses fully concentrate on the letters printed on the side cover, is different.


Now, once a week, I relish the moment when I walk into the alley between the high shelves, looking at those row of books, still with tilted head, but I use the catalog more often now, as I usually only have thirty minutes before the library closed. I'd walked out of the library with the book in my hand, and spend my two-hours trip home with my nose stuck on the book pages. 


It's a pleasant feeling and I'm glad to be feeling the feeling again, though I'm alone now without my sister. And by having said that, I guess I'm going to dedicate this blog post for her. I hope this blog post brings smile on her face the way it does to me :)