Carmen's Reading Biography

It seems to be that I had been influenced into reading books since a very young age. Having an elder sister who was 2 years older than I was, we did everything together. That meant that when she started reading was when I started reading. She would read Enid Blyton in Kindergarten and I would be reading it in Nursery (though I probably didn’t understand some of the vocabulary used and had to constantly bug my parents to explain them to me). It was also pretty funny that I could read words then but couldn’t even spell them during spelling tests.


My first love was Enid Blyton who introduced me a world full of fantasy. She was the one who taught me life lessons like having manners, learning to share, to forgive and to forget and the importance of friendship. Enid Blyton brought me on adventures with The Famous Five, solving mysteries and thinking out of the box to get out of dangerous situations. She taught me creative thinking and that was certainly a very useful skill in my primary and secondary school days where we had creative writing as part of the curriculum in our English lessons.


R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike were my second love. There were the ones who got me addicted to horror stories and thrillers during my primary school days. They also built up my courage for scary things to the extent of me becoming immune to horror films. I loved the way that they managed to build up suspense and then end it in a way where you least expect it. They were the ones to also teach me that not all interesting stories need to end off with a happy ending.





During my Secondary school days, my love for fantasy genre books grew as I got hooked onto J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. The way these authors described their world of fantasy was so brilliant to the point me being able to myself actually imagine myself being in there. I was quite crazy over such genres of texts to the extent of even reading some of the fanfiction which were really good.





 It was also during my Secondary school days when I was introduced to more serious books like The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Initially, they did not appeal to me since they weren’t exactly fun-to-read books. In fact, the stories were kind of depressing. However, strangely, the more I read them, the more I couldn’t put them down until I finished reading to the end. I felt outrage when Tom Robinson was found guilty even though he was innocent in To Kill A Mockingbird, I felt sorry when Johnny died in The Outsiders. It was all thanks to such books that I stepped out of my bubble and saw the world differently. They were books that made me more aware and matured my way of thinking significantly.




Also, who can forget Shakespeare? Shakespeare taught me about drama and also many other broader themes. I still remember struggling to understand his plays and then feeling a sense of achievement and appreciation after comprehending his style of writing. It is also because of him that my love and appreciation for dramas grew.





Junior College and University were the phases in my life where I learnt to appreciate Literature written by Singapore and other Southeast Asian writers and got rid of my biasness towards Western Literature. S. R. Narayan’s The Guide & Goh Poh Seng’s If We Dream Too Long exposed me to cultures in Singapore and Southeast Asia. They are works that makes me proud of being an Asian and appreciate my Asian roots more.







Of course, we cannot forget my guilty pleasures like books Alexandra Potter, Sophie Kinsella and manga. Who says that girly books are thrashy books? For one, Sophie Kinsella taught me about impulsive buying and lying and how it jeopardizes people’s trust in you. Same thing for manga, there are many stories that taught me many valuable lessons despite mostly having very farfetched scenarios in them. Cat Street by Kamio Yoko taught me that “Happiness that you obtain from others is very unstable. If you cannot capture it yourself no one else will come and grab it for you”. Such lessons are not only meaningful, but also very relatable to our daily lives.



Despite not having as much time to read now, I still enjoy re-reading books that I have read before to refresh my memory on them. I think reading has shaped me as who I am today and I am what I read (yes, excessive reading in the past has also made me the "blind bat" that I am today so reading has really shaped me both mentally as well as physically).