It is a cliché that books are windows into different worlds, but how true it has been for me all my life. Every time I open a book, turning the first page, it is like opening a door for my imagination to step into.
While today most people step into cinemas to see the world come alive, I stepped into books as a child to do the same. Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl were my “baby” books, and boy, did I love those stories. The characters of Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, among others, seemed so foreign yet so familiar. They were in a culture so different from mine, having tea and eating scones, yet they were children that I could relate to. I wished to experience these magical events just as the characters did. I wished I was as brilliant as Matilda; I recall concentrating very hard on a cup trying to make it move with my “power.” Apart from these, I recall reading with delight Aesop’s Fables and various fairy tales (the abridged ones though).
The pre-teen years, “tween” years as the popular term goes, were filled with (NOT Stephanie Meyer!) books focusing on female characters. I guess it was part of a desire to develop my identity, and yet to see that I was “in line” with other girls. Books of this time period in my life included the Nancy Drew series, a little of the Sweet Valley High, and Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon. I was so in love with Montgomery’s heroines; the wistful, romantic girls. More than that, I found myself amazed at her description of Prince Edward Island, and even till today I want to go there to have a look at the place that was so beautifully word-scaped. For a period of time I dabbled with Russell Lee’s Singapore True Ghost Stories, but they freaked me out too much. I guess it ran too close to home, and I began to imagine ghosts everywhere around me. Perhaps that was when I began to realise that reading about different worlds was more comforting and less threatening to me. The love for Roald Dahl encouraged me to read further during these years, and I encountered The Roald Dahl Omnibus, a collection of short stories written less for children. Since I had always seen Roald Dahl as a children’s writer, these tales shocked me at first, but they were so delightfully dark at this stage of my life that it began to open new worlds for me, to see that books and stories did not just revolve around people my age.
Secondary school was a time where I read less, because time was filled up with reading academic books. What a pity! In whatever time I had, I read autobiographical accounts like Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, Adeline Yen-Mah’s Falling Leaves. My father also introduced me to C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. And how could I fail to mention the Harry Potter series so popular during this time? But Harry Potter was more for entertainment and popular culture than anything else. At this point I began to challenge myself with tougher reads too, attempting to read Lewis’ Space Trilogy and Adeline Yen-Mah’s Watching the Tree. I mention them because I tried and failed to understand. What began happening during this period was that my imagination no longer consisted of visualising the characters or the landscape described, but the inner thoughts of the protagonists. The emotions underlying the written word came alive to me. That was when literature became more exciting to me than any other subject (except maybe music, because music is also the same – the thoughts, emotions, processes under the lines that need to be carefully teased out by performer and listener alike). I began a phase of looking for the buried meanings, the words left unwritten becoming as important as the words on the page.
My time in JC consisted of much more reading for the syllabus, which was enriching because it exposed me to a much wider variety of texts than I’d ever been before. While not all texts were really enjoyable (think Thomas Hardy’s poetry), JC reading was one of the most fulfilling periods of my life so far. After years of being forced to read science textbooks, I could finally be rid of them and delve into “text books” that did not prescribe but described, did not tell but hinted, did not enforce but intimated, did not push me away but seduced me into that dark dark world (think Gothic). What I encountered included: Gothic texts like Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Angela Carter’s collection of short stories in The Bloody Chamber, a little of Poe and Wilde; Thomas Hardy’s poetry, local poet Boey Kim Cheng, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, collections of prose, poetry and drama. S Paper also allowed me to discover more of Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence. As I mentioned in class, my one consuming passion is to find books that make my soul ache (in a good way), stories that are beautifully haunting. I think it grew in this period of my life when I encountered some of most achingly good texts ever. Okay, I have to admit that the term “good” is highly subjective, but to me these texts made me forever in love with how writers can weave alphabets, words, phrases together to create a whole different level of lived experience altogether. Let me just introduce what I read during these years of my life that made such a huge impact on me: Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (it is so good that I’m dying to pick it up and read it again but I’m so afraid of the ache that comes with it), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Roy’s The God of Small Things (even though it was a set text for the A levels, it was amazing to read and reread).
It’s easy to see why I went to study English Literature during my university years. No other school subject has so enchanted me and taken hold of my soul. Not once did I regret studying English Literature; my love for books and their authors has only increased through the years of university. University was good in building my repertoire of books, and essential to honing my critical thinking skills, research skills, and exposing me to the world of literary critique (modes of analysis like feminism, postcolonialism, postmodernism etc.). It was a time that I explored books, genres, eras that I previously had shied away from. One instance was science fiction and dystopia. The module with Prof. Patke was eye-opening and mind-widening; I loved that course and am now able to say that I enjoy reading science fiction (moderately). Grad school was even better. I took a one year Masters by coursework programme before coming to NIE and I have to say that it was the best time of my life. Again I found books that made my soul ache: Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows and Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil among others.
The only drawback was that I was so busy attempting to finish the readings for every module that there was basically no time to read outside of the syllabus. And once holidays came around, I was so exhausted from reading that I couldn’t pick up any book for a long time. Even then, I couldn’t stop from going to the bookstore and buying books (this means I still have many unread books in my collection). The moment I step into any bookstore, I’m just so tempted to buy any bookthat catches my fancy. It doesn’t have to be a “good book” (i.e. critically acclaimed or of literary significance) but it has to be something I might enjoy reading. Unlike some friends who love a particular author or genre, I’m more easygoing in picking books. I don’t have specific preferences, and I like to be surprised by authors I haven’t heard of before. In retrospect, I guess the variety of texts I was exposed to since young has allowed me to appreciate different genres and styles of writing. I don’t think that the study of literature has spoiled my enjoyment of reading in any way; it has only enhanced the beauty of meaning construction and meaning reception to me. I can still enjoy a story at just the narrative level, but I can also appreciate a text at a deeper level if I choose to. I continue seeking another world, another space, another time in books, not to escape from the one we are in, but to see our world in a different way through that given perspective.
No comments:
Post a Comment