The love for reading did not come to be naturally

The love for reading did not come to me naturally.

As a child, I was tasked with a weekly reading list. My parents had a simple plan: my elder brother (who is 5 years older) would have to choose 3 books and read those a week in advance, copy the definitions of difficult words/terms from the huge dictionary in the living room and then ensure that I read and understood those books in the following week. This practice has immense implications on my reading preferences; I started to read (and speak) like a teenage boy in primary school. Throughout my primary school years, I recall reading abridged versions of books/comics like The Adventures of Tintin, Sherlock Holmes, The Three Musketeers and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Then, reading was a more of a task than a pleasure. To be honest, I cannot recall a time when I would choose to read beyond the prescribed weekly reading list.

In secondary school, I was exposed to English Literature and I suspect it wasn’t until then that I started to form my own reading preferences. In lower secondary, I read Little Ironies by Catherine Lim and Animal Farm and in upper secondary, I read Joy Luck Club and Macbeth as part of the curriculum. My first contact with Shakespeare and especially the genre of ‘tragedy’ sparked a profound interest that lasted until university. I recall running around the kitchen with my brother and acting out the lines of “double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble” and “is this a dagger which I see before me…” In hindsight, reading was then to me a means of acquiring fun manners of expression during my play times. Apart from the curriculum, I recall reading Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Lewis Carrolls’ Alice in Wonderland, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and a couple of other books by Roald Dahl. These were the books lying around in the house and were a means of keeping me occupied. Of course, The Harry Potter Series remain as a personal favorite of mine; a series that have come to become the best marker of my adolescent years.

In Junior College, I chose to study English Literature and read Othello, Great Expectations, Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World and some of Poe’s poems. These works left indelible marks on my impressionable mind. It was not until then that I was deceived into believing that I would choose to study English Literature in University so that I can have fun reading all that I wanted for 4 years of my life.  After my A’ levels, I started to develop an interest in historical fiction after reading The Gates of Rome by Conn Iggulden and have followed up with a few other titles in his Emperor and Conquerer series. The interim period before university was the most productive of my reading journey: I, Lucifer, The Historian, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Tuesdays with Morrie, The Five People you meet in Heaven…

In university, as part of my Literature and History studies, I read more extensively and widely but admittedly, reading became nothing more than a means of going through the syllabus. I am glad though that I discovered several authors that I took to after reading their works as ‘study texts’: Homer, Kafka, Marquez, Mary Shelley, EM. Forster, Toni Morrison... Furthermore, in my studies of East Asian culture and literature, as well as of East Asian History, I was exposed to East Asian writers like Chang rae-Lee, Chen Ran, Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami, authors whose works I enjoyed prowling through.

 During my  semester of exchange in the UK, I rekindled the rigour in my reading as a means of keeping myself occupied during the ridiculously long road trips in Europe and sleepless nights at the budget hostels. It was also during that period of time that I acquired the habit of picking up books when travelling so that I can discover more about the place/people/culture. Amongst the many that have come to my possession during that period are: Anne Frank that I purchased at the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, Elie Wiesel’s Night that I purchased at the Aushwitz Concentration Camp, James Joyce’s Dubliners, Paris by Edward Rutherfurd and Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.

In hindsight, it also surprises me that after spending hours asserting my determination to “not read anything for the rest of my life” during my 4 years at University, I had naturally turned to books after my final essay submission. After submission, the only thought I had was to read Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns on my cosy bed. During my month-long graduation trip with some of my coursemates that followed a few days later, literature was an indispensable topic in our conversations. These were the friends who have joined me in what once appeared to be an unanimous and unyielding decision to “not read anything for the rest of our life”.

I am reading The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo at the moment and have many books on my shelf that I will have to read someday. The love for reading did not come to me naturally but has come to be a natural choice for me when I need information, entertainment or solace.