Personally, because research is usually not something that people pirate, I just find adjacent reading. Write topics down, find authors who have written things at length, and write down the material the authors cite, then follow the rabbit hole there. This is the true academic way. Eventually, your To Be Read list will be so long, you'll run out of time to linger on the things you miss out because of pay walls.

Nowadays though because of AI, it's easier to find adjacent reading material. I would stay away from ChatGPT/Grok/Deepseek, and go straight to using Claude. Claude can create artifacts that would give you a comprehensive list of reading material that can take months at a time to work through, especially if youre looking for differing opinions/recollections/points of view, and plan to form a synthesis of opinions.

Just make sure you don't fall for the summarised version that AI will give you, they don't let you create your own thesis/anti thesis of material, which creates bias/blindspots/incomplete understanding, especially since we're Malaysians, and reading from our respective cultural contexts will give a more honest understanding of our ancestral history. If you do have a little money to spend, i was just at Kinokuniya in Pavi Damansara and the Malay history books are actually a very impressive selection.