[Carol] Reading Biography

As a student studying literature, I never quite enjoyed/got the whole idea of "studying" it in the first place because to me, reading a book is a whole different experience from reality.. from my old Enid Blyton books from the days of yore to blasted Salman Rushdie's magical realism shenanigans. By placing a grade as to how I read my books, or answer questions as to how I read my books, it really takes the fun out of things.. but then again I digress, since this is supposed to be about my reading biography. :S

I start by quoting Margaret Atwood:

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

Getting lost in the stories retold by my mother, my kindergarten teachers and by the tape recorder/player (which always started with "once upon a time") was how I remember my growing up days, and I think this sparked off my interest for fiction. Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Sweet Valley middle high/high/uni (oh those scandalous books that were recalled by my primary school in the end), BSC, and then Harry Potter, LOTR --> were a few of the numerous books read in my childhood, and re-read in my teenage/adulthood.

Some of the other reading biography posts have also listed the various books which I have read before, and this is the wonder of reading, not just that it enables you to be enveloped by the wreckage and confusion of plots, getting sucked into an imaginary (and not-so imaginary) world, but it binds you with every reader, who understand the exact emotions that the stories can bring you through.

After all, what is a book if it is not read, re-read, told and re-told to persons after persons.