Finding an eye

The memory of the earliest books I read were definitely the Enid Bylton series. But honestly, what I remember of Enid Bylton are not the stories but the tactile/emotional experiences of receiving a new book from my parents, feeling the hardcover, plunging myself into another world for a couple of hours and then joyfully adding it to my collection of books. This simple routine slowly built itself into a tradition which I now include in my life (of course, in a very different form) as a treasured moment. I probably “grew out” of Enid Bylton after awhile and my next book obsession were adventure or mystery stories. In particular, I was drawn to stories that feature a group of children gathering together to solve a crime or going on an adventure. Although I was not particularly devoted to any individual author and was quite haphazard in picking out books on my library visits, two particular series that I probably devoured entirely were “The Boxcar Children” and “Kinetic City Super Crew”. I also really enjoyed the “Bookworm Gang” series, something which I anticipated reading every month because I subscribed to the Bookworm monthly magazine (a digest of short stories and articles I think). It is interesting to consider the content of the books I was drawn to on hindsight because I distinctly remember reporting to adults who asked if I felt lonely as an only child that I was perfectly content being in my own world of books. Yet, the books I was reading were all about children who belonged to tribes that went out of the house and did meaningful things together. I was unaware that ideas which I was exposed to as a child would soon became important values for me later in life – Although I did not relate them to the stories I read, the older me went on to champion and cherish concepts such as being a part of a knitted community, striving for something that counts when working as a team and wanting to go beyond my comfort zone with a bunch of like-minded individuals.  

Around late Primary School to most of my Secondary School years, I entered a phase where I somehow decided that I would read only non-fiction texts leisure. This conviction probably came from two places: Firstly, I was shaped by my father’s reading preferences. Although he was an avid reader and was always with a book, he only read non-fiction books that were in the areas of philosophy, psychology, religion or management. Due to his influence and the physical accessibility of his library of books, my interaction with books became almost purely intellectual (How do you get to the heart without the pavement that is story?). Another reason was that it was when I started to avidly embrace another story source that is the Role-Playing Game (RPG). I will not specify them since they aren’t strictly books, but they were definitely texts that were rich with narratives and I think I might have reaped the same kinds of fruits from such texts if I were immersed in fictional print texts instead (contentious topic that deserves more discussion that just a glossing over, I know).

Although I was lost in such an unfortunate position in my reading journey, what I remembered of those non-fiction texts were not the abstractions or the academic explanations but the narratives that embedded themselves in the writing either as illustrations or as a means of conveying an idea. Hence, the texts that were more formative and impactful to me were texts which took the shape of a narrative rather than an argument, blending in the benefits of the story with the coherence and structure of an essay. However, as a young reader of such types of texts, I don’t think I gathered the gems I should have. I have re-read a lot of the texts later on in life to be freshly rewarded by insights that my younger mind had completely overlooked. To name a few examples of the type of books I was reading in this phase: Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” shook my ideas about the human condition and woke me to how some things simply cannot be expressed in the form of abstractions. C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters” revealed to me the captivating power of putting argument into a mode of story. Reading up on Existentialism required me to capture the ideas in narrative and so I read ‘Existential’ works of fiction by Albert Camus like ‘The Plague” and “The Stranger”. These texts revealed to me how some ideas cannot just be told because they must be felt.

Of course, I was very much a kid at that period too and so I did not abide to my reading conviction as if it were a rigid principle. Like most kids growing up in that time, I got onto the Harry Potter bandwagon; I also indulged in random Science Fiction novels and (sigh) Nicholas Sparks. An author who I remember really enjoying was Aldous Huxley and I read both his essays and his fiction works.

I was only thoroughly convinced of the power and importance of fiction once I became an English Literature Major in NUS. This was in itself a tenuous position for my reading journey because what I read was controlled by the texts on the courses I was taking at that time (Typically, we will impress the other majors by announcing how we could have up to 30 books to read in a single semester). Despite this apparent rigidity, the vibrancy of the academic context led me to become much more appreciative of how literary texts could be situated in much broader contexts of theory, period and culture. At this juncture, it is difficult to divorce my reading journey from my academic education. Honestly, as an English Literature major, I felt that I was playing “catch-up” on all the great works I was supposed to be reading and hence it was admittedly a less organic and more intentional process as I soon found out how I was drawn to authors like Jeanette Winterson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.M. Coetzee and Toni Morrison. There were definitely some indulgences that were outside this clinical process of ‘being a good literature major’ – I enjoyed Tana French’s series on the “Dublin Murder Squad” for her presentation of the emotional but professional detective and Young Adult Fiction like “Divergent”. A late but moving discovery was “Flowers for Algernon” which eventually became one of my texts for my Honors Thesis.  

I guess it is only post-graduation when I can consider what my reading preferences truly are in a more personal way, without the regulation of academia. While it is an acceptable and popular notion to find a “voice” as a writer, this simple reflection has caused me to realise that it is might be as important to find an “eye” as a reader too!