Can a writer be alright, reading only his own words? Since when has reading become so over-rated? Previously, it was only a hobby of some sort.

You know, when you were still in school and you had to fill in those blanks on what you did in your pastime. Hoping to sound intellectual, as we were all groomed to think highly of, every child in the room would include ‘reading’ as a definite key word.

As you grow older, novels become just stories. The grown-ups, or whatever they call themselves, prefer to stick their noses in autobiographies, motivational concoctions and other similar false interpretations of life. Why I term them ‘false’ here could be because they make everyone think that we should all have opinions on anything and everything. That we should question even the unquestionable, just so that we can appear as though we have control of things, of which we never do anyway.

An author’s book is what a painting is to an artist. Or is it? Since Wilde’s brief observation suggests that a beautiful piece of art shouldn’t connote any meaning at all. At least, not in the artist’s eyes. There are no right or wrongs, only beauty or the opposite. Perhaps then, works of art are out to expand imaginations as an end result, but are not entirely written for that as the first purpose?

I, however, believe that it is inevitable for a writer to write himself in the paragraphs he weave. We leave a small part of us in every little trail that we pass. The audience will merely call this ’style’. Ironically, it is precisely when an artist/author create without including their soul, that the world will view their work as something ‘without a heart’.

Human interest is what we like to see. Everything behind closed doors is what we like to read. We delve into something with the sheer promise that it will reveal, instead of point us into another direction that we have no business going to anyways. And yes, newspapers are made to report in an unbiased prose. They merely inform, to the capacity they are allowed to inform.

In my life, I’ve had many throw the question: “you don’t read the papers?”, whenever I just so happen to not know a sentence of what they’re talking about. Not being seen hovering around the inky drifters does not make me less of who I am. It is important to be aware of what goes on around, so that we can avoid similar situations if bad luck swerved our way. But it does not make us smarter than our neighbours. It does not make us stand out, just because we read what everybody else reads.

How can noticing reports of the previous day’s events make you smarter? How about your own opinions on the things that people never talk about? And you know fairly well why they say that silence is golden.

It has been a long while since I got back the urge to read, to try something different. Thinking about it now, perhaps it was not because I didn’t have the attention span to flip through the pages. The reason was simple enough: those pages were not the ones I wanted to read. They belonged to him, the author that he found fascination with after he blindly read all that I recommended. Funnily enough, he was also the first person to tell me that he was smarter than I could ever be, just because he thought he was reading well.

Indeed, to be a good writer, if not great, I must certainly expose myself to the different works of others. To understand their thoughts, to interpret their emotions. I have started on the classical path, and find myself falling in love with it. But this is just the first chapter, and I will soon have to see for myself if I can find a niche in what I prefer to spend time with.

I find reading a very personal thing that speaks volumes. Identifying the cover of the book that the stranger is reading next to you in the subway will tell you much about what that person likes, and hopes for in life.

Fair enough, beauty ends when an intellectual expression begins. When we try to read meanings into words, and stories behind pictures, that we fail to see what stands before our very eyes. We try to go far deeper than any ocean we’ve ever been to.

But in the end, we will always return to the surface where we belong.