My Reading Biography

Charlene

My mother was the one who influenced me to become an avid reader.  Ever since I could remember, she seemed to hate it whenever I indulged in television shows and would limit my cartoon time to no more than an hour a day. With nothing to do and nowhere to turn my attention to, I picked up the habit of reading.

Discounting the fairytales that we as kids often hear and read, my earliest memories of my favourite books were actually The Three Investigators series. Unlike Enid Blyton books that bored me to death with its simplistic storyline and overly-predictable plots, The Three Investigators were fun, exciting, and opened up a whole new world for me. As a girl brought up in a traditional Asian home, I was often discouraged from running around like "one of the boys". The Three Investigators gave me a chance to live vicariously through the characters and participate in their adventures. I dabbled with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys for a while, but they just could not compare. In fact, I even recently hunted down all the ebooks in The Three Investigators series and bought all the hardcopies that I could get my hands on from a secondhand bookstore. It was really timely and thank god for technology because The Three Investigators is now out of print.

Aside from The Three Investigators, the exposure to great works like Roald Dahl's entire series, Applegate's Animorphs series,  Stine's Goosebumps series in my early years were paramount in building my love for reading. Like Dr Loh, I also went through the Francine Pascal phase and devoured all her books, from the tales of Elizabeth and Jessica to the Fearless series. I remember going to the library every weekend and picking out all the titles that I could find. From there, I ventured into other genres and the next few authors that caught my eye were J.K Rowling (with her captivating and magical Harry Potter series), Meg Cabot (who actually writes books for adults other than her Princess Diaries series), Jennifer Crusie (love her, her books are hiiiilarious), and John Green (cliche but yes, I loved The Fault In Our Stars, it was beautifully written and I bawled my eyes out at the end of it). 

My recent love involves dystopian fiction. There is just something so vulnerable and human about reading about the end of the world. I am obsessed with anything zombie-related and I'd like to think that after all that reading, I will be able to survive should an apocalypse really happen. I also read works revolving around diseases, natural disasters and the like that results in the destruction of the basis of what we define as humanity and society. Some notable works that I couldn’t get enough of are World War Z by Max Brooks, the Morningstar Saga by Z.A. Recht who sadly died before completing the third book in the series at the tender age of 26, Patient Zero and Dead of Night by Jonathan Maberry, the BZRK series by Michael Grant and the Quarantine series by Lex Thomas. 

After rambling on so much about the books that I like, I've come to the sad realization that I no longer have as much freedom to read as much as I like, and read what I like. I was blessed with fantastic Literature teachers in both my secondary school and JC who nurtured my love for reading and pushed me further than I thought I could go. Although some of the texts that we had to do, like Great Expectations, bored me to death, the teachers actually made it much better than what it would have been otherwise. However, in university, I no longer have the luxury of time, and when I take Literature modules, I sometimes feel like I’m forced to read books revolving around things that I cared nothing about, or texts that are just so incredibly boring I can’t fathom why it was published in the first place. I didn’t have a choice of my reading materials and I really disliked the lack of control. I do understand that the texts we get for Literature is often pre-picked and I do realize the importance of being well-read in diverse areas, but I still think that bringing in texts that our students actually cared about is the first step in getting them to like Literature.

Chen Ying (Charlene)