Carmen's Reading Biography (How Original.)

            My love affair with books started when I was in Primary One. I remember the first time my mother brought me to the library. Wanting to search for her own reading materials, my mother left me in the Children’s Section without realizing the very dire consequences of her thoughtless action. From then started my obsessive reading habits. I no longer remember what books I went home with that day, but I do remember begging my mother to borrow some books on my behalf (since I did not own a library card then). Of course, being a young child with nothing much to do, I finished those books within a week and moved on to conquer bigger things – my sisters’ old storybooks.

            In our old flat, my two elder sisters and I shared a study room, in which was a small bookshelf with a few copies of Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, The Bookworm Club and such. I think there was even an abridged copy of Great Expectations and Black Beauty in there. Again, I no longer remember how long it took for me to go through all the books that I can actually comprehend (Great Expectations and Black Beauty were, of course, not in the list at then), but when I eventually did, I begged my parents for more books and was met with rejection. I did not understand then, but my (literally) poor parents were simply unable to afford books for their nerdy little daughter, and so I moved on (once again) to the unthinkable – my sisters’ old textbooks and the encyclopedias lying around at home.

            Now before everyone gasps in horror … I honestly have nothing to say to defend myself. Yes, in fact, in my Primary School days, I horrified my entire family by sitting in the living room holding English textbooks that were a couple of grades up, and I think that’s when my weekly trips to the library with my mother began. Perhaps she took pity on her littlest bookworm of a daughter, but fortunately for all of us, I managed to get hold of my own library card and every week, my mother would bring me to the library to return the four books I had borrowed the week before just so I can bring home four more.

            This lasted from my Primary School to Secondary School days, every (other) week, I would go to the library to pick up more books ranging from the The Naughtiest Girl series and The Sweet Valley series (Sweet Valley Twins, Sweet Valley High, Sweet Valley University – so many of them!) that everyone seems to have read, to those that seems more obscure for the readers here like The Babysitters Club and the Fearless series. I also remember reading books from authors like Judy Blume amongst many names I can no longer remember (evidently, I have a very bad memory).

            Secondary School also meant being introduced to major writers like Shakespeare for me. Although I only did literature at a lower secondary level, I remember reading Romeo and Juliet (and really hating it) as well as Animal Farm. Interestingly, although I attended the same Secondary School as one of my sisters, the three year gap was enough for there to be a syllabus change – so I also had the opportunity to read the literature texts my sisters did in school, such as Sing to the Dawn, Charlotte’s Web and Red Sky in the Morning. I remember particularly liking Red Sky in the Morning and reading it through several times, since Anna’s love for her younger brother really touched me as a child.

            Moving on to Junior College, the rigorous curriculum meant I had less time for myself and I eventually stopped making time to read for leisure. Thankfully, I decided to do literature as an ‘A’ Level subject, and was forced to read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and Wilfred Owen’s collection of poems. Reading Great Expectations at the JC level reminded me of how I never managed to read the abridged version of it as a child, and surprisingly, the image of Magwitch at the churchyard in the earlier version always came back to haunt me. But, besides the trauma of having to read Dickens (I didn’t have much love for him), literature at the JC level introduced me to the idea of the absurdist theatre and this shaped my future interest in postmodern theatre.

            Although I lost my habit of reading in my late teenage years, I decided to do literature at the university level, thinking that it would bring me back on track with my reading. It did, to a certain extent, in the holidays before University started – I went through a short phase of classic-loving and spent my days reading works ranging from Jane Austen’s romance novels, (very few of) Shakespeare’s plays to the more ‘children’ classics like Little Women series and Alice in Wonderland. Those were good days when I could lie in bed and read whatever I wanted to – and then university started.

            As earlier established, I was (and still am) kind of a nerd, so I always felt compelled to finish the required readings for my courses. This meant going through 2 – 3 novels a week and evidently, I still did not manage to make time for leisure reading. This is not to say I did not appreciate the works I had to read for school (although I did find that reading them again for leisure feels very different from reading them for classes). Throughout my four years in NTU, I was faced with more Dickens (I was so proud of myself when I finished reading Bleak House), a couple of Shakespeare plays and various other authors like Amitav Ghosh, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Toni Morrison and such. To list them all would be too taxing, so I shall go on to gush about just a few of them.

            The first time I encountered Jeanette Winterson was in a Contemporary Literature class, and the novel in question was Written on the Body. While it is, on first look, a novel about love, I was immediately captivated by the poetic nature of her language, and while pretty much none of the plot stuck to me, I will always remember the stylistic features of her work. It moved me to attempt reading her other novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit on my own, which is, in my opinion, drastically different from Written on the Body, but eventually I encountered it in one of my other classes too. I remember picking up a copy of Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal sometime in June when I was in Taiwan, but I have yet to get around to reading it. Maybe someday, although I suspect it could hit a little too close to home for my liking.

            Toni Morrison is another author who struck me deeply since my first encounter with her. I was in Miami for an exchange program when I picked up Beloved for the first time. I remember reading it on the plane on my way to New York for spring break and was unable to put it down. Again, it was her writing style that captured me, although there is something undeniably potent about the infanticide plot. Personally, I find Beloved to be a masterpiece and it is one of my favorite books to date.

            As I have revealed in the very first class, the last three books I’ve read are The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas, The Hunger Games (I’ve finished the second book too!) and Brave New World. During the break before NIE officially started, I have also managed to read The Lovely Bones, which made me really sad, as well as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which I first read for a Postmodernism class.

            Of course, this list of books is in no way exhaustive – the books I read as a child have long been forgotten by me and I really am getting too tired of my own voice to keep going on about the things I had read and how much I love them.

Therefore, as a concluding statement, just let me talk about how the varied genres I’ve read came to shape me as a person, regardless of my initial willingness to pick them up. It is precisely through reading different types of books (from serious literature to chick lit and everything in between) that I remain convinced that every book has a value, even the ones we deem as ‘bad’ literature. Today, as we frown upon the ‘trashy’ novels the younger generation seems to be reading (just yesterday, my sister was telling me about her 16-year-old male student who read 50 Shades of Grey and thoroughly enjoyed it), let us take a step back and think about what we ourselves had read in our lives. Surely, no one could jump straight into what we consider as serious literature, and didn’t we all, at some point of time, found joy in reading just about anything we could get our hands on?

            So yes, as Brennan concluded in his reading biography (sorry Brennan, I seem to be quoting you a lot today), the most important thing is to start a student on his love for reading. In my opinion, it doesn’t quite matter if your starting point is Naruto, Twilight, or James Joyce, and it certainly doesn’t matter if one ever goes into the academic field of literature – for me, I will be entirely satisfied if I can just cultivate the joy of reading in my students.