Melissa's Reading Bio

 I didn’t always enjoy reading. Before I was three or four, getting me to read words out loud was a real pain, because I would squirm, quite literally, away from the effort. It didn’t help that Peter and Jane were mind-numbingly dull characters who did absolutely nothing of interest in the course of the entire primer series. So, no, I wasn’t born reading. Once I became fairly literate, however, I enjoyed reading very much, and spent my childhood divided between reading voraciously and torturing my older sister. My mother says she got me reading as young as possible to get me out of everyone’s hair.

Books I enjoyed in primary school include most of Enid Blyton’s works, but particularly the Malory Towers series (it wasn’t til I was quite a few pages in that I realised Darrell Rivers was, in fact, a girl). I also cried my way through most of the Newberry books (Death by Newberry medal is, in fact, a trope on tvtrope.org), and was a huge fan of Katherine Paterson, Madeleine L’Engle, and Lois Lowry. I was allowed to read the Nancy Drew series in moderation, banned from Sweet Valley High (my mother sniffed that it was the equivalent of literary cotton candy), and quickly discovered that if it came in a Penguin Classic cover, I was very likely to enjoy it. It became a mark of pride for me to read these ‘classics’ unabridged, because clearly the abridged versions were for babies. I think my classmates must have found me insufferable. I remember my English teacher being a little startled when she found me reading Hard Times in P6, but it wasn’t til I re-read it years later that I understood more of its nuances, so really, I wouldn’t judge anyone by the cover of the book they are reading.

In secondary school I had a lot less time to read, but one book I remember really enjoying was Holes. The rest fade into a blur of compulsory texts: Red Sky in the Morning (which obviously I cried over), Macbeth (which gave me nightmares), and Romeo and Juliet (which gave me nightmares, for different reasons. I did not cry.). I did half-lit in upper sec, because I could only do eight subjects (I wasn’t from a good school), and I desperately wanted to do triple science just to prove I could. That, coupled with the fact that I didn’t do Shakespeare at the A levels either, meant that my only experience with studying Shakespeare is the abridged versions of Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet from lower sec, and one module at university level, which I’m afraid I sparknotes-ed my way through (I was sick that semester). I also read some poetry (volumes I remember are Plath’s Ariel and Heng Siok Tian’s Crossing the Chopsticks).

In junior college, I read Blake, whom I detested immediately (too insipid), and The God of Small Things, which I love. That was when I discovered I like the way Indian writers wield the English language. I also really enjoyed the texts we read for the gothic module, even though I could never study at night because I got nightmares. I also read the translated scans of a manga that was popular at the time, Death Note, and John Logan’s play, Never the Sinner. I still think Never the Sinner is one of the most beautiful plays to read, because Logan beats out syllables and spaces with a heartstoppingly masterful baton. I started reading more non-fiction in junior college as well – Nietzsche (whom I still won’t pretend to understand), some Christian apologists, academic writings on the books I was enjoying.

After my A levels, I read Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and became a very vocal Foer fan (I read Tree of Codes when it came out, and liked how it engaged with the idea of absences), and started reading more postcolonial and queer-themed books. In university, we only had one compulsory module (the introductory module), so the modules I read did represent my interests to a large degree; all the gender/queer modules available to me, female writers, Victorian/19C texts, cultural-studies-themed modules, anything that proposed to deal with power and discourse in general. I also revisited old interests in children’s literature, re-reading The Little Prince (which remains one of my favourite texts), Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Oscar Wilde’s short stories, and Malory Towers (on which I wrote an independent study paper in my last semester). Kazuo Ishiguro remains one of my favourite authors, and I still like Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.

It’s difficult – nearly impossible – to think of all the books that have had an impact on me, much less all I’ve enjoyed. But in general I did read a lot of Austen, a lot of Dickens, and anything that was presented as canonical (i.e., came in a Penguin Classics cover). I think perhaps I remember the books which made me cry (and there were a lot, because fiction has an affective pull over me which real life somehow lacks) – Goodnight Mr. Tom, A Simple Story (which caught me off-guard because it was, quite literally, an 18^th century sentimental novel), some of James Herriot, Rilla of Ingleside (because Walter died, and I had loved Walter—Anne’s beautiful, poetic son!), Tess of the D’urbevilles (Thomas Hardy is in a class of his own when it comes to hanky-soaking narratives), etc.

Mine is a reading history that I think might alienate most of my future students, except that I read a great deal of fanfiction in secondary school and junior college. Up to recently, really (I only stopped because real life finally got more demanding). When I was relief teaching or doing my ESE, students would be surprised that I knew what fanfiction was, and was familiar with some of its conventions and tropes. Obviously we didn’t really read in the same fandoms, but I could use fanfiction to talk about certain general literary techniques or styles. I think perhaps fanfiction brings escapism to whole new levels, because not only are you reading what is overtly fiction, but this fiction has spawned fictional worlds of its own, and I like the idea of alternate universes, multiple ‘verses. I like seeing how different readers interpret and write characters differently, and how certain online cliques (the Big Name Fans) operate a little like 21st century internet Bloomsbury Groups in how members influence each other’s narrative styles and concerns. But mainly I like how terrible things can happen in a story, and I can revel in the catharsis of the moment, because somewhere in another story, another universe, the characters are safe and sound, and they’ll always be safe and sound in the collective imagination of the fandom, ready to be taken out like dolls or action figures, for another round of play.