Anyone who knows me well enough know how crazy I am with books. Back when I was a kid, my basic fashion item is the book that always got stuck several inches from my nose (Grandma: “Don’t read that close; you will damage your eyes!”). I would be seen everywhere with Agatha Christie or Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, including dining room (Father: “Don’t read while eating!”), family holiday like road-trip on Java island (tried to suppress the motion-sickness for the sake of solving the puzzle earlier than Hercule Poirot), or any other occasions.
That is why I found sort of paradise here in Korea. Unlike bookstores in my homecountry that greet customers with arrays of cheap romance/comedy/horror books, bookstores here provide sensible space of English section for my favourite kind of books: classic and modern classic. There is one most recommended bookstore in Korea which I frequented the most: Kyobo bookstore. On weekend, you can find kids, teenagers, adults, even seniles clogging up the aisles of Kyobo, flipping through pages furiously (surprisingly, it was not comic books that get harrassed the most, but the kind of books which writing dominates over pictures). The English section was also generous with its variety of books. Two grand shelves were dedicated to house world-renowned masterpiece: Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Orwell, Camus, Chekhov, Salinger, Marquez, Woolf, Steinbeck. Not to mention centuries-age masterpieces like Shakespeare, Austen, Bronte sisters, Homer, and of course my least favourite, Dickens. Hahaa, I will explain later why mr. Dickens (may he rest in peace) had the bad luck of inspiring my title post.
And once again, imaginary world kidnapped me, as it so oftenly did when I was a kid. From Murakami to Marquez, it was a back-to-back reading once I arrive at my dorm when the clock strikes at 11. (By the way, pardon me for single-handedly pointing Murakami as one of the best writer in the past decade.) As much as I was captivated by the web of magic realism woven neatly through Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was deeply enchanted by dystopian world in George Orwell’s 1984. Accidentally bumping into a youtube link about Indonesian famous dangdut singer who aspired to candidate himself in 2014 election, I can not help thinking that Orwell prediction may not be too far-fetched. It sent me goosebumps.
One corner of my desk
Please have the pleasure of peeking into my dorm private desk. As you can see, my book collection is still only a handful. I can not bear the expense of expanding the number too much, that is: the problem of bringing it back to Indonesia and the food-fasting that I determinedly do in order to fit book budget in my monthly stipend. Nevertheless, books are the staple food for my mind that got frozen daily from the winter wind and math practice. All books, except the ones by Mr. Dickens (again, may he rest in peace).
While despising some lacking-of-education group of people who blindly idolize a persona non grata and endorse him to be a leader of one big nation, I squarely refuse to be categorized as pseudointellectual. That is my own term of people who enjoy litterature for the sake of being labeled as intelligent people. Well, I was one actually. I once read Dickens’s Great Expectations and no matter how I got bloated of its wordiness, I kept on reading. I did not want to be judge as ignorant or uneducated for my weak mind in dealing with Great Expectations, much-acclaimed litterature piece throughout human history. However, I can say proudly now that the book is not my taste. I think the characters are weak-minded, no moral story taken, while the passages are overloaded with words. BLAH! (A reviewer in goodreads.com coined a suggestion that Dickens at that time was paid for every words produced, that’s why he took the leisure of using 20 words in the place of one simple word). And I loathe how it once shut my curiosity from reading other classic masterpieces.
Nevertheless, I retrieved the long-lost warm embrace of imaginary world again here, inside the gigantic bookstores in Korea. I feel so contended that I decided to give mr. Dickens another chance at the end of this month, once I am done with my final exam.
PS. Happy to announce that I already prepared a litterature souvenir for my dearest youngest brother who shares with me the same passion in reading and perusing the most trivial historical facts.
beigesubmarine 