Pamela's Reading Biography

Source: http://reviewstk.blogspot.com/ 

As a very young child I read Enid Blyton. Tons and tons of Enid Blyton. Oddly enough, I avoided the series (Famous Five? Secret Seven?) and opted instead for the short stories. At some points in my life I have been the proud owner of the entire Enid Blyton short stories collections (as was available, then). I still own these books and am serious about passing them on to my hypothetical grandchildren. As a school-going child I was extremely competitive. A reading program in Primary School where we had to track our reading by recording each book we had read and providing a synopsis led to frequent trips to the community library where I would check out books using my own quota (and my brother’s, and mother’s, and father’s). I wanted to be the one to hand in the thickest stack of reading records at the end of each semester. In lower primary, I won a book-cover design competition and was gifted with The Twits by Roald Dahl (the Twits remain my favourite Roald Dahl characters, although Charlie Bucket's appeal is undeniable). This lead to the acquisition and reading of as many Roald Dahl books I could get my hands on, with their iconic Quentin Blake illustrations. I also discovered, perhaps a bit too young, that Dahl also wrote short stories rather different from the children's stories I first encountered. A Roald Dahl anthology containing gems like 'Man from the South' and 'Lamb to the Slaughter' became a fast favourite. I guess here is as good a time as any to make my obligatory mention of the Harry Potter series, which proved to be very good for de-stressing during the PSLE year. 

Source:http://www.whsmith.co.uk

There was a period of necessary (?) digression into what I now think of as 'girly' books that are requisite reading for the teenage years. I did not take to the Sweet Valley High books that fascinated so many other girls but I read my fair share of The Baby-Sitters Club. In Secondary School I discovered Shakespeare, and promptly went to read as many of his plays as I could. I mean the simplified-into-prose versions, of course. For the first time the unfamiliar language of a story daunted me, but I found myself persevering because the content promised to be worth the effort (this is something that I continued to tell myself throughout my forays as  a Literature student, during which the English Language often failed to make the kind of immediate sense it did in everyday use). I was very lucky to have been exposed to a very good selection of texts by my secondary school teachers who enforced a reading programme that included 'must-reads' like Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi (probably one of my first translated novels) and The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. I also enjoyed Orwell's Animal Farm (which was the GEP text, but which I bought and read anyway). Interestingly, the list included epic fantasy writer David Eddings' The Belgariad, a whopping 5-book series that was all the rage in my class. I found my generally abysmal popularity ratings soaring for a while after I obtained (and began to loan out) not just The Belgariad but also its 5-book sequel, The Mallorean. The Upper Secondary years passed in a blur of Twelfth Night and a rather bleak Doris Lessing novel titled (after Eliot's 'The Waste Land') The Grass is Singing. Set in Rhodesia, the novel featured a dysfunctional marriage, an implied extramarital affair between a white woman and her black servant, and her eventual murder at his hands.

This strand of morbidity continued in Junior College, where my peers and I were 'doomed' to two years of  crypts, the uncanny, and melodramatic scenes of romance and horror, because my school had (strategically?) selected the notorious Gothic paper for the 'A' Levels. Compulsory texts were: Frankenstein (know affectionately by my class as 'Franky'), Jane Eyre, and Hotel de Dream by Emma Tennant, this last being a post-modern text so obscure it had gone out of print (we had to study from photocopies of the (old) existing versions). 'The 'Gothic' turned out to be pretty all-encompassing. Thus, optional reading included so many things that it is impossible to list them all. Some suggested texts were: Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, The Castle of Otranto, Mysteries of Udolpho, Dracula, 'The Yellow Wallpaper', etc. Although it all came across as fairly horrific, in retrospect the experience was genuinely enriching. In many ways, the kind of immersion that I received in a theme/topic/area (?) prepared me for studying Literature at tertiary level where some level of independent reading/research was required.

Source: http://www.filmous.com/the_truman_show/

At university the genres of texts I read (according to modules) broadened, but so did the mediums in which I encountered stories. For the first time I started to take films seriously as literary texts. Some of the most memorable classes I took included cinematic texts like The Truman Show, My Beautiful Laundrette, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Air Doll, and although I never delved fully into 'film studies' I came to see that there are important considerations when approaching texts that have visual and audio elements on top of words on pages. One of my independent study modules project focused specifically on the losses and gains that result from the print-to-screen process (when novels are adapted into screenplays for the cinema), and I used Coetzee's Disgrace (the novel) and its film counterpart (a movie starring John Malkovich as the protagonist.) I cannot say that I truly enjoyed ALL the texts that I read in university, but I enjoyed the process of having been exposed to a wide variety of texts and text types.

One lament that I have, which persists today (and which I foresee persisting in the future) is that I find myself reading less and less out of personal interest and more and more out of considerations for 'utility'. I do not think that I have lost the love for stories, but my training has perhaps weaned me off quantity in favour of quality. I prefer to read choice texts in-depth rather than to read and collect as many books as possible. The demands of work and life ensure somehow that I read mainly (and around) what is prescribed (what is needed for my duties as al Literature student, and then as a Literature teacher). Of course, I would still like to try to find time to go beyond that. Luckily for us, if time cannot be found for 4-5 hours of good-old book-devouring in an armchair, there is always the cinema.