Feed me nibbles, please!
If only someone would do the heavy lifting and read all those wonderful yet scarily thick books and provide bitesize pieces of them to keep us informed about the important things.
Quest, thoroughly pleased to have it as a mute companion.
How can more people benefit from such important books? I wondered, slipping momentarily out of my cleaning apron and putting on my academic reading glasses. Instantly, I surrendered myself to the authors’ grip. Experts in their fields, the authors do have important messages and every one of these messages is as relevant as they are important – nations fail despite being blessed with oil, and oil in turn is failing us and the world is beleaguered because of it. Why and how? you may ask but, shamefully, I can’t even think of reasons let alone articulate them because much of what is contained in these two books has dissipated from my shallow mind. I wish I could tell you, and I should be able to since I claim to have read these two wonderful publications.
But if they had not been sent to me for review purposes, I would not have bought them myself, frankly. I would, how- ever, have admired them from afar because the authors are renowned and the titles, intriguing. So, like many books wonderfully written, this duo would have turned me away even though, deep down, I would wish that I had the time and endurance to read them. And before I turned away, I might have taken one last glance at their covers in hopes of getting some slight flavour from them.
Such a scenario is, sadly, not uncommon, and it attests to a world without readers. Or rather, to a world with readers who find reading cumbersome, more so if books are as thick as my two.
Books, and reading them, make us smart but we won’t become smarter and more informed if we continue to turn away from books simply because they look intimidating. Still, in this age of information overload, if we are to stop turning our backs on printed books, we need someone to read on our behalf and tell us the gist of things.
Actually, doesn’t that wish sound like a new business opportunity: To summarise books for the very-important-hence-busy reader or the reader who wants to be in the know but is too intimidated to read the thick books. I can imagine some ingenious people building up a thriving business fulfilling such a wish. I can see people sailing through a 10-page summary and being awed by it. Within half an hour, it is as good as reading an 800-page book. Could this be the next big thing in the publishing world? Your answer is as positive as mine.
After 10 minutes of paging reminiscently through the fat pair, I put them down. Back to my cleaning, which I hoped to finish soonest possible so I could get into my bed and back to Melanie, a hungry girl infected by a virus. She is the girl who can do anything in the highly engaging thriller called The Girl With All The Gifts
We live in a highly distracting world. Information that used to be scarce now bombards us like bullets, never ending and overwhelming. Because of this overload, books need to be thinner and come in nibble sizes that can be digested quickly. Otherwise, we will head away from reality and into fiction for fictitious solace.
After decades of switching back and forth between fiction and non-fiction, Abby Wong has decided that the Internet provides the best non-fiction. Fiction, however, still comes best from the minds of ingenious fiction writers, captured on printed pages. Share your views with her at star2@thestar.com.my.