My Reading-Life (Clare)

I’d organise my reading-life into two segments of time. The time when I never really thought about the act of reading or how it influenced me, and the time I attained an epiphany of sorts and became a more (self-)conscious reader.

Reading-life and Innocent Bliss

My first memory of reading was of reading and re-reading Enid Blyton's short stories and Pretty Star the Pony. My parents would bring me to the community library and I would read books from The Babysitters' Club and Sweet Valley High, getting all caught up in the characters' business. I suppose my child’s mind derived voyeuristic pleasure from the text, which enabled me to fantasize about a life that was different from and yet still relatable to my own.

And then, there was Harry Potter. This series was my constant during my secondary and JC days. I fondly remember reading the last instalment of Harry Potter under my desk during lessons in JC, so entranced by the magic JK Rowling created. My classmates and I were impassioned by Dobby’s death and could not get over it for days; excitement grew as more of our classmates were reaching the end of the book after us. This was also the first time I knew what a plot “spoiler” was.

Besides Harry Potter, there exists a black hole of my reading-life during Secondary and JC days because life was preoccupied with CCA and focused study in preparation for an upcoming exam or another. I don’t have any lasting memory of this period. That being said, I still read a steady flow of popular fiction like Dan Brown, Nicholas Sparks, Jodi Picoult (whose books I could read in a sitting or two!) and whatever books were trending during that period. Of course, there were the two assigned texts for my H1 Literature course - Othello and Great Expectations.

Despite the groans and grumbles of this tedious study, I had a nagging feeling that there was more to reading than I had let on, though I simply could not articulate the thoughts.

Reading-Life hits… Maturity (debatable).

After JC, I read more “mature” texts like To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984 and The Outsiders. It was also very much by chance that I became a literature major, through eliminating all other possible courses of study.

I would say that I was a late bloomer in the study of literature as I never took it seriously or considered how much it had shaped my life until University.

I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily… to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Reading the American Transcendentalists marked a turning point both in my life and in my reading-life. The ideals of Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau, though farfetched and quite ridiculous as times, embodied the meaning I had long searched for. I learnt vicariously through them to never stop searching for the essence of our being, and in that, found a way to deal with the transience of life on Earth.

The surveys of literature - reading the great epics of Beowulf and The Odyssey, Plato’s Republic, Sir Gawain’s chivalry, the social satires of Swift, in A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels, the birth of feminism through Wollstonecraft, social issues and turmoil translated into text, the list goes on - opened my eyes to the boundless possibilities of Literature. All within the first year of study. I was am constantly in awe of how these texts, though written in various times past, still resound in the modern day reader.

"Sal, we gotta go and never stop going 'till we get there.'

'Where we going, man?'

'I don't know but we gotta go."

~ Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Kerouac was a modern extension of the Transcendentalists for me. He, along with the writers and music of the Beat Generation, influenced my life philosophy and motivations greatly, enabling me to become more aware of what truly mattered. On the Road grounded me amid a great frustration and sadness about what Thoreau called “the masses of men [living] lives of quiet desperation”.

The next high point in my reading-life is when I was introduced to texts from the slavery period in American history. It started with Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the first text which truly made my heart wrench) and ended very aptly with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I ended up writing my thesis on Huck Finn, because I was struck by Twain’s use of Huck as a child narrator. That is, if the narrator had been anyone but a child, many of the things Huck said (about the slave trade) would have been unforgivable. It brought to light the ingenuity of authors and made me truly appreciate the wonders of composition. I don’t think I will ever be a writer, but I hope to become a good reader of their works.

Now, I have been slowly covering, or un-covering, the books on my still-growing “to read” list ever since Uni. I’ve been increasingly drawn in by dystopian fiction like Brave New World (which has become one of my favourite books) and would like to read the classics of each literary genre. I especially want to read Virginia Woolf but have been intimidated by her streams of consciousness. I want to read the classic Greek and Roman texts again, because I had to plow through The Republic, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Metamorphoses (Ovid’s, not Kafka’s) and The Iliad in one measly Uni module. I want to read tomes like War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I also want to read randomly and widely. On that note, I’ve been having many false starts with comics and graphic novels, given the recent Marvel-mania of movies, but have not yet found a series/character I want to stick to. There is so much more to the portrayals in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which I feel, has been taken greatly for granted, perhaps due to over-sensationalism and dilution of the literature by popular culture. In a nutshell: so many wants, so little time.

Writing this biography has made me realise how difficult it is to put into words the impact that reading has had on my life. Each day’s reflection is a constant revision of what has been written and read during daily doings; it takes deliberate effort to stop and think in an increasingly fast-paced world. The act of reading has become so underappreciated in Singapore society that it is a private affair and simply must stay that way. It is because of this that I consider reading-life separate from life as we live it.

Lucky reader, for you have glimpsed a part of me I have never revealed to many!

Hence, my life and reading-life are constantly at odds with this dichotomy between practicality and frivolity... But in the words of Kerouac, “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”