[Shu Wei] Reading Biography

          According to my Mum, I have had a great affinity with books since I was a baby. Apparently when I was a baby, my favourite activities involved gazing at picture books or man-handling/gnawing on them. I was weaned on the Peter and Jane series since I was two or three, and I absolutely loved them. My mum would patiently read to me every night and eventually I had to read them back to her as well. I used to stay in the Ubi area and there was this neighbourhood stationary shop which my mum and I would often frequent to pick up stationary supplies. I would always remember that day when she allowed me to choose a storybook all on my own. I was only three years old then, and it felt like I was a big girl because I had a say in what I wanted to read. I tottered off to the nearest book shelf and picked up a pretty pink book. That was the “first” book I have ever read on my own and it was The Cat with the feathery tail. I was so proud of myself then, and I still have that book sitting around somewhere in my house (I’m quite amazed too).

          Throughout my childhood, I devoured Enid Blyton’s story books with a ferocious appetite. I literally read one book a day or three a week kind of thing, which is why my Mum often complains that I was a very expensive child. Staples of my childhood reading list included the bookworm club and the young generation magazines. My favourite series from Enid Blyton were: The Famous Five (George!), Mallory Towers (Alicia and Darrell Rivers!), The Wishing Chair and The Faraway Tree (Moonface!). I swear Enid Blyton was such a huge major influence on my life, my mum learnt how to bake so that we could have tea and muffins and cakes. Nancy Drew and simplified children classics like Ten Thousand Leagues Under The Sea and Huckleberry Finn were also part of literary diet. Russell Lee’s Singapore’s True Ghost Stories were so wildly popular then, and I stole the lot from my uncle and read them all. Interestingly, the sole Roald Dahl book I’ve ever picked up was Mathilda and I absolutely loved that book. It made me want to try eating TV dinners in front of the TV as well. I picked up classical fairy tales from the Grimm Brothers as well. As a result, it made me interested in mythology and legends and it started off my lifelong obsession with Greek and Scandinavian mythology in my late primary school years. In my late primary school years, I moved onto Goosebumps and The Babysitters Club (Claudia!) as well. I remember in my final year in primary school, my teacher introduced Totto-Chan to us. It was absolutely enchanting and unlike anything I have ever read, so it started an entire of chain of interest into Asian literature and biographical accounts. That very same year, I started reading Adeline Yen-Mah’s The Chinese Cinderella.

          When I was in secondary school, I moved onto Catherine Lim and Amy Tan. I used to adore Catherine Lim and because of her, my vocabulary bank expanded exponentially. My feelings for her writing style has since vastly changed, but I must acknowledge her influence on my reading history and writing style. Her first book I picked up was The Teardrop Story Woman, but her best novel must be The Bondmaid. One of my all-time favourite was Memoirs of the Geisha, and I found myself captivated with the tragic story of Sayuri. This was a period of my life when I was exposed to the fantasy genres  and I absolutely loved David Eddings’ The Belgaraid Series. I tried reading Lord of the Rings, but somehow I was not able to stomach it down it. There was, of course, Harry Potter and Gang, whose world enraptured me for the next few years into my late teenagehood.

         I was absolutely in love with the 6 texts which my Junior College literature teachers have chosen for us: the amazing Shakespearian works of Othello and King Lear, Silas Marner, The Age of Innocence, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. I spent most of my time reading through these texts, as well as the compulsory GP readings over those two years. After I graduated from Junior College, I begun to immerse myself into a variety of texts but the sole text I remember was: Sophie’s World, which initiated me into the world of philosophy and epistemology.

          I started to hate reading when I was in University, because there were too many texts to read and some of them did not interest me at all. Amongst those mountainous piles of notes, readings and novels, the ones I love the most included: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Ian Mc Ewan’s Atonement, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and finally, Magaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In my later years in University, I took up a few creative writing modules and it begun to shape the way I perceive the act of writing and reading and it influenced my reading taste as well. I shifted from becoming a discerning reader who was trying to understand the work to a discerning reader who was trying to understand why the work was written in such a style and manner and to what effect it was trying to achieve. I appreciated Poetry a lot more, and poetry writing became a carthartic experience. I started buying and reading poetry collections from various poets. My favourite poets include Cyril Wong, Gilbert Koh, Anne Sexton, Pablo Neruda and Dorothea Grossman.

           Now that I’ve finally graduated from University, I remember how I used to enjoy reading. Just barely a month ago, I picked up a novel and begun reading it because I wanted to and not because I had to. That feeling was sooooooo good. Though the reading biography had seemed like such an awful chore initially, I’m glad I had to write it and reflect on my reading history because it made me consciously remember how my reading habits and choices have changed over the years. One thing I'm thankful for is how my parents supported my ravenous and insatiable appetite for books, and that appetite exposed me to different types of worlds and writing styles which invariably shaped and influenced parts of my life.