Tabitha Wang
Hardcover or on an iPad, I devour them all — and I hope you do, too
This column almost didn’t get written. That’s because, despite my initial scepticism, I have become hooked on the Twilight series of teenage vampire novels.
I started on the first book on Sunday and, since then, have slept fewer than five hours a day, staying up late to finish all four books.
There are still 100 pages to go for Breaking Dawn, the last in the series, and I foresee I will be staying up till dawn to finish that up before work tomorrow.
As you’ve no doubt realised, I am a bookworm. I love the printed page and would even read the Yellow Pages if I had nothing else to peruse.
My mum started me reading from the age of three. Family lore has it that I amazed a bookstore assistant so much he kept throwing book after book at me to read until he exhausted his stock of children’s books.
Growing up, we didn’t have much money to buy books but there was always the library. I read anything I could lay my hands on — including my uncles’ silverfish- ridden spy novels (with naughty sex scenes that I didn’t understand then).
Now that I can afford to buy my own novels, there’s always one in my bag for those tedious waiting times. And heaven forbid if I forget one for my daily commute. Though it’s only a 20-minute train ride, I’d be bored out of my skull.
Thank goodness I married someone who is as much of a bookworm as I am, if not more so. Our flat is lined with bookshelves. We’re moving house and had to give our movers a list of things to pack. It read: One daybed, one mattress, 20 bookshelves and 100 boxes of books.
People have asked me: “How can you read so much?”
I ask in reply: “How can you not?”
I can’t understand people who say smugly: “I don’t read”, as if they’re too important for such childish pursuits. A guy once told me that on our first date. We never went on a second one.
It’s sad but I have noticed that many Singaporeans seem to have lost the joy of reading. Just walk into any of those expensively-decorated apartments and you’ll notice something: No books.
There may be a few magazines, possibly a coffee-table book or two, but where are those loved-till-the-spinefalls-off books? Can it be that Singaporeans are just too busy with the reality of earning a living to dream a little?
I was shocked when I met a teacher friend in Singapore who said: “I have no time to read.” And she taught English.
This cult of the unread is probably what is causing our dearth of creative talent. If you’ve never taken flights of fancy, how can you think outside the box?
A friend’s daughter, a bright, well-read seven-year-old, once ended her English composition with “Fancy that!” The unimaginative teacher crossed it out and wrote: “Irrelevant.”
The girl was being creative and applying what she had read in her beloved Rainbow Magic books but, instead of encouragement, she was told to go back to the same dull stuff as everyone else.
My friend was later told her daughter was “too imaginative” and “not following instructions” in her composition — the implication being she should not read anything but textbooks.
Is this how we want our children to grow up? With only the knowledge they can get from textbooks and nowhere else? With no encouragement as children, no wonder there are fewer adults reading.
Thankfully, devices like Kindle and the iPad and book series like Twilight and Harry Potter are getting people reading again. They may not be Shakespeare but it’s a start.
As my friend’s daughter would say: “Fancy that!”
Tabitha Wang can’t think of a witty one-liner here because she is dying to get back to Breaking Dawn.
From TODAY, Voices - Friday, 03-Sep-2010
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