My Reading Journey (Wai Wan)

"That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."
- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

For me, that first link was formed when I was in Primary 5. A senior of mine at an after-school daycare centre, whom I knew to be very active, was sitting in a corner with his head buried into Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire one afternoon. The sight intrigued me, and I remember wondering what exactly it was that he read that could have been that engaging. Knowing myself, I probably shrugged it off and went ahead to play football. But one day without our best striker became two days, and two days became three and I gradually plucked up the courage to ask him what he was reading. One act of sharing that year sparked off a reading journey that had me backtracking the series from The Philosopher's Stone in the following months, finally culminating in a JC1-me waiting outside of Borders for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Since then my reading has expanded to many other series - though fantasy and science-fiction has and always will capture my imagination. As a young teenager, I was drawn to the Expanded Universe of Star Wars, reading books about the New Jedi Order as well as the Spider-Man and Iron-Man comics. Back then, I did not understand the complexities that comics and graphic novels offered, and merely read them for pleasure. The Dan Brown "wave" caught my all-male school (Victoria), and I soon re-discovered my love for crime and thrillers, eventually leading me to re-read many of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories (I had read abridged versions of them when I was younger, but had completely forgotten all about them).

Fast-forward to Junior College and fortunate circumstances meant that I could take Theatre Studies, English Literature and Knowledge Inquiry; my reading list exploded in these two years. I began to read about reading, from Scott McCloud's works on comics to Aristotle's Poetics. I was introduced to terms like dystopian literature and gothic literature. The works of Edgar Allan Poe simultaneously sent shivers down my spine and made me marvel at the things words could do. The theory-head in me sought to learn about the things I read - about what they were about and how they worked. I continued my reading passion into military service - in fact, Philip Pulman's His Dark Materials as well as Neil Gaiman's works kept me sane during this period of time. Following that, I took on the opportunity to read English and Drama in the UK.

My overseas education pretty much built upon this, as I delved into issues of time in narrative with books such as Martin Amis's Time's Arrow and Ali Smith's Hotel World, while looking further into romantic and gothic novels. In retrospect, perhaps what all these chains, from Harry Potter to Sherlock Holmes and then to Edgar Allan Poe and theory, had led up to was a 40-minute puppetry performance that I wrote and co-directed for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in my second year. It was my first full-on play-writing project, and it was an honour to have it staged and an even greater honour to have received feedback (both positive and negative) that I hope will push me forward as I continue to read and write.