Samuel's Reading Biography

Like so many others, I started reading when my mother forced me to read Peter and Jane books. I would read 1 sentence and run out of the room, hoping she would tire if she had to catch me each time. She would simply call me back verbally to read the next till I got through the book. This laborious process on my mother's behalf equipped me with reading skills.

Like you probably did, I progressed to Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl. This was in Primary school, and perhaps my most avid reading period. My parents would bring me down to Popular on the weekends and I would read, while standing, the Enid Blyton books that I had missed out on. There was, of course, also Constable Acai and a couple of Singaporean books. Singapore Ghost Stories always freaked me out.

My favourite childhood memory is of myself holding the Enid Blyton Omnibus (3 tales of fantasy) and reading it while lying down on the sofa. Next to me, below the sofa, and always within arm's reach, was a bag of Grandma's brand assorted chocolate chip cookies. I could finish half a bag a day while reading, which was probably quite unhealthy for a young boy. Apart from all the playing with Batman and Lego, this had to be the quintessential reading experience for me.

Roald Dahl increasingly became my reading pleasure as I grew into my teens. I devoured every one of his short stories. I also became slightly more capable of understanding his wit: In "The Great Automatic Grammatizator" the main character explains that his machine has a compendium of long, exotic words which it taps on at least once in each story it crafts, as every writer throws in a difficult word in their stories to make themselves look clever as well. A few lines later the word Dahl himself used the word "epexegetically" in his own story; his self-deprecating humour had flown over my head so often, and only hit me when I grew older. Yet Dahl would disturb me as well. His dark twists had me at times feeling distressed in the lowest reaches of my consciousness. I threw the Dahl short story omnibus my parents had bought me into the trash one day, but my mother retrieved it and scolded me for wasting money. I don't think I tried to explain myself.

Reading became a less common affair as I grew past Secondary school. I only read what I was given, as far as books were concerned. In JC my books were amazing, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. In particular "The Country Wife" for its bawdy humour, "Decline and Fall" by Evelyn Waugh, Chaucer, and Sylvia Plath. But I never made efforts to read other books. My time was occupied by manga (in particular "One Piece"), anime, and the occasional science magazine, which interested me far more than any novel. I remember in the days before Wikipedia how amazing it was to take a whole stack of magazines dedicated to the latest findings in science, especially about solar systems, stars, black holes, and the Big Bang.

All through university life, to this day, I don't think I have recaptured the love for reading I had as a child. I very much enjoyed a good number of the texts I was given as a student, but I enjoyed TV series, movies, manga, and scientific articles far more than reading on my own. I think, in part, that I didn't enjoy dealing with the emotional roller coaster that books put me through. So, so many, would never leave me with a happy, yet satisfying ending. I remember being struck by how the movie "Stranger than Fiction" really encapsulated my dilemma. It so often feels more artistically satisfying, more poignant, when the happy ending is denied (in the movie, that entailed Will Ferrell having to die to make his writer's story more exceptional). Yet a tiny part of me dies which each tragedy. I remember convincing myself to get through "The Mayor of Casterbridge" on a rare occasion I dedicated myself to reading my own texts, as I had heard Thomas Hardy was a great writer, before giving up halfway when I realised that it was a tragedy of epic proportions. In particular I remember throwing down the book in anger when I found out.

Today, Wikipedia is my best friend. I read it not only out of necessity (for all those texts in Uni that I never wanted to get through), but also for sheer joy in the amazing complexity of our world. Maybe one day I'll mature enough to enjoy dealing with texts again.