Growing by reading

There were many influences which guided me towards a habit of reading: my sister loved reading, we had many Enid Blyton books in my house, and my mother encouraged it the best she could. When we were young, she would quote us the Chinese proverb which translates to "If one doesn't read for three days, his appearance would be horrible." She took the liberty of shortening the grace period to one day, in hopes that we would read every day. We only found out when we were older how the proverb really went.

Like many children, I was fascinated with Enid Blyton's stories of The Magical Faraway Tree, The Wishing Chair, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Five Find-Outers, The Adventure Series, all of which developed my imagination immensely. I loved the fantasy genre and the places it could take me, but I soon realised that stories not belonging to that genre could also transport you to different places no less charming. These places were boarding schools in Malory Towers and The Naughtiest Girl At School, from which I gained a keener sense of the values of moral uprightness and good work ethic and wholesome fun. I also visited a small Swedish village where Pippi Longstocking a little girl with a most unconventional upbringing lived with her monkey and her horse. There was also The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner, and the Sweet Valley Series from which I never graduated middle school.

My interest in the fantasy genre did not wane as I grew older with books, but it certainly did go a little over to the dark side, with books by Graham P Taylor and J K Rowling (whose characters grew up with me, as the books were published when I was in secondary school). There was also C S Lewis and Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings I have yet to complete; I read well-written fanfiction focusing on the time before the events in the books). I got in touch with my teenage side with Karen McCombie’s Ally World’s Series. The school library also offered the book Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, for some reason I have not discovered, which left a lasting impression. It was then I became more sensitive to plot twists and the realization that the text is the author’s craft. I then saw Roald Dahl’s children’s books as more than simply stories about the cleverness of animals and the madness of adults. In junior college, my group of friends and I got hooked on Agatha Christie, which was not constructive to an imagination well trained by Enid Blyton’s Fairyland.

My childhood lasted a long time as I constantly revisited my old books. That, and Archie Comics which I never thought I would outgrow having read them to university. I still enjoy the occasional comic, but I now have less time for that. They were easy on the eyes what with the drawings and extra-textual features; what I liked most about the Archie Comics was not the love triangle formed by Archie, Betty and Veronica, but rather the conciseness and wit of their sentences. I fancied that it sharpened my reading and writing skills, able to get more out of and pack more into a sentence. It never realized my mother’s concerns about comics, with its (largely) well-formed English with the occasional slang and clean humour. It was with the comics that my awareness of language use expanded.

When I was old enough to travel overseas, or rather when my sister was old enough to travel overseas and tell me about them, I was attracted to the cultures of the world and especially the curious customs they live by and activities they participate in (e.g. rolling cheese down hills, jumping into freezing waters in winter after baking in the sauna).  More than that, I was impressed with each people’s personalities (even if they may be stereotypes): the industriousness of the Germans, the ingenuity of the Japanese, the nature lover in the Scandinavians, etc. It was in these cultural books that I gained insights into what each people respected and what humanity valued.