Jason's Reading Biography

It all started with Roald Dahl’s Matilda; after almost two decades and three house moves, the book by still sits on the bookshelf above my desk.  It always occupied (and still continues to occupy) the prime location in my collection: leftmost slot on the bottommost rack. The original is long gone, of course – and through the years I bought several copies of the same book; I would come to some point where I thought I had outgrown its content and give it away, but each time I had done so I would never fail to purchase another copy on impulse when I was browsing at the book store.   

I remember bringing the book to English class for show and tell when I was in upper primary, and I remember being asked to share why I liked the book.  I remember that I stood up awkwardly and said: “The drawings.”  My teacher asked why.  “Because they are pretty and they make me feel happy.”

All of this is important: because beginnings are important – you never really leave behind what you start with.

My first formal encounter with a literary text was doing Julius Caesar in Secondary School.  It is significant because it was the very first text that made my hair stand on end.  As a student, the inaccessibility of the Shakespearean English was daunting, but there was also the thrill of working towards understanding the text, unlocking the different levels of meaning.  It was like a puzzle box – if you tried hard enough, you could get it open and savor the treasures within. Julius Caesar was the moment I fell in love with Literature; because it was at the moment I learnt that the payoff was not only the intellectual stimulation that Sherlock Homes provided, it could also operate on the aesthetical and emotional level.  There’s nothing quite as powerful as the invocation of pathos that leads into the act of catharsis.  If there’s one reward I crave in the act of reading, it is to experience the moment where all your hair stands on end.

This passion solidified in the following years in Junior College, where I pursued the bard through Othello, King Lear and my all-time favorite: Antony and Cleopatra.   The Shakespearean tragedies were of special significance to me, because through learning about the rise and fall of the tragic heroes I learnt what it meant to be honorable, what it meant to have a character flaw, and what it meant to make a mistake and have to pay for it.  All in all, I learnt what it truly meant to be human.   Much as how I benefited from learning the works of the bard through my schooling years, it is my wish that he remains on the required reading lists of generations of students to come. There is still no one who is able to encapsulate the human condition into a study of our humanity quite as succinctly as he did in his plays.

My course in English Literature at University exposed me to a wide range of works across the literary canon.  I found myself drawn to the works of Gabriel García Márquez, starting first with Love and Other Demons, before moving on to Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was enamored not only by his brand of magic-realism, which seems to bring an added dimensions into perceptions of everyday life, but also in his intoxicating narrative style and his ability to render narrative landscapes in startling detail. Márquez taught me that there was magic in the everyday – if only you knew where to look for it.

Subsequently, I was exposed to the work of John Banville, reading The Book of Evidence and The Sea. Where Márquez painted vast narrative landscapes in great detail, Banville captured poignant portraits painted in watercolor.  His books brought back the notions of pathos and catharsis through a prose style so lyrical you could feel the rise and fall of cadences on each line as he explores themes of love, loss and desire.  My experience with Banville piqued my interest in Irish Literature, which led me to pick Ireland as the destination of choice for my exchange program.   There, I fell in love with James Joyce; reading Dubliners, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake under guidance through the semester.  The allure of Joyce was not only from the intellectual frames of his work, but also the way the words as an embodiment of Irish culture and psyche. My contact with Joyce also brought around the concept of the musicality of literature to my attention -- the work both references musical pieces while being in itself musical.

My experiences with Joyce also acquainted me with narratives of the everyday and the mundane.  Upon my return, I picked up Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and Le Père Goriot, finding their unrelenting realism and their multifaceted characters (whose moral ambiguities and complexities cast them as fully human) an intriguing study of human society.  Seeking a more philosophical exploration of the human psyche, I then turned to Milan Kundera, reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality in quick succession.

Then, intrigued with the rendering of human desire in fiction, I read Valdimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire, before embarking on Jeanette Winterson’s  Oranges are not the only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry and The Passion. In Oranges are not the only Fruit, I was particularly intrigued by the interplay of the alternating chapters of fairy tales placed in between the main narrative, and how elements of both genres seemed to bleed into each other, juxtaposing an inner landscape of dreams and desires against the harsh realities of the world with all its expectations.  While the feminist discourse and all their associated theories did engage me during these readings, my true inclinations through the reading of Nabokov and Winterson was to specifically to look at their writing technique.   In The Passion, I rediscovered once again my affinity for the lyrical lines and imagery, a particular sublimity that made my hair stand on end.  Their power came from the act of tapping on threads that go beyond intellectual stimulation into the realm of emotion -- they are set upon some aspects of the human condition that compel us to intrinsically feel, understand and empathize. 
 
It is with those thoughts that I embarked on a reading of Anton Chekhov’s and Angela Carter’s short stories, which reside on my shelf in massive volumes that I have yet to complete. These short stories appeal to me, because they can border on the fantastical (as with Carter’s take on fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber), or on the realist mundane (as with Chekov’s works), yet they share the same quality of lyrical lines that seem to roll off the page into your mind, and they all illuminate some aspect of the shared human experience.

After my Honors Project, I read Matilda. Again. After all these years, I still quite like the pictures; but of course, this time I could see them existing not only in the illustrations, but also within the words on the page.  I also discovered that the reason why they made me happy all those years ago is because as a child I could relate to Matilda, with all her aspirations and her naughty pranks. They make me happy now, because they are a reminiscence of those days, and they serve as a reminder; that for all the theories and the interpretations, it is the aesthetic beauty of the words on the line that brings forth the pleasure of reading and making meaning, things that make Literature what it is for me today.