LCE: Reading Seriously

Tracing our reading biographies are a way for us to know ourselves as readers and to understand how our reading habits and practices have influenced the way we think about ourselves as readers and as particular kinds of persons. Reflecting on your reading history allows you to see where there are alignments and disconnects between what you know about literature and what your students know, and to begin to think about how to build bridges between the discipline of literature and your students. For a start, here is my reading biography, written in 2006 in Albany, New York. 

Stories are essential to our life, and “serious business” as Jerome Bruner in Making Stories would have you believe. Definitely, narratives are part of our culture and help us make sense of the world we live in, and the stories we read are but one type of narrative that have the capacity to influence the way we live, the way we see the world, the way we see others and the way we see ourselves, and while narratives are not limited to text-based sources, some people (like me) tend towards narratives of that sort.

We read for all sorts of reasons – for pleasure, for escape, for projection (into a different world), for instruction, and even for conversation with the text that must impinge upon our ideas and either build upon them or change them. I certainly read for all of these reasons and the types of texts I read would impact upon whether I was reading for pleasure or labour though they all must have changed me somewhat, at least during the period of the reading. A close look at the trajectory of my reading shows a development in ideas as well as significant impact on life choices I have made, not only because of these readings but because amongst other things, these readings have helped shape my thinking, whether in reacting through affirmation or resistance, and consequently have played some part in life-choices made.

Significant books of childhood include Enid Blyton’s vast collection – who could forget The Adventures of the Faraway Tree, The Famous Five and all the boarding schools stories, and Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series, and books in the same vein such as E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Little Princess. Then, there was Laura Ingall Wilder’s semi-biographical Little House on the Praires, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and other books of such nature such as What Katy Did. And of course, there were the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries and most importantly, C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. 

In my teen years, I found J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings a wonderful read, a more adult version of Narnia. For a while, I dabbled with Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High and the romances and troubles of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield. Historical (fictional) romances of England helped me to get acquainted somewhat with the history of England. It was mostly the women I was interested in and Queen Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII, and Anne Boleyn appeared often in my choice of readings. I remember being absorbed in M. M. Kaye’s The Far Pavilions and a series about World War II, the title which I fail to recall. There were the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes and the autobiographies that ranged from Anne Frank to Alex Hadley’s Roots and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. Here, clearly, stories do help me to travel vicariously, for when I first stepped into England in my early twenties, I felt as if I knew the place exceedingly well. Reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway after having been to London certainly helped me to envision the story more clearly, even if the London I visited was far more modern.

And when I got to junior college, there were more “challenging” readings like Shakespeare, Raymond Carver, Margaret Atwood and Graham Swift, which I enjoyed in a different way. And lots of plays because I was studying theatre. And on my own time, there was James Herriot’s All Things Bright and Beautiful series and Vikram Seth’s giant of a read, A Suitable Bride. My reading diet consisted now of “meatier” readings, often those on the Booker Prize list, with the occasional return to my “quick fix” such as Enid Blyton and The Chronicles of Narnia, easily digested in under an hour.

Following that, Law School constituted of reading after reading of case studies – stories told in a less dramatic manner, though reading some of these stories, it would seem that the drama of our human existence can come close to being unbelieveable. A more expository, philosophical bent occupied me then and in addition to my jurisprudence readings on the philosophy of law, I was once again taken by C.S. Lewis in another form – apologetics, and particularly his exposition on the nature of love in Four Loves. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and Antoine de St-Exupery’s The Little Prince were late discoveries, both in children’s literature and in philosophical thought that continue to amaze me today with how simplicity and innocence can be so… simple. Each time I re-read The Little Prince, I cannot but reflect anew on the truthfulness of its simplicity, evidenced in my own life.

Stories may affirm our way of thinking, stories may change our way of thinking and the depth and breadth of each story grows as it mingles with our experiences of life. My worldview in some way is developed by my reading of “The Little Prince” which affirms what I already believe in, and yet develops it in giving me some new insight by conveying in a fresh way how I can view the ritual of the mundane, as contributing to the intimacy of my relationships, in reminding me that “what is essential is invisible to the eye” and that “it is the time that I have wasted on [my] rose that makes it so important.” And in living life and developing relationships, my understanding of what the story tries to tell cannot help but develop in the context of my personal life experiences.

There is a personal act of choice in the kind of stories I pick up along my life. Like how, more recently, I intentionally read texts set in Vietnam, by both Vietnamese and American writers, fiction and non-fiction before my trip to Vietnam, because I wanted to have a feel of what it was like before I even got there. There is a personal act of choice in choosing to read the way I do. Like how I chose to read certain texts differently after reading Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, to learn to read knowing that all our readings are coloured by interpretations, as are choices of readings. I am transformed by his re-reading of literature to realise that it is necessary for me to re-look what I read and how I read, and so I do, and in that very choice of choosing, transform my mindset about certain issues and the person I am. I am renewed and rejuvenated by re-readings – “re” the idea of doing again and again – but yet being changed in that act of repetition so that each “re” is refreshing in itself.

Texts “do” something to us – as Janice Radway puts it in Reading the Romance and I do believe that we are actively constructing our understanding of the text and our understanding of ourselves as we read a text. There is an ongoing conversation which advances, accepts, rejects and transforms. Our self-story mingles with the story on the page and when we read a “great” story, there is much potential for transformation, which is why the stories I read are “serious business” indeed. 

Loh Chin Ee 2006