My Reading Story

My Reading Story

I have a vivid memory of my last day at nursery school at four years old, when all the children in my class were given a book as a leaving present. I was set on a career as a ballet dancer and was thrilled to receive Opening Night by Rachel Isadora with beautiful pictures and all the excitement of being backstage. It is about a girl older then I was, dancing as a sprite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I did not like the references to “Bottom,” I remember thinking it was rude, but my parents would have approved the mention of a literary classic.

Like Dickens’ Pip I grew up in an isolated village in the countryside and spent a lot of my childhood without other children to play with. It is fair to say that I was very imaginative and I loved to escape to the worlds that I found in stories. If I was bored on the weekends I was advised to: “Go read a book,” “Play with the cats” or “Go for a walk.” Maybe I loved stories about animals so much as I grew up in a place which lacked child play mates but with an over abundance of wild life and pets.

My parents have bought me books all my life, beginning with The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle which is so well known and loved it probably needs no description, nor does Where the Wild Things Are written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. I still have a beautiful copy of The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley. In my memories there is a blurry overlap between the time that books were read to me and when I started to read them myself. I do remember that my vocabulary at school was good and I remember a teacher asking me how I knew so many big words. I was much in my own imagination in primary school and was described by a teacher as creative and not academic.

At Secondary School I spent a lot of time absorbed in some book or other. The Jungle Book and Just So Stories are the first books I remember reading “because they are the sort of things that you ought to read” this motto from my dad. I have read lots of books since then because they are the sort of thing you ought to read and some I have genuinely enjoyed. I found Kipling’s Just So Stories a bit distracting as I did not understand some of the language which made them hard to read. I also remember reading The Twits because my dad thought that it was hilarious but in truth it made me uncomfortable and I felt it was dark although I pretended to like it for my Dad’s sake. As an adult I love The Twits and The Witches but I think that Dahl can be quite dark and I have read a couple of his short adult horror stories that convinced me of this.
I have a memory of someone asking me about a book I was reading on the bus on the way home from school in Year Seven. The book was Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales and I remember trying not to cry at the end of The Little Mermaid. At this point I became a teenager and subject to peer pressure. This is how I account for my obsession with Point Horror stories. Jean Ure came to give us a lecture in the library at school and I did not know who she was, only that she wrote one of the Point Crime books. I tried reading Dreaming of Larry but I abandoned it for the cheap thrills of the Point Horror novels, the fast food of children’s literature.

A couple of times a year, all the children in my school would receive book magazines which they would take home to their parents who would order books through the school. I acquired The Tulip Touch by Anne Fine and Waiting For Anya and War Horse By Michael Morpurgo. I remember reading Daz for Zoe at school and after this I read Z for Zachariah by Richard O’Brien; when the Iraq War was announced In the 90’s.

The books we read at school also included Truckers By Terry Pratchett which I remember we all thought was a bit naff. However I became a huge Terry Pratchett fan concerning The Discworld Novels. My father first bought home The Colour Of Magic and the audio book of the story to which all of the family listened to in the car when we went on holiday. After that we were hooked! My dad bought the books as soon as they came out and my brother being the eldest read them after him, I got them last. My mother did not object to the audio books on holiday in the car but she found the characters in The Discworld stories simple, undeveloped and lacking in female characters that she could identify with.

For GCSE we read The Lord of the Flies William Golding and The Crucible by Arthur Miller which I loved because they were about human nature and I could really feel the building sense of hysteria. We also read an anthology of poems including Half Caste by John Agard, Carol Anne Duffy’s Valentine and Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan by Moniza Alvi. I loved these poems and they are the first experiences I had of poetry.

At college I loved English Literature and especially Theatre Studies. One particularly memorable term we explored the transformation of Gregor Samsa into a beetle in Berkoff’s stage adaptation of Metamorphosis. We looked at lots of genres of writing and books that had been adapted to the stage: Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie, A Doll’s House by Ibsen and Dancing at Lughnasa by Brien Friel. Exploring Literature with a view to performing it is a really hands on way of thinking about a text. For example considering an aspect like the costume of a character includes thinking about: the right period, character’s social standing, their personality, mood and the scene they are in.

Studying English Literature included a module on war poetry which I really enjoyed. Although it was not for Theatre Studies, I could really feel a sense of physically what it sounded like and looked like on a battle field. I learnt about devices like onomatopoeia: “The stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle” I remember from Anthem For Doomed Youth. I do not know anyone who does not like war poetry and I think it appeals to a more general audience then another poet we read, Keats, who I felt required patience from a reader especially reading Hyperion (which is about thirty pages long.)

It would be wrong to claim that my law degree included much literature. I enjoyed studying political theorists at university including Hobbes’ Leviathan, Plato’s Republic, Durkheim, Weber, Hart and lots of social and legal theorists in Jurisprudence. The general body of Law is pages of statutes and the decisions of High Court Judges who are unforgiving writers with no regard for full stops, commas or even paragraphs.

In my spare time at University I was in the Drama Group but I found I had not much time for reading. I have had more time since University to read and my parents continue to buy books they think I might like and it is familial practice to read something and then pass it on.

Since I was a child I have valued literature as a way of entertaining myself and have been awed by any prose or poetry that makes me feel something; suspense, horror, disappointment anything accept apathy. Literature develops language and awareness of self and others through a range of literary devices that this course is teaching me to recognise, like the first person narrative in Great Expectations. This is an exciting stage of my Reading Story where I am learning to interpret my own responses to text and the devices that operate to make me feel different things.

Hey you,
It's amazing, I've found someone else who has read Z for Zachariah!! Heavy stuff, scary subject. I read it at secondary school, only because we had to study it. I vaguely remember enjoying it, in a strange sort of way. I remember it having an eerir sort of feel. Almost real which made the topic something to be quite wary of.
I've enjoyed reading your reading history, really interesting.

Kay x

This is lovely but what a horror to have had so little poetry - shame on your teachers!!