Reading as pleasure, reading as chore

I remember the time when people used to ask me what my hobbies were and I wouldn’t hesitate to say that one of them was reading. Books featured a lot in my childhood years, and I would read voraciously as a kid. Reading was a pleasurable hobby that was cultivated by my parents from a tender age. I recall fondly the wonderful and fascinating bedtime tales my dad used to read to my brother and me before we slept. My favourite bedtime story was one out of a compendium of atypical tales called “Why the sea is salt” which tells the story of two brothers and touches on the themes of greed and familial ties. The Little Miss and Mr. Men books, Enid Blyton books, Roald Dahl’s books, Archie comics (who doesn’t love Archie?) and The Little Prince were to become some childhood favourites of mine later on.

A terribly taken picture of my favourite compendium of bedtime tales

During my secondary school years, I still found great joy in reading. Apart from reading books which I mostly borrowed from the library, in particular crime fiction, I also started reading trashy teen magazines and comics which I spent quite a bit of my pocket money on. On hindsight, I really should have saved all that money. Those teen comics printed on coloured glossy paper were really expensive! Yikes! It was also during my secondary school years when I fell in love with manga and anime—I still love them!—and started collecting a whole lot of them. I believe I have several hundreds of comics (all translated in Traditional Chinese), though I no longer collect them due to space constraints. Thankfully, there are online versions which are free! Woohoo! Apart from reading manga in Traditional Chinese, I also read other Chinese books, though they were largely picture books illustrated and written by the famous Taiwanese picture book writer, Jimmy Liao (幾米). Of course, in secondary school, we were introduced to literature and the text we had to study was Orwell’s Animal Farm. It was a whole new ball game to me, as that was the first time I realised that what I’d considered to be stories could actually be studied as part of a subject! Poetry was puzzling to me, then a 13-year old, but I eventually grew to like literature and really wanted to pursue it as an upper secondary ‘O’-level subject. Alas, it wasn't offered as a subject for my class and practical considerations meant that I had to suffer two whole years of agony studying triple science and double math (urgh). >_<

My all-time favourite manga and anime, Hunter X Hunter

In my JC years, I believe that was when I picked up Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time which I love and continue to love. I still revisit the text very now and then. It makes for such a wonderful read. ^_^My JC years was also when I started reading the newspapers and I realised how crappy The New Paper was.  It was also in JC when I manage to take literature as a subject (yay!) and my lovely literature teacher, Ms. Lin, taught us to appreciate the wonderful texts we had to read for our ‘A’-levels; they were: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Aldous Huxley’s The Brave New World, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Ms. Lin, whom I will always be grateful towards, also made poetry fun, palatable and interesting. Beyond the texts we had to read for the exams, I also picked up tons of recipe books from the neighbourhood library which I love perusing through.

The programme booklet of the play adapted from one of my favourite books

Unfortunately, this love of reading for pleasure soon faded away and became a chore when I entered university, and when people asked me what my hobbies were, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of guilt when I named reading as one of them, for it felt like I wasn't being truthful. I’d started questioning what reading meant to me, and whether I can look at it in the same way anymore. This gradual loss of interest in reading can be largely attributed to the innumerable readings we had to complete every week. The dry, boring and often incomprehensible readings gradually eroded all my interest in reading. Reading became a chore, and sadly, this tainted my perception of reading in general. I no longer read for pleasure, and all that I read were newspapers, journal articles and academic texts that though mind-opening, were not pleasurable at all. Moreover, it was also during my time in NUS’ FASS that I began to discover the ‘snobby’ side of reading. I began to constantly place value judgement on books and often looked at ‘lousy’ books with contempt and derision which only served to reinforce my gradual distaste of reading. Therefore, every time I look back at my reading history during my undergraduate years, it will always be peppered with a tinge of regret for having been turned off by the whole idea of reading. Ironically, it was during my university years that I became a serial book hoarder. I’d buy books (both new and second-hand ones sold at book fairs) which I always convinced myself I would read, only to chuck them somewhere, forgotten, in my ever-expanding bookshelf.

Fortunately, I feel that I am beginning to regain an interest in reading. The texts we have to read for this module have been fun reads, and the idea that I can make my students learn how wonderful reading can be have all somewhat rekindled my love for reading. Though it’s still pretty much a love-hate affair, what with the academic readings we have to complete for various modules, the wonderful feeling of a rush of excitement—a paradoxical mix of a touch of glee and sadness—derived from having finished a good book has resurfaced and I can’t quite wait to get started on reading solely for pleasure once again! :D