Between Fiction and Non-Fiction

Her collection of 'Commando' comic books.

Today I take a major rest from my routine browsing and downloading of articles from the Internet for my written assignments. Learning and gathering knowledge is so much fun these days and I'm grateful that I'm able to keep up with the rest in academia. Very early in the morning I took on a great mission to help my wife sort out her collection of novels, mainly paperbacks and arrange them neatly in the bookshelf we bought yesterday ( see inset). Both of us shared the love of reading and books. She reads largely fiction books (horror,thrillers,crimes ) while I read mostly non-fiction books ( management,history,nature,wildlife,landscaping,art,photography etc.)Since our marriage of 32 years, she has now collected about 400 fiction titles and I have accumulated a sizeable 700 titles. That's a lot of money we have invested in books and of course not to mention the time reading them. Books and reading have kept us together happily and we never complained about each other's spending on books, thus the pile up.
I have a peculiar habit of collecting books on my travels as a remembrance of the time away from home. Normally I would scribble the date of travel, purpose and other tiny details that would be of interest in my life later, like now when I tend to recollect about my life's journey. Therefore for this purpose I have created a blog that will document about the places I've been. I call it "Books and Places" and it is here ~ http://booksandplaces.blogspot.com/ . I just started to upload pictures of the book covers a few days ago and will not know for sure when I'll finish uploading all the 700 titles. Well,a start has been made. With this blog I hope to track part of my travels through books I brought home. It is my fervent hope that the books will remind me of the people I met and also the ideas that crossed me. I guess I'll be able to track back the journey of my personal transformation through books this way.

In between our love of fiction and non-fiction there is however an interesting genre that separate our reading interest. My wife loves to read comic books even before I met her. But to know she only read 'commando 'comics truly amazes me. Her prized collection is an original Commando comic (no.982) as shown above. She told me at that time she only bought the comic for 25 cents and as indicated on the cover too, it cost at that time in 1975 only 7 pence. Today one can buy a Commando comic in Kuching for about Ringgit Malaysia 8.60/piece.

As for me, a gem in my collection besides non-fiction is this song book bought in 1966 with the Beatles on the cover. I bought it when I was a junior secondary school student in Bintulu. That's when we boys started to play the guitar and do the twist and shouted "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah".
From learning to shout and sing to analysing management case studies, I feel my life has been one thrilling adventure.
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