[Kaelyn] Reading Biography

I have a huge appetite for reading. It’s hereditary (from my dad) and it was cultivated in me from a very young age. My mom read to me and with me. My parents purchased the usual stock of children’s books (by Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl), along with books like Nigel Hinton’s Beaver Towers Series, Strawberry Girl, Onion John, The Nickel-Plated Beauty, Little House Series, Anne of Green Gables. I couldn’t stop reading and I kept going to the library to borrow more. That’s when I was reading the Nancy Drew Series, The Babysitter Series, the Hardy Boys Series. It gave me a huge sense of accomplishment to polish off books, and I don’t know who I was competing against but somehow I decided I wanted to be the person who read the most books. I attacked my dad’s bookshelf, diving into novels by Jeffery Archer, Tom Clancy, John Grishham and Agatha Christie. My dad had science fictions books by Issac Asimov which I absolutely refused to touch because I was adverse towards science. I realized I did like science fiction after all when I took a course in university (because I loved the Professor) which required me to read science fiction.

I was on a rampage for satisfying plots, which mostly translated into books which had sensational plots, detective novels and thrillers. Come to think of it, I was thirsting for life. I enjoyed living through the lives of others. I could enter worlds that I would never enter or would have to be older to enter. At that age I didn’t know my limits and admittedly that brought me some trouble in the form of touching content which should be restricted. (I still don’t know what those books were doing in my primary school library.)

Books definitely shaped my life in that they were my companions. They watched me grow up and made me grow up. Books affected and altered me in ways that are at times un-utterable. I remember how books made me feel but can never remember the details. I always was on the lookout for books which would invoke something in me. The tingly feeling where I think, this is it. I love it that books speak to the unconscious which my consciousness is only vaguely aware of. I love that some things can be said, but cannot be explained. I read to find myself too. I like to see reading as a two-way construction; as we construct the meaning of books, books construct us.

I read to run from this world into another. I see it as being on the move in a fuss-free way. The other worlds that I enter into are not always better or more beautiful, and they remind me of this world that I came from, but all the same I relish the idea of a temporary getaway. Perhaps it is this touristy mindset, this desire to be entertained, that makes me feel like an outsider to books, or at best, a temporary insider. I can only enter other worlds to a certain extent, and beyond that extent I feel the pull of this world oh-so-strongly. I don’t think it’s a tension but a superimposition of worlds that aren’t separate but are seemingly conflicting.

I soon grew exhausted of sensational plots, and went on a search for new authors. This was the time when I read a lot of fantasy novels by Dianne Wynne Jones and David Eddings. There was the occasional pull of horror and the gothic, and I read books like The Tulip Touch by Anne Fine. I was also introduced to the quirky novels of Paul Jennings. When I reached my teenage years, I concluded that I like women more than male writers and female more than male protagonists. I simply wasn’t interested in how males thought. I discovered Jeanette Winterson by chance in the school library in my secondary school years (because of the gorgeous book cover). I didn’t understand it, I don’t think I do now either, but I remember the way it tugged at my heartstrings. Jane Austen, Daphne Du Maurier, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, and Susan Hill were other authors that accompanied me those years and even now I can’t resist their powers.

Another reason why I read is because I feel very secure in the library. That is, during the day time. As a result of gothic novels (I had to read tonnes in JC for the gothic paper) and a bid to save electricity, school libraries are creepy in the evenings. Shadows were cast everywhere and it was difficult to relish being alone. It felt as if the atmosphere of horror seeped out of my gothic novels into the library.

In my university years I turned back to detective novels. I wanted to chill out during the holidays and opted for what I thought would be a lighter read. Dorothy Sayers’s detective novels came into my life. They were very different from more familiar detective novels by Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie and turned out not to be a lighter read, especially Gaudy Night which taxed my brain tremendously. On the other hand, if it was not taxing it seemed to be less fulfilling. I ended up reading Chinese novels half of the time during the holidays, because I wanted a break from reading so many English novels during term time. On certain days I would haul myself to the school library to diligently select novels to read. On one such day I came across C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces which was life-changing, not only because that novel made me decide to work on C.S. Lewis for my thesis. It also led me to read the Narnia Series. I abandoned The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe when I was in primary school because I thought that that book was strange and boring. When I read the Narnia Series in full, I was mentally kicking myself for my foolishness.

Every year for open house the Literary Society would give away books donated by kind professors. As a volunteer, I always got first picks. One of the books which I picked up was William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. I am not in the habit of reading comedy but this book is such a gem. I also started reading Vladimir Nabokov’ novels as a result. Because of the modules I did at University, I fell in love with Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Gaskell, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Sarah Waters, Barbara Pym and Banana Yoshimoto.