Fictional Past

After The Alchemist, I began to think that maybe I should rekindle my appreciation of fiction books. I remember distinctly that I read plenty of fiction during my school time at least until my tertiary education when I started to divert to more non-fiction books.

It seems it was only yesterday that I used to read the popular writers like Sidney Sheldon (just found out he just passed away in 2007), Issac Asimov (Foundation series, one of my all time favourites) and others that I now vaguely remember.

However, another writer that I can recall was Czech writer Milan Kundera whose books tend to be short stories with I can remember to sometimes funny and ironic in the storyline. I remembered reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Immortality. Can't exactly remember their storylines since it has been so long ago. Maybe I should consider revisiting them sometime again.

The popular fiction that I read by Sidney Sheldon were books like Sands of Time which I can immediately remember because I bought it with meagre pocket money I had saved during school time. Also, bought a range of Foundation Series which has the mathematician Hari Seldon trying to help galactic mankind and steer them away from the brink of destruction. Ah... the stories of a galactic empire and a group of scientists that invented a branch of science called psychohistory, the ability of mathematics to predict the course of human history really expanded my young mind (although these are science fiction stuff, I thought it was going to possible that sometime in the future this would really be invented)

Going even further back in my younger days, especially in secondary school days, I was trying very hard to remember the Fantasy author that I read, then finally remembered it was Piers Anthony. Went to his website to see his bibliography to refresh my memory and I finally found the books that I had read was actually the Xanth Series. There are a total of 32 titles and counting, so I would think I had read the first top few.

I guess what we read in the past, especially during our youth will definitely shape and form our interests in the future although it seemed that I had missed a good deal of such book genres since I switched to non-fiction.

Well, its been nearly fifteen years since the time of that switch. Maybe I should try to balance my reading between the different book genres. It could perhaps give me a broader perspective of life, knowledge and wisdom.