Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. Read it when I was 14 and didn’t fully grasp what the characters were going through, I especially disliked Midori and thought she was outright annoying. Until I re-read it as a young adult, it suddenly hit me that she felt insecure beneath the outspoken and rebellious appearance. I read the book a few more times in my adulthood and every time still brings me new perspectives.

Buying books is never a waste of money. If you don’t read them it’s called a COLLECTION 😉

I speak English, Malay, Mandarin and Japanese. My rule of thumb is to go for English translation for Western works and Chinese translation for Eastern works, to minimize the chance that contexts are lost in translation considering the cultural distance and language structure.