My Reading Journey (Wei Ling)

When I was young, reading was a self-indulgent activity. When my sister and I were set free to roam within the library, reading meant a retreat into familiar shelves and familiar authors. I remembered my sister and me making a list of all the books in The Baby-sitters Club and ticking them off one by one after we completed them. We were determined to finish every book, a self-imposed challenge to stretch our reading abilities, but ultimately situated within what was comfortable and predictable. The dramatic turning-point in our reading spree occurred when my sister declared that she was borrowing Little Women in place of another book from the Baby-sitters Club series. I was distraught: how could you betray our sisterhood pact forged between shared library cards! Being the younger sister, I had no say in the matter: I grudgingly read Little Women against my will. Thankfully, I eventually learnt that the joys of reading lie in the exploration of imaginative possibilities, something that can only be done if the reader is willing to test his or her personal limits.

If my sister was the one who shoved me into the realm of unfamiliar reading territory, the study of Literature taught me why it was necessary, reasons that went beyond the need for personal pleasure. During the course of my academic studies, I was obligated to read numerous books that I was not immediately interested in. There were assigned texts I never quite appreciated—I whined my way through pages of Eliot’s Middlemarch and Pynchon’s novels, dissatisfaction tussling with academic obligations as I reluctantly trudged through them. Yet there were also texts that I would never have discovered if not for set texts and module requirements. Till now, during opportune moments, they are a constant reminder of the necessity of reading. On mellow nights as I contemplate loss, I think of Jay Gatsby and ponder his foolishness, and mines. On bad days when acts of kindness seem hard to come by, I think of Lord of the Flies and remember that at the core of the human heart, there might only be cruelty and self-preservation. Yet it is also a reassuring thought: it is a reminder that we have a choice to not be subsumed by the darkness within us; we have to keep on fighting it to prevent it from consuming us whole. Wilfred Owen’s war poetry remains relevant and enlightening even after the “A” levels were over. His war poetry taught me to break down binaries of Us/Them, soldier/civilian, good/bad which are often simplistically portrayed in newspaper reportings. His poetry is an indecent exposure to the things we choose to avoid due to a societal dismissal of emotional, “unobjective” journalism. His poetry is the exact opposite: it treats humans as humans and not as statistics. I think that is one of the best things that Literature can do for us: it is often essential to return back to Literature to recover those pieces of “human-ness” within us, to realise that we have the capacity to be moved and most importantly, to empathize with unfamiliar perspectives. This is especially crucial when we are too caught up with the overwhelming burdens of life which throws us into self-centred disarray.

Now I intentionally seek books that are unfamiliar, books that I am not certain I will enjoy. It is part-defiance, part-bitchiness (the more you know your enemy, the better you can disparage it), part-curiosity. I want to experience new and different perspectives and the only way to do so is to go in unexpected directions. It seems almost absurd, mindlessly looking for something, anything, that can fill the void in my knowledge paradigm. But it matters to me: I want to read The Fault In Our Stars because a student once looked at me, bright-eyed and declared that she “loves romantic novels like this”. I want to read Games of Thrones because I once watched spellbound as two strangers at the dinner table waxed lyrical about the series. I want to read all of Murakami’s oeuvre mainly because I think he is overrated; I might even read Fifty Shades of Grey. I want to read more Chinese books, world literature and local literature to help me think about my identity as a Chinese-Singaporean who is still suffering the remnants of a colonial hangover (perhaps one day I can give back cultural credit when credit is due instead of blindly following a post-colonial aesthetic). Of course, I do have books I turn to because I am interested in them: Iris Murdoch and her melodramatic novels about the complications of human relationships, Virginia Woolf who spins prose like poetry, the Western canon that I am determined to get through, the Internet canon (“100 Books To Read Before You Die”), North Korean literature after a visit to the country (after all, Kim Il-Sung is a “published author” in their terms), the Bible, books about religion and philosophy, Charles Bukowksi and Herbert Zbigniew’s poetry, feel-good picture books (to confess, mostly to look at pictures than actually at the words) etc. etc.

I read only because there’s so much more to read, and so much left undiscovered and unexplored. If reading something today can help me understand the world and its complexities tomorrow, then I will continue doing it.