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Ed is Not a Good Reader (or is he?)
How should I put this... I don't like reading that much.
I know some friends who would stay up way past bed-time, risking the wrath of their parents by not going to bed and reading with a tiny light underneath the sheets and cranking their myopia indices. It would be a romantic little anecdote of myself I might proudly own, but I was already an Internet-enabled kid rather early for our generation – having a dial-up Internet connection and a 286mhz computer running Windows 3.1 back in the day. As is endemic amongst the overly-connected children today, I had – and perhaps still have – a nonexistent attention span.
Yet from time to time something comes along that grips me, and those are the times I follow through with my reading. I remember reading Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers in Primary 3, and also Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea and Around the World in 80 Days. Then there were a few Roald Dahl books like Matilda, Esio Trot, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, BFG, James and the Giant Peace; and other classics like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations (both abridged). These occupied me through the rest of Primary School, similarly imaginative; and more light-hearted, more fun, and thus easy to get through. And then I got my first Playstation in 1999.
The secondary school years constituted a little black hole reading-wise. I was too busy being a teenage boy – football almost everyday after school, chasing girls, LAN games with my friends even when I hated them (they took too much time to become good at and it was no fun sucking at it), and the occasional studying. I hated literature class too, since I never bothered reading most of the assigned books. But I remember loving Taming of the Shrew and just feeling such intense anger and frustration (a personal connection!) when discussing I'm The King of the Castle in class. I just chalked it off as "oh yeah the books were nice" instead of "hey I love reading". With whatever spare time I had left, I would come to collect way too many football magazines and Garfield comics. The former gave me my first dream of wanting to be a sports journalist/analyst (a dream which I live on a very amateur level occasionally now), the latter cultivated a love for dry wit, wordplay and subtle humour. I always tell people that the Garfield comics are so smart, but people looked at me weird. So not a black hole exactly, but certainly a lack of "literary" reading.
Not much changed in Junior College – I was still a teenage boy messing about. But it was here I started really enjoying literature classes, because I was afforded the freedom of interpretation never allowed in Secondary School. It all began when I went for a mid-year exam having never read Measure for Measure and managed to score so well it really intrigued me. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest was the only A-level text I read in full, and it is perhaps easy to see why. Looking back now, it is a little bit strange that I loved the subject but while I did not hate reading, I could always easily find something else I'd rather do.
Then came the intermission years during National Service when the brainless nature of it all made me recoil and determined to keep my mind sharp. My reading had no method to it – books on self-improvement, real estate, religion (i loved Norman Mailer's On God: An Uncommon Conversation), foreign exchange markets, Newsweek, the stock market, Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars (semi-academic) and bond investments, and I also picked up Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. I can't really describe why but James got me really loving the American faux-Victorian style. I then picked up John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman and to date it is still my favourite novel. Here I decided (yeah, based on two novels I loved) to give up my place at SMU and do literature at NUS, and take up the MOE Teaching Award. (oh god why...)
The NUS years – best years of my life. I never thought I could keep my head in something for so long, but I worked extremely hard, never asked for a deadline extension, and truly enjoyed every bit of it. I still did not complete most of the set texts, but most of those (and "outside" books) which I did read I could not put down, and I think it was more the enterprise of mining for meaning and relating it to the real world that captured my attention. I developed a critical edge, loving anything that deals with human inequality, society and power struggles – Marxism, postcolonialism, feminism, critical theory, Bakhtin, Brecht, Baudrillard, new historicism yada yada. I came to appreciate contemporary texts, finding anything from James Joyce or before too baroque and alienating.
To include that customary list, here are of my favourites from my uni days and beyond (present).
- Three of Coetzee's novels that were set texts (Disgrace, Diary of a Bad Year, Waiting for the Barbarians)
- Two more of Coetzee I read out of love (Life and Times of Michael K, Summertime)
- Things Fall Apart by Achebe -> such simple prose, with many teachable bits.
- Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow -> for the lover of the absurd
- Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss; the Rame and Fo plays; -> Brechtian theatre, another favourite area of mine
- Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh and The Enchantress of Florence by Rushdie (which I worked on for my thesis and I have nothing but awe and reverence for)
- Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger -> continuing my exploration of South Asian lit outside class
- Abraham's Promise by Philip Jeyaretnam -> on Singapore and Operation Coldstore. was not available anywhere in Singapore and I had to get it imported from Hawaii.
- Disgrace by Alberto Moravia, got me interested in the "voyeurism in family/person breakdown" genre. also led me to read (devour, really) Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (I have a precious copy signed by Franzen in London) and Simon Mawer's The Glass Room
- Arthur Philips' The Tragedy of Arthur -> I can't recommend this enough. It is about the "discovery" of a "new Shakespeare play". Explores narcissism and tragedy within the context of an unheard-of Shakespeare play (reproduced in full glory) to pore over.
- Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall -> Tudor drama and court intrigue
- The Economist -> recently just got a subscription. news/analysis that is both comprehensive and in bite-sized bits. you would enjoy this if you are anything like me.
As I mentioned in my class introduction, I have my fingers in way too many literary (and non-literary) pies at this moment – all of which are interesting without having me truly hooked. I could come up with so many excuses for not reading enough now, most of them at least semi-valid. I am waiting, wanting to experience again that rush when I simply have to finish reading something.
