Diyana's Reading Biography

Almost everyone I know started off reading books and short stories by Enid Blyton and I am no exception. It's a little hard to say if I enjoyed her works because I already had a taste for fantasy fiction or if it influenced me to favour that genre above others. Perhaps it was a bit of both. I recall my first Enid Blyton book in hardcover titled The Brownie House and Other Stories. That was the first of many hardcover titles that I was to own in the coming years and I remember stacking them up in my bookcase in neat columns, feeling very pleased with the number of books that I had (almost thirty when I was 9 years old). They were easy to read, had cute little illustrations that I would colour in, and provided many examples of moral lessons and comedy. They were the perfect companion for the little daydreamer that I was. The collection then grew to include The Faraway Tree series, as well as The Famous Five and The Secret Seven. Looking back, I find it a little amusing that I was drawn to books by Enid Blyton because of all the food and drinks that kept appearing in the stories. There was just something about all those picnics, suppers, treats and drinks that the characters in her stories enjoyed that appealed to me as a kid. My early preference for fantasy and mystery then extended to myths in my late primary/early secondary school years and I become particularly fond of Greco-Roman myths which I would read different versions of.


During my teenage years, I began to read Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew series and Franklin W. Dixon's (which is actually a pseudonym for a group of ghostwriters) The Hardy Boys, obviously influenced by my earlier readings of The Famous Five and The Secret Seven. My appetite for fantasy fiction grew even more and coupled with the epic (which I had no inkling of the term at that time), I fell in love with Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series and Mercedes Lackey's The Dragon Jousters collection and Vows of Honour. I suppose that it is unusual for a teenage girl to indulge in such a genre, especially when you come from an all-girls school where almost everyone was soaking in titles like Sweet Valley High, The Babysitters Club and a lot of other 'softer' books that delved into romance. These books had little appeal to me. It was adventure that I wanted, the magnificence of an epic in which might, magic and cunning are let loose in a unruly world that still laid down the codes of honour. I wanted glorious battles that tested the unity of a brotherhood, monsters of all kinds that inspire both fear and courage, the complex and intricate workings of humankind in a quest for survival.

The closest thing to this which the secondary school curriculum offered me was Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The idealism of Brutus, tragedy of betrayal and Mark Anthony's brilliant speech cemented Shakespeare as a maestro in my mind. My second, real exposure to Literature began in Junior College where I studied Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (such wit and humour!), Coleridge (The Ancient Mariner and Christabel still haunts me at times), Shakespeare's Othello (all-time favourite tragedy, brilliant!) and an introduction to Chaucer with The Knight's Tale. I was so taken with these works and the periods in which they were written that I continued my studies of them in various modules during my University years. Even now, I still favour such canonical works over modern ones even though I've been blown away by the works of Marquez (Love in The Time of Cholera) and Calvino (On A Winter's Night A Traveller).