A Young newspaper reporter once quizzed a veteran journalist about advancing her career.
The latter's reply was that unless your parent owned this publishing company, there was not much you could do, except work harder and smarter by absorbing journalism's best practices and read anything and everything to get a better understanding of the world and to develop an analytical mind.
The goal was to amass knowledge, and while you won't know everything, you'd certainly know a lot.
Her response was as sobering as it was nauseating: "Oh, it's just too much work…" She didn't last long.
In that statement lies the grievous rub, a troubling reflection of Malaysians' reading habit: only two books annually, if at all, and a reluctant 80 per cent of university students, who can read, but declined to do so.
Conversely, we could be grateful that our education system produces students who can read road signs, newspapers, pamphlets and social media messages.
We returned to this problem of reading after the prime minister implored civil servants to read, study and deliberate.
It's an earnest call, stemming from the fact that Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim is a bookworm, whose reading habits are mirrored in his expansive and esoteric vocabulary, and progressive thinking and positions employed in his speeches, missives and banter.
However, Anwar, who can sway people socially and politically, is still unable to galvanise millions to read fervently.
For Anwar to make such an appeal, like coaxing people to breathe, speaks volumes about the paucity of these habits.
That's reading. What about studying and deliberation, as he entreated civil servants to devise, plan, chart and set policies to determine the course of the country?
How on earth did our unread civil servants contribute to nation building all these decades? We have a broad idea: studying from government-sanctioned courses and deliberations by always deferring to superiors.
It's an infinite battle: "unread" Malaysians plod though life by gulping down instructions and self-help manuals, and do-it-yourself videos through social media.
Five factors subvert good reading habits: Internet, environmental influence, lack of motivation, peer pressure and entertainment.
We already articulated the propensity to read (view) social media, but parents who read and set up home libraries will influence their children to focus on books instead of digital devices.
We understand though that it's a daunting task to ward off the distractions of entertainment: reality TV is ridiculous entrapment; music is too relaxing and lulling; movies, sports and concerts are excitably therapeutic; and night clubbing, like golfing, takes us away from reading.
Short of a law making reading mandatory, we're afraid that the PM's plea dissolved as soon as he verbalised them.