[Timothy] Reading Biography

As with all things, my attitude to reading has changed over the years. When I was younger I was an avid reader of fantasy novels, delighting in the escape they offered. The difficulty and obscurity of the words was part of the fun - like discovering a hidden spell, a new word to add into the repertoire of insults to use against nasty classmates.

Naturally, this changed as I got older. By the time I was in JC I had moved on to slightly more philosophical authors, like Milan Kundera, Orwell, and others that supposedly dealt with the BIG THINGS in life. There is no doubt that this shift was driven by a pretentiousness on my own part, of wanting to appear cultured and sophisticated. I still enjoyed fantasy novels but I certainly wouldn't admit to reading them. And needless to say, despite the wrong motives, it certainly made me think about what it means to write a lot more, and expanded my notion of what literature is.

Now, at an age where I hope I'm a lot less try-hard, I read most things. Undergoing my degree has had the same effect that my pretentiousness did in JC - it forced me to appreciate new things that I was not used to, and this included the fantasy novels and children's literature that I had snubbed in my younger days. I'm struggling with J M G Clezio's War (La Guerre?) now - it's very exciting in terms of how he uses his language but it's also so difficult to plow through. And I find myself quite liking magic realism - it seems to be the happy medium between the dichotomy I drew up earlier in my life. I do, however, find myself paying more attention to technique and innovation - and am less likely to appreciate authors that are one trick ponies.

I suppose this illustrates something about our choice in literature - it is very much subject to immediate influences. My pretentious days were fueled by long, ridiculous conversations about the nature of man with my best friend, but what kept us both reading was exactly that - discussion. Literature was an emotional problem - we wanted to distill exactly what it was the text was trying to convey, and to flesh out the various paradoxes and tensions within the text, to explain away the multitude of reader responses. And I think that is, possibly, one way that we can present literature - as an emotional problem born out of own immediate influences, where solving the problem is simply unraveling and expressing that problem itself.