“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Over the course of the Christmas/new year’s day week, I read three books by Christopher Pike. My sister also read the same three books. We used to read a lot of his books when we were younger — though apparently not really that many! We went through the titles and couldn’t recall many of them, causing a great deal of shrieking (with laughter, of course) as we went through the plots we remembered. Here, for your pleasure — all three of you reading this — are recaps of the books. Uh. Beware of spoilers?

See You Later

This one I never read before. I, uh, will not try to be kind. This one, while it has a seriously WTF-is-going-on-here plot, was still predictable. Of course you knew who the girl was! Who wouldn’t? This had to be the worse of the lot, at least plot-wise.

It also felt like Pike was trying to smack the back of our heads with some sort of personal philosophy. Reincarnation! Trying to rationalise cause and effect to explain the paradoxes set by time travel! Those weren’t the things I needed paragraphs of rambling upon, thanks.

My sister read this book after I did. I had a blast watching her expressions as she flipped through the pages — she’s a very expressive girl. There was a point I was sure she was going to throw the book across the room, but of course she didn’t.

Among other reactions from my sister: “What kind of title is See You Later? It doesn’t make sense! See who later? Yourself? And what the heck is on the cover? The Eye of Sauron?” Ahahaha.

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Spellbound

This I definitely read before. This one has your standard shaman, transfer students and people turning into animals and of course the quiet, pretty transfer girl is obviously the one to look out for. Beware of English chicks. Seriously.

It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t really good either.

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Gimme a Kiss

I probably read this one before. A mystery/thriller, this time, instead of horror or something with supernatural elements. Rather slipshod when it came to resolving the whole story, but maybe my twelve-year-old self wouldn’t have been too critical about the too-nice girls always being the evil ones. (Or maybe I would have been. I was one of those too-nice girls once.)

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. . . but this is not why we are here

I am here to tell you the reason why I am thankful for Christopher Pike. Strange thing to do, I suppose, after rather dour recap of three books.

My first language isn’t English. I never had much trouble with English, and languages in general, since my parents liked books and I had always liked to read. When I went to school, though, I pretty much despaired at the state of some of my classmates’ command of the English language. The good ones were very good. The bad ones were really, really bad. It didn’t seem possible that after six years of classes in primary school, you can’t get a sentence like “This are is a cat.” right. In another school, it probably would have been more believable — yet still not acceptable, if I have any say in the matter — but I went to one of the boarding schools, one of those supposedly “good” schools where you got in based on merit.

There was a girl I was rather close to when I was in the second form. She would come to me with her English homework, asking me for help, and I would feel more like a harassed teacher instead of a friend when I had to underline and cross out things in her essays and workbooks and struggle to explain to her why this is correct and that is not. (I was not a good teacher and never will be. I lack the patience to explain the same thing over and over after I’ve explained it once, and I don’t have the grace to give a kind word when needed.) I never corrected things for her. I only pointed out what was wrong and forced her to fix those mistakes until she got everything right — I think her English teacher was a bit suspicious how she managed to write as well as she did. She would come very close to giving up sometimes, looking sadly at the sentences I kept underlining.

She didn’t read many English books, this friend. (I can’t remember what was required reading when we were in the second form, but I certainly know that you should never force The Red Badge of Courage on lower secondary students who had naught of American history. Even the abridged version.) I tried recommending books from the school library but they were either too hard or she wasn’t interested in them, so that was a dead end. I figured if I could get her to read more, it would solve a lot of her problems.

One day I found her reading an old copy of one of Pike’s books I had brought from home. I was quite surprised — I didn’t think she would have liked horror. I can’t even remember which book it was. I couldn’t tear her away from it. She asked me if I had any other books like that book, and I had shoved all the Pike books I had to her. Her English improved. She started reading other books. She got an A for the exam we took in third form. I was happy for her.

She’s a teacher now. No, she doesn’t teach English, but she probably could have if she wanted to.

See? These books can be useful, after all. XD If you can use them to get a kid to read, then I’m happy enough.

This is from Renay, for the meme she did here. You should do it too!

1. Since everyone starts with this: I don’t remember learning to read. I know I must have learned to read before or around the age of five — I remember being in kindergarten and wishing we had more words in the books inside instead of pictures. I can’t remember whether my parents read to me either. They probably did, being the kind of parents they are, but I don’t remember them reading to me.

   I remember my aunt reading to me, though, but that when I was much older, and I was able to read on my own by then. I remember her reading Batu Belah Batu Bertangkup — a story based on Malay folklore. I can’t remember the writer or the publisher, but I would know the binding of the book if I saw it. The details of the story itself are a tad hazy — the story varies from retelling to retelling, but the start of the story always goes like this: a widow catches a tembakul fish after a day at the fields, and when she cooks the fish, she sets aside the roe in three rations, two for her children, and one for her. She leaves the house for a while, telling the elder child to mind her brother and to have their dinner, but to leave that portion of roe for her. The widow leaves, and the younger son throws a tantrum, and unable to placate her younger brother the girl gives her mother’s portion to the boy (and maybe half of hers as well? I remember thinking that the sister was a saint to tolerate the boy so) thinking that surely her mother wouldn’t begrudge the little boy some roe, right?

   That night, the widow hears the calling of the batu belah, batu bertangkup — the splitting rock, the closing rock. I can’t remember if this was actually in the version I read, but I know in some versions — or perhaps it was the film — the rock calls to her, telling her just as she yearns for the roe, the rock yearns for her death, she hears it calling out to her and she heads towards it, despite the children running after her and calling for her forgiveness. But the children’s voices are drowned by the rock’s call, and the throws herself into the open mouth of the rock and it closes over her, ending her life.

   . . . That had nothing to do with anything, but there you go. (That was a morbid story, really. It doesn’t end there — it goes on until the children grow up and find their happy ending, but the ending always felt odd to me, and what always stuck with me was you should always listen to your mother. Always. Especially when it came to food.)

2. Stories from my mother, Part I. My mother once told me that I was terrible at sharing books. Toys were fine, but not books. Books were mine and I refused to share. I think I was particularly bad with kids who were children of my father’s acquaintances, since I almost never see these kids at school and I was convinced that they’ll never come back to return my books.

3. I tried reading Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream when I was in secondary school — probably in the Third Form (I would have been fifteen then), during that long, long break after the exams. I finished it, checked it back into the library, and swore to myself I wouldn’t try another Hemingway book.

   I broke that oath I made to myself. I picked up my father’s copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls sometime after I finished school — after I finished the Fifth Form and another long break with nothing to do — and I didn’t finish that book. It sits with my other unfinished disgraces from my father’s shelf, along with Anna Karenina and several others I have forgotten.

4. Best birthday present you could ever give to a nine-year-old: a shelf with a full set of an encyclopaedia and nature books in it. I can’t remember what the encyclopaedia set is called . . . it just escapes me at the moment. I used to check everything up in those books, and was mostly left disgruntled because it had so much material on US states, which really didn’t interest me since the only state I vaguely knew was Minnesota, and almost nothing about the countries I had to look up. It was a time without the internet, so we had to make do. XD

5. My mother tongue is Malay. I speak Malay more than English, but I’m quite unable to write in Malay. I think it comes from not reading enough in Malay. Seriously, though, some of the popular literature I’ve come across recently are terrible (god, some of the romance novels made me writhe in pain), and you can’t expect one to read and reread A Samad Said over and over, can you?

   . . . I suppose it’s really bad that when I think of the last Malay novel I remember reading, what comes to mind is Merpati Putih Terbang Lagi by Khadijah Hashim. It was published in 1987; I probably read it in 1997 or earlier. Oh man. I should go asking for recs for Malay novels.

6. I (probably) started reading with these Little Golden Books as a kid. Heh. I looked at their site, and I realise I still remember The Poky Little Puppy and The Little Red Hen. There was another one that had a fuzzy blanket in it . . . I can’t remember the title to look it up.

7. Then I started reading books by Enid Blyton, starting with the ones for younger children, like the Amelia Jane series and the Wishing Chair series. Oh, and The Faraway Tree stories — that was one of my favourites. Then came the mysteries: The Famous Five and The Secret Seven stories, and then school stories: The Naughtiest Girl series (I liked this one best out of the series set in boarding schools), Mallory Towers and St Clair stories.

8. I got stuck in the Sweet Valley Twins/Christopher Pike mode for a while. A rather short while, all things considered. You can only have a sleepover/new kid in school/dance a limited number of times, and your spooky mystery stops being a spooky mystery when you start figuring things out before the book is half-way through.

9. I try writing a bit now about the books I’ve read. I used to have a spreadsheet listing the books I owned, but I stopped updating that a very long time ago. For a while, my to-be-read list consisted of scribblings on spiral notebooks and paper napkins and bookmarking pages from Amazon, but I realised that I keep listing the same books over and over because I kept losing the old list. So I’ve started listing stuff in spreadsheets again. The list keeps growing, and I don’t know whether I’m delighted or dismayed by this fact.

10. Sometimes I have such long breaks between reading a book and writing something about it (I just can’t seem to be able to call them “reviews” — it doesn’t feel I’m writing reviews . . . it feels more like rambling and going off in tangents — see how far off I went in point #1) that I sometimes forget what I actually think about them. I tend to gloss things over when I’m stuck between being unsure and thinking maybe I didn’t like something, it gets even worse when I’ve left something alone for a while. Partly the motivation of posting about books (here and elsewhere) is simply because I know then that I’d have to write something. I’d most definitely read something during the week, though there’s no guarantee that I’d finish a book in a week. I tend to finish books pretty fast once I get into them — getting into them is often the problem. I’ve been trying to start a few books for ages now — Naomi Novik’s Temeraire for one, and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief for another — and it’s not that I think that I wouldn’t like the books, it’s just that I’m not compelled to start them just yet.

11. I have never ordered anything from Amazon or any other online book retailer!

12. I am bad at reading non-fiction. I struggle through biographies, memoirs, self-help books, books on architecture, cookbooks, books with glossy pages almost like magazines detailing the contents of the Louvre, and textbooks, just because they’re non-fiction. I’m not terribly interested in magazines either, come to think of it.

    I don’t do very well with poetry as well, but that could simply be because I’ve never been exposed to much of it.

13. I bookmark my books using whatever’s handy. I have a “default” bookmark — a friend gave it to me during my last year in school — but sometimes it goes missing. Then anything goes: old receipts, pieces of paper, discount cards, post-it notes. If nothing’s around, I just memorise the page number, and I generally find myself losing a few pages because I remember the number wrongly, but not by much. Usually by a page or two. I don’t know how I manage that. I don’t dog-ear pages. I generally don’t mark my books, though habits at work are creeping into my personal life and I find myself flagging pages with post-its because there’s a typo or missing words or something I should take note.

14. I usually read one book at one time. I may start a few books at once, but I usually focus on just one, once I’ve gotten into that book. Then I get stuck reading the series till the end, because it’s very hard to derail me once I get into something. Which gets really hard sometimes, because I don’t always have all the books to a series!

15. I use Goodreads. My profile is here. I use it to track books I own, or books that I know are around the house, so books in my to-read list aren’t necessarily in the “to-read” shelf on Goodreads. It’s a strange logic, I know.

Booking Through Thursday: Volume
Would you say that you read about the same amount now as when you were younger? More? Less?
Why?

This is a tricky question, really! I’m pretty sure I read more when I was younger—at least when it came to actual “volume”, ie number of pages or words actually read. I still read, but I don’t think I read as much, and it’s mostly because of time constraints—work, the internet, trying to write porn fiction fanfiction—and I’m pretty sure what I read now is much less dense than what I read when I was younger.

Hah, that didn’t make much sense, did it.

The “why” part is probably harder to answer. This is also where I ramble, and not really answer the question!

I learned to read when I was five. Or somewhere around that age, because I think I was already able to read when I was in kindergarten. I suppose that’s nothing special; a lot of kids learn to read early. I started with the usual kid books—those Ladybird books, and then I graduated to Enid Blyton and similar books for younger children. Somewhere between the ages ten to eighteen, I managed to skip the whole young adult range of books: at that point, I’d never read the Narnia books, I had no interest in Anne of Green Gables and the subsequent books, I had no idea that The Dark is Rising sequence existed, I had no clue that there was this woman called Diana Wynne Jones who wrote hysterically funny and really clever books about magic.

I started clambering over my father’s bookshelf when I finished the Enid Blyton books and ended with books by Tolstoy and Hemingway and Steinback. He had all the old editions of the Penguin Classics like the Iliad and The Travels of Marco Polo, and books translated from Arabic and multitude of dictionaries. So I ended up reading those books instead (I never finished Anna Karenina, but hey, I was twelve). I went to boarding school when I was almost thirteen, and I guess the trend continued, except that I found fantasy and science fiction books, and I pretty much latched on to those until I finished school.

I did read some YA books then, but it never dawned to me to categorise them as such. I remember Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was required reading when I was in the second or third form. But I read awfully few of them, that’s for sure.

I went to university. I struggled to find time to read—I was an engineering major and I had no required language classes, so most of my reading time found me stuck in some horribly thick tome of Theoretical Mechanics and the like. I barely read, then.

Somewhere along the way between graduating and getting a job, I began reading the Harry Potter books, thanks to my mother, who bought them for my youngest sister, who was then around fifteen. (She’s almost eight years younger than me.) It was only at that point I realised that there was this whole niche for this type of fiction, and I wondered why I never noticed this before. I started alternating between my fantasy books and these new YA books I found, and I found myself enjoying them a lot, probably even more than the fantasy series that were pretty much my staple diet when it came to reading.

So that’s what I read now—mostly young adult fiction, and that’s what you’ll find on my bookshelf. So maybe in terms of sheer number of books, it would look like I am reading a greater number of books now, but the books are thinner and the text is larger, so I’d hesitate to say that I’m reading more. But I do enjoy what I read now, and that’s more important, don’t you think? :)