By Sam Trailerman
Every time my students ask how I always seem to feel the pulse of the world each morning, I tell them: press a book to your chest and listen. Treasure the ink. Let the pages rasp under your thumb, smell that faint vanilla of aged paper, and watch how the words unlatch a whole new wing of your mind airy, echoing, and bright with things you didn’t know you needed.
A wise man once said that to read is to throw open a door in the brain. Two of my students finally stepped through it not long ago. I watched their eyes widen — that quiet, startled recognition when a sentence finds the exact sore spot in you and salves it. The others are still thumb-numb, lost in the dopamine flicker of Cap Cut cuts and Tik Tok loops, mouthing goo-goo ga-ga at screens that vanish the moment you swipe.
We all chase different pleasures. Mine hums. It’s the weight of a hardcover in my lap, the cool hush of a library, the way a paragraph can tighten my throat or loosen a knot I’ve carried for years. These pleasures don’t buffer or glitch. They root. They outlive fads, outlast heartbreak, and get passed hand to hand across generations like heirlooms. Books never ghost you not in grief, not in chaos, not at 3 a.m. when the world feels too sharp.
I feel it in my bones when George R.R. Martin said: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” Sit with that. From the mind that carved Game of Thrones and Beauty and the Beast, it’s not a quote. It’s an invitation: to taste dragon smoke, to bruise your knuckles on castle stone, to love and lose and rise again all without leaving your chair. One life is a hallway. A thousand lives is a labyrinth, and every book is a key.
A former student a Sweet Young Lady undid me without trying. She set 912 Batu Road by Viji Krishnamoorthy into my hands, and the weight of it went straight to my chest. This book had lived on my bucket list for years. Born in Ipoh to a Tamil father and Hokkien Chinese mother, Krishnamoorthy writes in textures: the hush of monsoon rain, the crack of peace breaking.
The novel traces the Iyer and Tan families as betrayal shatters their quiet lives during the Japanese Occupation of Malaya in the 1940s. I’d sought it out for its ghosts Sybil Kathigasu and Gurban Singh. Saying their names still catches in my throat. They bled courage into this soil we now call Malaysia. May they rest where the roots run deep.
Books don’t sit on shelves. They seep. Line by line, they wick into your marrow until you can’t separate the story from yourself. Every copy I’ve bought has cost me, but what is money beside inheriting Sybil’s spine, or carrying Gurban’s fearlessness in your breath?
My niece and brother have given me books across the years. They are my hoard, not for their dust jackets, but for how they’ve sculpted me. I know the world lives on screens now. I’m not against it. But I’m still that school kid: I crack a new book, lift it to my face, and inhale. That scent woody, a little sweet is pure possibility. It won’t intoxicate you. It will humanize you. It will widen your heart and quietly, permanently, redraw who you are.
Sometimes I had to let books go. It hurt like peeling back a page I’d thumbed thin but I felt their weight shift toward someone who needed them more.
I gave away Images of War, the full Marshall Cavendish / Imperial War Museum set from 1989. I can still feel the gloss of those combat photos, smell the old print. They went to a boy who spread battlefields across his bedroom floor. That boy is a journalist now. My chest swelled when I saw his by-line from Cannes, writing at the International Film Festival while Tan Sri Michelle Yeoh took top billing. Those war pages had seeped into him and come back as a lens for new stories.
I also parted with The New Book of Knowledge, 21 Grolier volumes from 1984. Cool cloth spines. Explosions of colour inside. My grand-nephew took them, bewildered at first then lit up, question after question.
Books rewrite you in the holding. They rewrite someone else in the letting go. My shelves have thinned, but my chest has not. If anything, it feels heavier — full of ghosts, gratitude, and all the hands my books are meant to find next.
I’m still cradling two treasures: my worn stack of Lat cartoons, where every inked line can still make my ribs shake with laughter, and the Combat Picture Library by G.M. Smith, 1959–1985, its pages brittle now, smelling faintly of dust and old gunpowder. I run my thumb along their spines at night. I know I have to set them free before I go. To keep them would be selfish. To release them would be the last transformation they give me.
And there’s an ache I carry daily, low and constant: Misery by Stephen King, Viking Press. A Swiss friend pressed it into my hands once, after crossing oceans to see me. I can still feel the cool, smooth dust jacket, the weight of dread and brilliance inside. I’d meant to pass it to a former student I’d watched the reading habit catch in her like a spark but it vanished. Not stolen. Just… misplaced. The loss isn’t about paper. It’s the thought of her hands not getting to hold it, of that story not getting to unspool inside her and make her braver, stranger, more alive.
That’s the misery now. Not King’s. Mine.
Nganasegaran (tapessam@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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