My Reading Journey (Francesca)

TOO MUCH

I can’t recall most of the books I read as a child, but I do, however, remember owning many Berenstein Bears books. According to my mother, I used to read one every night before bed. “You really, really liked them,” she insists today, referring to these bears who always seem to have Too Much of everything –  

 

– and look like Singa the Lion. 

Looking back, my first foray into reading involved an obscenely nuclear family of anthropomorphic bears who clearly don’t know how to have a good time. Nonetheless, these grizzlies sparked my love of reading, so I shan’t complain.

JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER
In my early teenage years, I resolved to become a more serious reader, and that meant moving from the Children’s Section to the Young Adults’ section at Kinokuniya without getting lost. Back then, I was an indiscriminate reader who devoured books regardless of genre or topic. Basically, I would read anything that had a pretty cover. This was how I stumbled upon two books that would later become very dear to me: Holes by Louis Sachar and The Giver by Louis Lowry. The only reason I picked them up was because they had shiny gold stickers on the cover, and I pretentiously thought they meant that those books were for Gifted Readers (they were not). 

My favourite character was Kissin’ Kate Barlow from Holes, a sweet teacher who falls in love with Sam, the African American onion seller, against the social and racial conventions of 1880s Texas. Sam is killed after the two of them are seen kissing in public, and Kate becomes a badass but morally ambiguous outlaw who robs banks, leaves lipstick kiss marks on her dead victims, and paints her nails with snake venom. She is a three-dimensional antagonist, and her story made me question my tendency to classify characters as either “good” or “bad”.

A MATTER OF INCONVENIENCE
After I stopped choosing books based on how pretty their covers were, I started reading books with really ugly covers discovered and fell in love with many other books. My favourite book of all time is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. It is the only book that has made me laugh out loud one moment and weep buckets the next. Although some critics find it too contrived, I adore the use of photographs and other visual aids in the book. I thought the text and the pictures complemented each other so well and, at the risk of sounding cliché, made the book come alive. 

Sometime in Junior College I began to see books as more than just a source of pleasure and comfort, and realised that books had the potential to shed light and comment on the human condition. Studying Brave New World by Aldous Huxley for literature class contributed greatly to this revelation. I thought the most intense moment of the book was the following conversation between Mustapha Mond and John the Savage:

“But I like the inconveniences.”

“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”  

I remember reading this and how the romantic idealist in me leapt up with a vindicated and resounding “YES.” This was before my teacher explained that Huxley is satirising John’s idealism as his morality, instead of elevating him, pins him down. And, with that, promptly crushed my rose-coloured glasses beneath his heel. In retrospect, studying texts like these has allowed me to see things in a different light, and for that I am grateful.