Reading biography of a super non-serious, super frivolous, super unempathetic reader

I was never--and still am not--an earnest reader. Not of English literature, at least, perhaps partly because English is not my first language. Having spent my childhood in China and having access to my cousin's book collection, I read the classic fairytales (Cinderella & co.) in Chinese when I wasn't in school or at play. But those readings were never 'serious'; it was just something to do when I was bored--maybe the only thing a child could do before the age of iPad and Internet. At ten years old I migrated to Singapore and had to learn a new language from scratch. My mum fervently and threateningly encouraged me to read English books so that I could "learn English faster". It didn't work. I continued to scramble for Chinese books, as a source of solace from the daily struggle to memorise twenty new vocabs and knowing when to use 'is' and 'was'. When the Harry Potter fever struck I pestered her to buy me the books in Chinese instead of the originals, and she finally relented after I passed English at the end of Primary 4. 

By the time I started secondary school my deficiency in English no longer showed in my grades, and I could then understand say, eighty to ninety percent of Animal Farm and The Pearl, which were the lit texts chosen for my lower sec syllabus. It was also at this time that my passion for history began to develop, so I spent my leisure time reading books like Wild Swans instead of more of Roald Dahl (which I now really regret). Outside school I read mostly because I didn't want to miss out on the pop lit, so there were the occasional Sidney Sheldon, Mitch Albom and Stephen King. 

Choosing Arts stream in JC forced me to do English Literature, which then in turn forced me to read Shakespeare, Donne, and Dickens. I struggled quite a bit initially because... before I could even master English in its modern form I had to then struggle to understand it during the Renaissance and Victorian days. Dicken’s incessant descriptions of the trees and the bushes and the flowers and the sky nearly bored me to death, and Pip’s lack of spine made the modern feminist in me want to kick him in the face. It was also then I realised I couldn’t stand (low ability to empathise, perhaps) any other types and era’s bildungsromans because of their inherently wishy-washy-whiney nature, such as Stephen Chbosky’s extremely overrated The Perks of Being a Wallflower. [Cues GASPS from audience.] Shakespeare and I, on the other hand, had a bit of a love-hate relationship going on. I loved him for his genius use of imagery in plays but despised him for being a delusional loser in his personal life (read his sonnets guys--I PROMISE you’ll feel the same). But all in all, in my JC days reading was about getting that A for a subject and nothing more. 

In university I was tasked to do four literature modules because MOE assigned lit to be my CS2, so I had the luxury to pace them out. As a result I had more time to appreciate the books and reading was once again no longer associated with purely extrinsic motivations. In one of my lit classes I was exposed to particularly interesting books, my favourites being Coetzee’s Disgrace and Winterson’s Orange is Not the Only Fruit. After struggling through Joyce’s and Woolf’s streams of consciousness, and Rushdie’s heavily culturally-referenced Midnight’s Children, I came to realise what type of books attracted me most: the ones with simple language but deeply disturbing ideas, best with a hint of postmodernism. Harold Pinter’s quote “Meaning begins in the words, in the actions, continues in your head and ends nowhere. There is no end to meaning. Meaning which is resolved, parceled, labeled and ready for export is dead, impertinent—and meaningless.” struck such a chord with me that it fundamentally defined the way I henceforth looked at things--everything. Outside class, the relatively flexible school hours of NUS FASS allowed me to read many books just for fun, so of course I couldn’t miss out on Arthur Golden, William Golding, or Khaled Hosseini--books that I’ve always wanted to read in my younger days but didn’t have the luxury of time to do it. 

Now that I’m in NIE, the reality that I might really be teaching literature to secondary school kids suddenly becomes scarily real, which can dictate my book choices in the near future. Although I have an inherent bias against bildungsromans, I now consciously try to overcome it since teenagers relate to them (SIGH), and have been giving them a go again, starting with Salinger’s classic Catcher in the Rye (completed--and I was impressed). I’m planning to start on John Green and Sylvia Plath next, so that I can tap into the brains of both hopelessly romantic and hopelessly emo girls. Oh yes- poetry too! That has always been one weak area in my ability to appreciate texts and I’m hoping The Little Things will give me a good start to the world of poetry.