Xin Hui's Reading Biography

I actually don't really know how to begin writing this, as I find myself faced with the realisation that I don't actually remember a large fraction of the books that I have read. I guess I will just have to do my best to write down whatever I can remember.

I started off with Enid Blyton at a tender age of six. Back then, I was just hungry to read, and anything and everything that I could find to satisfy my hunger would do (I confess I actually read newspapers and nutritional facts off cereal boxes because I was bored and couldn't find anything else to read). Enid Blyton's short stories allowed me to jump from one story to another, which was ideal for my childish short attention span. However, as I entered primary school, I soon found her short stories too shallow and undeveloped for my liking, and that was when I entered into the wonderful world of Roald Dahl.

At this point, I must add that my parents are engineers by training (I'm the only literary one in the family) and no lovers of literature and, apart from the bedtime stories that they read to me in my early childhood, I hardly ever saw them read. My dad eventually picked up my copies of the Harry Potter series just to see what my brother and I were fussing about, and eventually jumped on the Hogwarts Express with us. Other that that, I can only safely say that he has read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and Hillary Clinton's It Takes A Village.

It is no wonder that my childhood involved reading whatever books came my way as birthday or Christmas presents, which were few. A few of the books that came that way was Sandra Forrester's Sound The Jubilee (which got me interested in the American Civil War); Toto Chan by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi; Marguerite Henry's horse novels King of the Wind and the Misty of Chincoteague series (my mum knew that I was a huge lover of horses) and James Herriot's All Things Bright and Beautiful. What also came that way was Adeline Yen Mah's Chinese Cinderella, which an aunt had given to me for my ninth birthday. Although, in hindsight, I find the narrative rather poorly written, as a young girl I was hopelessly obsessed. I so much identified myself with Adeline's unfortunate childhood, so much that it even made its way into one my primary school compositions. I naturally followed up with Adeline Yen Mah's other autobiographical novel, Falling Leaves. Apart from Adeline Yen Mah, I also spent a substantial amount of time trawling through library shelves for books to read. I read all the Animorphs books that my neighbourhood library had to offer (which wasn't much, sadly), as well as a substantial number of The Babysitter's Club, and many other animal-related series of which title and content I can no longer remember. It was also at this point in my life that I took an interest to science, and a large portion of my reading list consisted of books on chemistry, geography, history, and my personal favourite, biology.

Somehow, I picked up a few abridged classics along the way, some of which included Treasure Island; The Swiss Family Robinson; Black Beauty; 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Great Expectations; Gulliver's Travels  and many more that I can't seem to recall at this moment. I do remember that I first read Elizabeth Gaskell's unabridged North and South when I was eleven although, try as I may, I cannot recall how I came to possess such heavy reading for a primary school child. I also ended up reading hand-me-downs that came my way from my aunts and uncles, one of which was Janice Young Brooke's monstrous  Cinnamon Wharf. I've always been a bit ashamed to admit that my first foray into the world of adult fiction began with Cinnamon Wharf when I was ten but, there, I have said it (and I still don't know how it ended up on my bookshelf, because all of my aunts and uncles denied owning the book. Hmm...) I continued my early adventures into adult fiction with Paulina Simmons's novel set in war-torn Russia, The Bronze Horseman (which my unsuspecting mother bought off a book fair thinking that it was about horses... how wrong she was).

As I progressed into further in years, I started exploring more literary options. Apart from my beloved Harry Potter series -- which followed me all the way from the tender age of nine until the last novel was released when I was eighteen -- I continued to grab whatever interested me from the library shelves. I ended up reading Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, and a whole list of books (of which titles I unfortunately cannot remember) that were centered around Southeast Asian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Asian-American culture. I also read Jean M Auel's Earth's Children series (which I adore, by the way) and discovered the sequel to The Bronze Horseman and Tatiana and Alexander (of which I finally became a proud owner this year). I've read so many books by picking them off the bookshelves that I cannot actually remember their titles now, even if I do roughly remember their plots.

Added to my library visits were my secondary school literature texts: a collection of short stories titled Twister: Stories before 1914; Nina Bawden's Carrie's War; Romeo and Juliet; and Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter, which I had poached off my aunt's bookshelf and completed even before the book was taught in my upper secondary years. In my JC years, I read Othello; King Lear; Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; Sylvia Plath's poetry collection Ariel; and Boey Kim Cheng's Another Place poetry collection -- the poems set me off on a period of existential depression and, though I still love them, I shudder to think that my life (and way of thinking) has been so greatly changed because of these two texts.

Sadly, with my entry into university, almost all recreational reading came to an end. I found it exceedingly difficult to balance my coursework (with its sheer amount of texts that I had to read) with my musical commitments (what with clarinet lessons, band practices, and orchestra rehearsals). Essentially, all the books that I read during my four years in university were limited to what was to be discussed in class and, even so, I didn't manage to read all of them (please don't stone me). It doesn't make sense to list all of the books that I've read during this period because I would end up writing this reading biography until daybreak, and because they would likely correspond with what my coursemates have already written. However, I will say that I read more classics (Austen; Hardy; Burney; Greek tragedies; Dickens; Shelly; and the Brontë sisters, to name a few) and ventured into the modern and poco-pomo domains (Rushdie; Coetzee; Hill; Atwood; Ghosh etc.). I also dabbled with metafiction (Byatt; Fowles; Eco; Barth; Nabokov etc.); science fiction and dystopian literature (Dick; Herbert; Huxley; Orwell; Atwood; le Guin etc.); Asian-American and American literature (more Amy Tan; Hong-Kingston; Melville; Twain; Emerson etc.); feminist theory and literature (Butler and the women novelists) and Psychoanalysis (Freud; Kristeva; and Lacan).

(Writing the above paragraph really exhausted me in the immense effort it took me to exercise discretion in my listing.)

It wasn't my university modules that led me to the One Thousand and One Nights -- it was the fact that my orchestra was playing Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. It was also via my musical adventures (after playing Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique started my love affair with Berlioz's life and music) that I began on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, which I compared to Berlioz's comic opera, Béatrice et Bénédict, for my thesis on the relationship between the life and art of Berlioz and Shakespeare.

I'd say that university hasn't really changed my leisure-reading preferences, as I found myself going back to what used to interest me when I was young and didn't know any better. My interest in Faux-Victorian literature (started by Cinnamon Wharf and my love for Victorian novels) led me to the young-adult Mary Hooper novel, Fallen Grace, and my obsession with anything Russian (which began with The Bronze Horseman) led me to Kate Furnivall's The Jewel of St Petersburg, David Beinoff's City of Thieves, as well as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Generally, the books I pick off the shelves nowadays either speak to the above two categories, deals with issues of belonging, exile, identity and existentialism, or are written by authors who I have previously encountered and have come to enjoy.

Looking back, I'd say that my reading history does not allow me to connect with the students who I may end up teaching. Firstly, I grew up too fast (children aren't expected to be reading adult novels at nine, are they?) with the result that I missed out on a lot of children's and young-adult fiction, which my future students would most likely be interested in. Secondly, I've never been a huge follower of trends, and I must confess that the most that I have read of the Twilight series is the first ten pages of the first book (which I don't remember anyway). Thirdly, my reading biography proves that I am a jack of all trades and master of none -- I go around dabbling in a bit of everything but walk away not having read enough of each area to safely say that I know what I have been reading (and that's the reason why I cannot name a personal favourite novel). This essentially means that there may be less common ground between myself and my students, even if we are interested in the same field.

But, I guess, I can easily pick up their books when I next get to a library. Maybe my students' interests will define the next category from which my books will come.

That said, I have three whole plastic bags of books (among which number the unabridged Les Miserables and War and Peace) that are waiting for my attention. Now if only I'd have enough time to finish reading Anna Karenina.