Like most of us here, Enid Blyton was like the third parent to me in my childhood (admittedly, however, I was not a very well-informed fan and mistakenly thought she was a man till much later in my life). A while later I began to get into Roald Dahl as well; the first story I ever read by him was Witches, and I remember getting properly freaked out. His stories always disturbed me in some ways, but kept me strangely intrigued, and filled me with a guilty sense of pleasure each time someone mean or annoying was punished.
Towards the later half of my primary school life I started reading Tin Tin, my first foray into the world of comics, and somewhat disturbingly developed a huge crush on him. At about the same time the first book of Harry Potter was published, and my friend introduced me to it, and I, like so many others, fell instantly under the spell of Hogwarts: throughout the whole of my eleventh year I made it a point to check the sky every morning just in case Hagrid was whizzing down on his bike to deliver a letter from Hogwarts to me, such was the strength of my conviction/desperation. The Redwall series (kind of like an epic adventure series set in the animal kingdom) by Brian Jacques was another series that I got really addicted to; my friend and I even attempted to write our own sequel.
When I was twelve, however, I discovered an author that was quite unlike any of the previous authors I’ve ever read. Till then, books have always been portals to a different sort of universe, a fantastical one, one that was filled with adventure and magic, and where the Good Will Always Triumph. The discovery of Robert Cormier thus marked a kind of coming-of-age; his books often dealt with teenagers confronted with dark, unanticipated aspects of human nature – greed, cruelty, lust – and who often had to find ways of dealing with it on their own, such as in The Chocolate War (where the protagonist is victimised by the school mafia and comes to the dismal conclusion that the only way to win is be beaten) and Heroes (where the protagonist discovers his childhood hero, a decorated war veteran, raped his girlfriend). His books were disillusioning, but also sobering, and thought-provoking. I was drawn to the brutal, unflinching honesty of his books, and to his protagonists, with whom I could strangely relate to, growing up.
I continued reading Cormier all the way into my lower Secondary school days, where he became even more relatable thanks to the onset of adolescence. Nonetheless, I eventually found brief reprieve in a new author I discovered: David Almond, who wrote children’s books but wrote them in such a way that was so poetic and sensitive and delicately beautiful, that there always seemed to be a sense of profundity in his stories, of great depth lurking beneath the surface of his clear, simple words.
The rest of secondary school is, unfortunately, not a very memorable phase for me when it comes to reading, for a variety of reasons. It was not until JC that I read the book that was pivotal to the way I viewed the world around me: George Orwell’s 1984. It did to the almost-adult me what Cormier did to the pre-teen me: shoved the stark, bleak truth in my face. That book disturbed me greatly, pumped my head with subversive ideals, and I became a brooding anarchist for a while (I have grown more mellow since). Nonetheless, while it might appear to be the case, my reading life isn’t marked merely by such bouts of gloom and disillusionment. It was also during JC that I read yet another, more uplifting book that till today still makes (in Mel’s words) my soul ache in a way no other book has done: Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love. I also discovered Douglas Coupland at around the same time, whose books depict facets of contemporary life in a manner that is at once humorous, moving, and just deadly accurate. They also contain many brilliantly insightful and stinging one-liners that are wonderful for quoting at people, for e.g.: “Your inability to achieve solitude makes you settle for substandard relationships” (Shampoo Planet), or “when you’re middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you.” (Generation X)
As part of my H3 literature paper I was also given the chance to explore writers whose, for the lack of a better word, “minimalist” craft made me reflect more about the relationship between language and meaning: specifically Beckett, with whom I share a love-hate relationship, and Raymond Carver. I was able to explore their works even further at university level, among a range of other literary texts and genres, including the works of the French writer Albert Camus, whose absurdist philosophy I could (for better or for worse) relate very strongly to. It was also during university that I developed an interest in Beat writing, more specifically Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, though they were in fact not part of my syllabus. Kerouac was good for reading on travels, and I would fantasise about hopping on and off trains, meeting crazy people, and being a man.
Thinking about it now, I realize reading has probably influenced me in more ways than I’d been aware of. Though as a matter of fact, I mostly read to feel less alone: to quote from The History Boys, “the best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.” On another note, however, I aspire to read more non-fiction: I never seem to have enough discipline to do get down to it.
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