As a child, I remember reading Disney picture books — fairytales with Disney characters, and later on I went on to read those as recorded by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and a collection by Angela Carter. I got into Harry Potter as a child, and I always wondered when my Hogwarts letter would come. (It never did. I am still bitterly disappointed.) Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass stayed with me, and over the years I retain a fondness for anything related to Alice, be it stories using the characters from wonderland or new adaptations in different media. I loved detective stories as well, marvelling at how the mysteries were solved — I read Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, and the highly entertaining Japanese manga, Detective Conan, which is still running until today. Reading Adeline Yen Mah's Chinese Cinderella really sparked my interest in Hong Kong and Shanghai of the 1930s and the 1940s, and the imagery stayed with me as I got into University, wanting to learn more about that particular period.
Secondary school went by in a blur. I read a variety of books, and while there was my set text of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I thoroughly enjoyed, books I remember reading then include Elizabeth Redfern's The Music of the Spheres, Trudi Canavan's The Black Magician trilogy, Tan Hwee Hwee's Foreign Bodies and Mammon Inc. (the first two books by a Singaporean author I really enjoyed) and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian.
In Junior College I was exposed to a variety of texts from all around the world, and I enjoyed Mishima Yukio's 潮騒 (translated as The Sound of Waves), Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and August Strindberg's Miss Julie (definitely regretting how I am unable to catch a performance especially since it is playing here now) and Alice Walker's The Colour Purple. Afterwards, I developed a fondness for poetry (I studied Robert Frost, Wilfred Owen and Wole Soyinka), and the poets I like include Carol Ann Duffy, Richard Siken and Pablo Neruda. I started reading more plays, and my favourite would be Terence Rattigan — I really liked After the Dance and The Deep Blue Sea, as well as Alan Bennett's The History Boys.
Recently, I finished William Golding's The Lord of the Flies and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. In the past, I used to read much more, but these days I watch more films instead. Apart from our required reading for class, I am trying to finish Tove Jansson's series of Moomin books, as well as the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming. I carry a Japanese copy of Akagawa Jirou's 三毛猫ホームズの推理 (The Reasoning of Calico Cat Holmes) in my bag, and it has made for some very interesting train rides.
Hey Van, your JC reading list places you as an IB student, yes? I was introduced to The Sound of Waves because my IB colleagues told me it was being taught at ACS(I) and I enjoyed reading it. Reading books from different cultures really exposes one to different ways of thinking about the world, different ways of seeing that being in specific places may place us.
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