My Reading Biography by Geraldine

My reading journey started at the tender age of 6 when, bombarded with a toddler and a newborn baby in the house, I decided that my share of parental attention and affection had dwindled to a misery portion and that I needed something to entertain me in the post-daycare/kindergarten hours. I was far too short to reach for the television buttons and the computer graphics at the time did not interest me in the slightest. Thankfully my parents kept a full series of children’s encyclopaedias and I happily devoured them one by one, often returning to the same ones that piqued my interest: animals, the world’s cultures, anatomy, and British history. 

My aunts noticed that I was often quoting these encyclopaedias and insisted that I be exposed to stories. They bought me a set of “The Naughtiest Girl in School” and “Mallory Towers” and I was instantly transfixed by the world of British boarding schools. By 9, I would end my day in bed, reading a few chapters from either Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl. My imagination blossomed under these authors and I started to find pleasure in not only reading but writing, filling out pages in my primary school compositions books with (far too many) imaginary words/images. I remember often exceeding the page limit by two or three times, much to the irritation/confusion of my English teachers.  

In my pre-teen years, I lived overseas for a while and was enrolled in an American public school. I was quickly ushered into middle school reading lists and boy were they challenging, to say the least. I started with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, then moved on to John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird, Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Number the Stars, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, S.E. Hinton, and many others that I cannot quite recall. It was in these years that I was transformed into a voracious reader. I also exposed to poetry, reading Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost. Frost’s ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ was the first poem I had ever read, and I remember being quite fascinated by the arrangement and rhyme of the words. It had never occurred to me that words could be structured quite like this, made to sound as if they rhymed so naturally and effortlessly, while still being able to say something meaningful.

Suffice to say, my tastes have evolved over the years. I have generally shifted towards more feminist texts; specifically feminist re-tellings of typically masculine stories. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Edible Woman, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife (which has become my favourite collection of poems) come to mind. I love texts with twists of perspectives, such as The History of the World in 10.5 Chapters by Julian Barnes and The Last Girlfriend on Earth by Simon Rich. 

I've also come to enjoy literature that explores human desire in its many forms - be it desire for sex, food, travel, justice, affirmation, power, etc. Desire can either be denied or magnified, a sentiment rejected or embraced, and the varying degrees to which a character would deny/indulge in his or her desires is fascinating to me. Some texts that stand out in the category of ‘desire’ are Perfume by Patrick Suskind, Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, Anthony Capella’s The Food of Love and The Various Flavours of Coffee, Gabriel Marquez Garcia’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, even George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series hits this notion of ‘desire gone dizzyingly mad’ right on the nail.

In the future, I hope to read more Singaporean literature because I feel like there’s so much I’m missing out on. I’ve purchased a few volumes of Cyril Wong’s poetry and I’d just finished reading Kevin Kwan’s Crazy, Rich, Asians which made me really happy/excited to see Singlish in print. I really hope that I can come to appreciate Singaporean literature and to see how well-executed some of the texts are. I think it will not only make the idea of ‘being Singaporean’ more concrete/meaningful/problematic but also foster a sense of pride in the literature of my country.