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0:05 Raw Material 8:58 Mayhew 18:13 German Harry 28:10 The Happy Man 38:26 The Dream 50:25 In a Strange Land 1:01:37 The Luncheon 1:12:40 Salvatore 1:24:55 Home 1:36:58 Mr. Know-All 1:53:23 The Escape 2:03:30 A Friend in Need 2:15:11 The Portrait of a Gentleman 2:31:10 The End of the Flight (move the red dot to the desired timestamp) |
I have rarely kept a diary, usually only during some short troubled times to offload my troubled thoughts. For the rest of the time, I rushed through life without reflecting on the people I had met, or the experiences I had had, or the few epiphanies I had gained.
What I did keep are some of the books I read then. Their bookseller marks on the inside page or price sticker still visible on the backcover remind me of where I was or even who I was when I bought those books.
My collection of Somerset Maugham's short stories are such reminder. I bought the first few during short visits to Singapore when I lived and worked in Burma where foreign-language books were almost impossible to buy, and I remember reading them while sitting on the porch of my colonial house, in sight and within earshot of the tinkling bells of the Shwedagon Pagoda, with LOBO playing on the cassette player nearby.
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00:01 The Ant and the Grasshopper 11:01 French Joe 23:35 The Man with the Scar 32:59 The Poet 46:04 Louise 01:03:13 The Closed Shop 01:25:54 The Promise 01:43:04 A String of Beads 01:57:08 The Bum 02:18:17 Straight Flush 02:33:43 The Verger 02:52:58 The Wash Tub 03:11:44 The Social Sense 03:31:32 The Four Dutchmen (move the red dot to the desired timestamp) |
The next lot of Somerset Maugham's short stories I acquired at various airport bookshops as I flew in and out of Saudi Arabia, where I read them to distract myself from the monotony of living under strict Sharia law and working in a chaotic office in which I was the only European. By then I had already "graduated" to Eddie Rabbit and a huge range of other pirated music cassettes, all freely available in Jeddah's soukh.
I no longer drown out the desert wind blowing outside with the songs of Eddie Rabbit, but every so often I still reach out to my collection of Somerset Maugham's short stories to return to those long-gone days.
What a surprise to find some of them as audiobooks on YouTube, beautifully read by Charlton Griffin, a voiceover actor and narrator.
