Usha's (Amnesiac) Reading Biography

When I was in primary school, I don’t remember doing a lot of  reading.  I remember doing a lot of assessment books instead. But I clearly remember Enid Blyton’s The Magic Brush as one of the books that I owned and read.

 In Secondary school, I fell in love with my first Literature text, The Clay Marble by Minfong Ho. I loved the cultural experience that I felt while reading the book. I love the whole setting of the book, a coming of age story focusing on friendship set in a war torn situation. I was into the mild horror genre for a while and read a number of Christopher Pike’s books.  I also went into the Chicken Soup for the Soul phase and cried my eyeballs out reading the series. The Harry Potter series kept me sane during the O’levels period. I do remember reading many other books here and there during my secondary school days (since my favourite hangout place was the NLB), but I have this habit of not remembering the titles or the author’s name. I usually just remember the story. So I can’t really document what the other books I read during that time.

During JC, I was exposed to more genres and better quality books. I like all the literature texts that I did for my A’levels. (Okay, I don’t think I liked Boey Kim Chang’s poetry that much then, but I appreciate it more now). I was intrigued by the Gothic genre so I went on to read up more on the genre and started reading Anne Rice’s Vampire series. Other than just reading, I watched horror movies as well (not the Asian ones- those are too familiar). Beyond this, I really didn’t have much time to read.

It’s the same case in university. I only read my lit texts and since literature is not my major, I had tonnes of other readings to do for my major modules and I really couldn’t allocate anytime to do much reading beyond that. After taking a South Asian Literature module, I started reading more books in the genre. I remember reading The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh and some other novels (no, these were not the texts assigned for the module).

Currently, I’m reading The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano. :)