Su Zhen's Reading Biography

My first story books were also the ones I doodled on. The worst were the Disney ones which came with audio cassettes and which I listened and doodled to. I grew up on a staple of fairy tales which came beautifully illustrated. Happily, by then, I was done with the doodling age though I continued to love the pictures very much. On hindsight, it is perhaps little wonder why my reading diet should consist largely of fantasy literature – I suspect now that it had to do with the way I began reading, and loving the way fairy tales were replicated pictorially in all their imaginative glory.

I went down a fairly typical route thereafter. My primary school reads consisted of mostly Enid Blyton, and a lot of horror – True Singapore Ghost Stories, Goosebumps and R.L. Stine’s Spinechiller series were all staples. I even read Goh Sin Tub’s The Nan-Mei-Su Girls of Emerald Hill, without quite understanding what was going on – I’d only bought it because the cover looked creepy. Along with these, I was also an avid consumer of dated copies of Reader’s Digest and my uncle’s National Geographic magazines.

My reading diet would probably have stagnated there when just before I hit secondary school, I was introduced simultaneously to The Clay Marble, which I really enjoyed, and Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, which I loved. It wasn’t the book which changed everything, but it did lead me to talk about the magic and the humour and I was recommended Diana Wynne Jones’s The Lives of Christopher Chant, and since then there was no looking back. By then, Jones was already a prolific writer and I read virtually everything by her, alongside Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Roald Dahl and Eva Ibbotson. In between waiting for my Potter fix, I made up for the fantasy with the Narnia books, which I started after I’d finished The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and was looking at the competition. I also read Pullman’s His Dark Materials series and I was, and still am a fan of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series.

Those were the light reads – I also read from the prescribed reading list with plodding patience (Teardrop Story Woman, Cheaper by the Dozen, Red Sky in the Morning) and an unsurprising lack of recollection. I suppose it was because of the rivalry I had going on in class with another classmate but which likely gave me the patience and the personal philosophy that I should read what I normally wouldn’t when given the opportunity. This was lucky for me - I started out on His Dark Materials with The Subtle Knife, which, apart from being the most  boring of the trilogy, had pretty dense language and plot. It was what also got me through a number of perplexing reads like Tom's Midnight Garden, though it didn't help me in understanding it.

In junior college, I discovered Neil Gaiman, who was a natural progression from the all the teenage fantasy reads. On top of my literature texts, I read Ender’s Game, the Hitchhiker's Guide, Sophie's World and Life of Pi while being exposed to 20^th century plays, Shakespeare, the Romantics (in particular, Coleridge), Chaucer, Persuasion and Oscar Wilde. My JC time was also when I finally finished, with a great deal of enjoyment, To Kill a Mockingbird and Pride and Prejudice, having started and abandoned in secondary school without fully appreciating either of them then. 

In university, my reading tapered off, mostly because I was already reading a lot of prescribed texts. My focus eventually settled around the 19^th century, especially the poetry and novels, along with a solid dose of film and the Renaissance on the side. I started on Georgette Heyer for fun, and read Susanna Clarke whose wit I appreciated. I also remember being surprised at how much I enjoyed Isabel Allende’s Zoro. I dabbled in architecture and skimmed through E.M. Gombrich’s The Story of Art and then a bit of Borges for my Independent Study thesis and Sherlock Holmes short stories to get me by while I was writing it while a Dystopian Lit module got me onto Margaret Atwood's Handmaid Tale and Oryx and Crake.

Upon graduating, I realized I wouldn’t have much of a reason to read on my own. Being semi-disciplined, I finally read Anna Karenina while holidaying in Spain and Year of the Flood in London. I am however, not much of a Booker Prize winner reader though somehow I feel guilty for not being one. The only other winner I read apart from Yann Martel was Coetzee and it was only because he appeared in a Postcolonial Lit module. On the other hand, I did read Twilight, and pretty much despaired of it.

While I was contract teaching, I revisited The Secret Garden because of a film and started on The Name of the Rose which I had wanted to since my undergrad days but could never as I'd not read the requisite Borges and Doyle references. I also began my first serious non-fiction with World without Us. I chose that partly because on hindsight, I've managed to hang on to an interest in environmental issues which (as I am typing and realizing this properly) probably started with that first National Geographic magazine all those years back. Recently, I’ve restarted (I can also see this is a habit), Middlesex while recently finishing Coraline which I had finally bought because Book Depository had a discount. I’m on Wise Man’s Fear too, but that is parked in hall as it is an extremely fat book.

To sum up, I guess the main areas of reading that I eventually focused on could be broadly summed up as books that dealt with the gothic, fantasy, mystery, Spanish writers (this one I still have no idea why) and books with an environmental theme. These were things that I'd enjoyed as a kid and which I guess I would continue to.