As a child, I was surrounded by beautiful picture books, my mother making it a policy to buy books for me on every special occasion, and encouraging relatives and friends to do the same. My mother would read to me, and I would count all the bunnies in my giant “1 to 100” picture book. I would listen, wide-eyed, as Peter Rabbit, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and Mr Jeremy Fisher got into all sorts of trouble, silent scolding the watercolour Tom Kitten for tearing his clothes, crying out in warning when I saw Jemima Puddle-duck chatting with the disguised wolf. I listened to all of Paddington Bear’s adventures, and all of Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes. I listened to Peter and the Wolf (orchestra and all) on CD in the car. After a while, I started reading books to my mother instead, or when she wasn’t there, to myself. Books, I have always felt, must be read aloud.
I think my father too contributed to my notion of aural text. My father loved to read to my brother and me. I loved the sound of his voice. (So does he.) It would run and roll, rise and fall, become sharp, soft, slow, whatever he wanted to paint the text with. On the nights he wasn’t away for work, my father would read to us until we fell asleep, continuing the story the next night. I remember listening for weeks to Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World. I was eight. I had no idea what was going on. But I was curious about Hilde Møller Knag and how she came into the picture, and who the mysterious somebody was that was giving Sophie philosophy lectures, so I suppose that must have been why I wanted to hear it. Thinking back, I don’t recall understanding much of what he read to us beyond the plot, because he picked things like stories by Jorge Luis Borges, or poetry, and while I did try my best to catch what was going on, it didn’t really matter; the drama of his voice was entertaining enough. And on the evenings he wasn’t around, I had Roald Dahl on cassette (my mother bought the audiobooks). I easily followed the stories of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Danny the Champion of the World and the BFG, and these more than made up for the lack of understanding I wasn’t getting when my father was around.
While I was read to a lot in the evenings, I did read on my own to in the daytime. I read, of course, everything Roald Dahl, relishing his Revolting Rhymes so much I decided to perform them during Speech and Drama in primary school. Apart from going to the library or bookstore with my mother, outside of school I was alone most of time, and read voraciously (fictional only; I never read the Dorling Kindersley anything): all three What Katy Did books, Charlotte’s Web, everything from the Little Women series, 1001 Arabian Nights, A Little Princess, basically whatever my mother thought was good for me, which (co)incidentally were almost always Penguin Children’s Classics (I was banned from reading “Mr Men” books and was never allowed to borrow them at the library). When there were no new books and we hadn’t yet been back to the library, I read whatever I could get my hands on. I would allow myself to be insanely bored by Aesop’s Fables. I read this brick of an anthology of all of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that I was given, which was slightly disappointing, the writing being rather dry, and the endings rather more dampening. At that age nothing could really distracted me from reading, except my one hour bicycle time at 6 o’clock and the occasional masak-masak.
When I was eleven, my mother bought me my first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Read it, she urged. I left it alone at first in favour of my Roald Dahl and Penguin Classics, but one day I was so bored I decided to pick it up. That was the beginning of... not studying. I read everything Harry Potter, staying up throughout secondary school to finish the books, to read them again and again. I need not explain my Harry Potter obsession, as I am sure many of you already sympathise. It was the same with The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings. I could not put them down, and I forsook homework and sleep in favour of the Fellowship’s quest, following all the nine as they journeyed, got split up, fought in battles, died, came back to life. I remain a really huge fan of LOTR, and when the movies started coming out, I bought new boxed sets (the copies I had been reading were my father’s and were REALLY OLD with the pages brown, brittle and falling out), and read and re-read everything, even the appendices. Until today, the story of Aragorn and Arwen, documented in the appendices to the trilogy, is still my favourite story (OMGOMGOMG).
During secondary school and JC, obviously, I also read my Literature texts. This may surprise many, but throughout my entire and secondary and JC Literature education (and I took Pure Literature at ‘O’ Level), I never once had to study a Shakespeare text. Instead, the schools I was in chose other texts, mostly 20th century writing. I loved the anthologies of short stories, plays, and poems, and exploring them at an analytical level really made reading much richer for me. During this time I explored texts by D.H. Lawrence, Saki, E.M. Forster, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, among others, learning much about life and human experience that was beyond my own. Of course, being consumed with school and dance, I didn’t have too much time to explore many books on my own, but I maintained a love for literature and the life lessons it took me through.
My undergrad studies really transformed me as a reader, making me more critical, and sharper with my analysis. Undergraduate studies in English Literature, it goes without saying, exposes one to more texts than one can list, so I will only name a few: I read authors from other time periods, like Chaucer; I finally got to study (an entire module’s worth of) Shakespeare; I read texts with unfamiliar structures from unfamiliar cultures and with unfamiliar agendas. For the first time, I explored all of these from a critical perspective, which I find really opened up the subject for me. My favourite authors are still more contemporary ones, but I am now better able to appreciate the intricate form X content relationship.
These days, I no longer visit the library. I do however, visit Kinokuniya a lot (goodbye, money!) and when I do have the time, apart from the occasional Harry Potter/LOTR binge, I read authors that I loved from my undergraduate days, like Kundera, Winterson and Ishiguro, but also newer authors, like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer. I love the ways these authors manipulate form and structure to explore their concerns, and exploring the form X content relationship in texts like theirs has become my chief joy in reading.
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