[Qian Ling] Reading Biography

When I was a child, I remembered reading Gordon Snell's The Red Spectacle's Gang, Margaret Buffie's The haunting of Frances Rain, and the famous children's classic, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.

When I was in secondary school, I read mostly crime fictions. I became a huge fan of Kathy Reichs, and I would try to read every single one of her novels. Another crime writer whom I admire was Greg Iles. He got me interested in learning about how the criminal mind works. I also remembered reading Principal Defense, a legal thriller by Gini Hartzmark that was an absolutely irresistible page-turner.

I also thoroughly enjoyed some of the 'A' level texts that I studied, especially Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native and Jane Austen's Persuasion. Outside of my prescribed texts, I read works by Evelyn Waugh such as Scoop and Brideshead Revisited. I also read Wilkie Collins' The woman in white and Carson McCullers's powerful and emotionally stirring novel, The heart is a lonely hunter, which is a heartwrenching story about the life of a deaf-mute by the name of John Singer, the people he befriended and the tragic events that revolve around him. Other books that I enjoyed as a teen include Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and White Teeth by Zadie Smith.

When I was in the university, I began to develop an affection for novels and poems by local writers like Catherine Lim and Koh Buck Song. I also fell in love with postmodern fiction from writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino. I began to pay more attention to Asian writers like F. Sionil José and Yeap Joo Kim. I became interested in postcolonial works by JM Coetzee such as Age of Iron and Disgrace, as well as novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, such as The remains of the day, An artist of the floating world, etc. I also read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima, a novel that intrigued me, chiefly because of the novelist's uncanny ability to inject an element of zen and beauty into the violence and madness that he is dealing with in the novel. Another book that captivated me was Reinaldo Arenas's autobiographical novel, Before Night Falls. It is a thought-provoking and emotionally compelling novel that chronicles the difficulties that the author faced, as a homosexual growing up in Communist Cuba, and contains explicit and shocking description of gay sex. Besides that, I was also fascinated by Victorian sensational writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood.