Cats can't read but you can always read to a cat.

I grew up with books(and cats who often sat on my books). Whenever I was alone at home with no one to play with and no good cartoon to watch, I would enter my study room and take out the small squares that revealed to me the sorrows of The Happy Prince and others. I would hide The Old Man and The Sea, with its dull cover, far behind all the brightly covered books that brought me to magical worlds. From an early age, I realised how a tiny girl who seemed insignificant and naive could easily outwit ugly frogs and flee from unsuitable marriage proposals(my pop-up book of Thumbelina). I was so obsessed with illustrations and images of all kinds that I grew fond of my visual dictionary. I would spend hours admiring the illustrations of plants, flowers, machines, fashiona and the skeletons of animals. What was perhaps even more amazing was that every part was labelled. And so began my love affair with words and images and the worlds that they conjured. I felt like George except that I wasn’t concocting my very own Marvellous Medicine, instead, I was brewing my very own imaginary worlds by piecing together the words that I liked with the images that I liked.

Taken from http://iamthepapershaper.blogspot.sg/2011/06/lauren-child.html on  13 Sep 2014

My love of Roald Dahl began with Charlie and the Golden Ticket that permitted him entry into the amazing Chocolate Factory. As I began exploring the lives of Willy Wonka and the Glass Elevator,Matilda,James and his Giant Peach the girl with The Magic Finger, The (tiny and adorable) Minpins or The Enormous Crocodile or The Big Friendly Giant, my heart ached for these worlds to materialise in my own reality. And so began my obsession with www.wonka.com and all the wonderful games it had to offer me. I would buy Wonka’s Nerds, Wonka’s Gobstopper and lament the limitations of NTUC Fairprice and the local supermarkets. How could they not have the stretchy and tangy Laffy Taffy?Or the pixiedust-like FunDip that was advertised on their website? Still, I got over these disappointments and began to craft my own little stories and imaginary worlds. What I truly loved about growing up with Roald Dahl was how Quentin Blake had allowed these imaginary worlds to come alive. The Oompa-Loompas, the chocolate river, the black and blobby Vermicious Knids have stayed with me throughout my life. But as I entered my tween years, I became more and more curious about the books that my older sister was reading. And when I visited the public library, I began to explore the shelves at the Young Adult section.

As I peeked through the lives of teen girls falling in love and exploring their sexuality, I also came across more mature themes like rape. Beverly Clearly and Meg Cabot were my guilty pleasures as I could always turn to their books to make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But occasionally, I would pick up more problematic narratives that made me feel uncomfortable and disturbed. Cynthia Voigt’s A Solitary Blue and Elizabeth Laird’s Red Sky in the Morning inspired me to push past all the negativity in my life. In these narratives I found solace, and comfort and a place to bury my grief. While these narratives seemed to resonate with my own experiences, there were other books that thrusted me forward and forced me to experience things that I was not necessarily ready to experience. In Erika Tamar’s Fair Game, I was not only forced to think about rape but gang rape, and not just an ordinary girl but an intellectually disabled girl. Perhaps I was too young to have been exposed to such a graphic description of rape, but encountering that text enabled me to appreciate the extent to which texts can provoke readers to think about issues that they aren’t necessarily ‘ready’ to confront. Another book that had such a lasting impact on my was Tarquin Hall’s To The Elephant Graveyard. The text itself was a personal recount that conveyed Tarquin Hall’s journey to India to shoot down an elephant that went on a rampage and began viciously killing villagers. But as he slowly began to piece together the history of that one elephant, he began to empathise with the elephant. Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of his journey was killing the elephant despite knowing how much the elephant had suffered. The book was at the non-fiction section of the library, and I only came across it through my sister. Nonetheless, it developed my love for written texts in general and I begun visiting the non-fiction section more often to look for other personal recounts that might inspire me just as much as Tarquin Hall’s journey.

When I entered Secondary School, through English Literature, I was exposed to more Roald Dahl as we read Taste and Other Tales,except this time his stories had a darker sense of humour. My absolute favourite short stories from that collection are The Leg of Lamb and The Way Up to Heaven. In both instances, the wives contribute to their husband’s death (though this in no way suggests that I aspire to follow suit). I loved stories with humour, but I had thus far, not been exposed to the humour that’s found in irony. But these stories inspired me to find humour in the most bizarre, and seemingly least humourous situations. I was lucky enough to stumble across Slim DeGrey’s Changi: The Funny Side and Gary Larson’s There’s a Hair in My Dirt!: A Worm’s Story while I was browsing through the shelves in the library. I am now I proud owner of Changi: The Funny Side, which is a personal recount of DeGrey’s experiences as a POW in Changi. There are numerous books that describe the atrocities of the war, and the pain and suffering, yet, there would have been instances, no matter how rare or seemingly inconsequential, of humour. His stories always put a smile on my face, and inspire me to make the best out of every situation I am in, regardless of how bleak and hopeless it may seem.  

When I entered JC, I initially spent a year avoiding Literature. I refused to take it as a subject due to my own personal fears. Although I told myself to avoid it, whenever I felt miserable trying to figure out what on earth I was learning in Chemistry or struggling with PW, I found myself back in the library, brushing my fingertip against the spines of books searching for a book to read. One of the books I ended up reading was Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy. I was not yet an A’ Level student of English Literature, yet, I found myself critically analysing the text after I had read it. That was probably when I realised that I needed to change my subject combination. But anyone who has read Possessing the Secret of Joy would know that it is a depressing book. As I read the book, I felt as though a dementor was sucking up all my positive emotions, leaving me to feel utterly depressed and hopeless.

My random and seemingly arbitrary method of text selection often leads me to wander through unexpected lands and take surprising journeys that end up being extremely fulfilling. It might have something to do with Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken being my favourite poem when I was a teenager, but whatever the reason for my habit, it has enabled me to explore texts I would not have ordinarily encountered. Texts like Cynthia Thayer’s Strong for Potatoes, which taught me about homosexuality and identity, Neely Tucker’s Love in the Driest Season, which exposed me to the painful adoption process, and Antoine Laurain’s The President’s Hat which showed me how a single artifact can inspire different people in different ways. I nearly forgot about Richard Matheson's What Dreams May Come, which taught me about death, and enabled me to construct my own afterlife. 

Taken from http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/robin-williams/images/26619597/title/what-dreams-may-come-photo on 13 Sep 2014

One of the best things I was able to take away from my University education was an exposure to local playwrights and plays through Robin Loon’s module entitled Singapore English Language Theatre. While I had been searching, for years, for a text that would reflect the fragments within my identity as a Singaporean, I was only able to locate such texts through this module. I was exposed to plays by Goh Poh Seng, Kuo Poh Kun, Stella Kon, Ovidia Yu, Natalie Hennedige, Cheong Tze Chien, Jean Tay, Alfian Sa’at, Haresh Sharma, Eleanor Wong and some others. It was while reading their plays that I realised that there were others who struggled with some of the very issues that I struggled with as well. Issues of race or ethnicity, or even of gender and how all of these add thin layers to my kek lapis- shaped identity.

Taken from http://www.deal.com.sg/deals/singapore/2D1N-Batam-Harmoni-One-Includes-Return-Ferry-Land-Transfer-Authentic-Indonesian-Halal-Buffet-Lunch-Buffet-Breakf on 13 Sep 2014