about

IF YOU REALLY want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born ,and what my lousy childhood was like…

To quote the opening chapter from J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye seems a little bit too daring for me. First of all, I don’t really have anything to tell (since I doubt if anyone would ever bother to hear about it), and my own childhood wasn’t even lousy. But I just like Holden Caulfield pretty much anyway.

My name is O. I’m a 21-year-old college student who lives in Thailand. I started this blog fundamentally for my meditative purpose, so if you ever bother to read it, you’ll likely to find that it is full of my personal nonsense stuff. Besides, my English vocabulary is somewhat limited. You won’t understand much what I’m writing about. Sometimes I write in Thai too. You can’t blame me for that because I just can’t help it.

I have been reading a lot of book as long as I can remember. I remember reading Charlotte’s Web and There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom when I was little (in Thai translation, of course). I didn’t even know Louis Sachar by then. I learned that he was a tall-tale master when I read Holes many many years later. In my childhood, I was also acquainted with Judy Bloom, Roald Dahl, Mary Poppins, and other children fiction those days. I can’t really remember much. I also read some Catholic stuff when I was a kid because I went to a Catholic school. I don’t recall much of them saints though.

Soon I was introduced to Harry Potter and was preoccupied with it. Some people said to me that the book was of little literary value but I read and reread it anyway. I used to read The Chamber of Secrets from the first page to the last within twenty-four hours. And from the third book on, I switched from reading it in the Thai translation to the original English version. I became somewhat acquainted to the language ever since. Many thanks to Mr. Potter.

Many years during the continuing impatiently-waiting-for-the-next-Harry-Potter-book were my blanker years. I was kind of fallen out with fictional world during that time. All I bothered to read was Harry Potter. But I chanced to read Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase when I was a college freshmen and realized that there were many more things magical outside the world of magic. Many following months, I started to read Murakami’s books like crazy. From Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball,1973 (my favorite), Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Dance,Dance,Dance, Norwegian Wood and so the long list goes. During this time, I also started listening to some music too. Now I have few favorites; The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Bob Dylan, etc.

My life kind of changed when I took the English literature course during the summer semester of my sophomore year. I was born and prepared for it all along. I really enjoyed studying fiction and short stories. We got to learn those works like Chopin’s The Story of an Hour, Hemingway’s Hills like White Elephants, Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily (my favorite of spookier kind), Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. We also learned poetry but it was a pretty new and a pretty tough stuff for me. For drama, we read Wilde’s Lady Windemere’s fan. You can guess how much I enjoyed that summer.

Actually, I am a journalism student, so I was supposed to take journalism class during my regular semester. I considered dropping journalism study for literature but it was kind of late for such decision. So the next summer which was in my junior year I took another literature course, and I have been reading a broader collection in English literature ever since. I also read the Bible and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology to supply myself with a greater understanding of literature text.

To name few so you could get the picture, I like those poems of Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, John Donne, Langston Hughes, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Shakespeare’s sonnets and many others. For fiction, I like James Joyce, Haruki Murakami (he is so far my unchallenged favorite in the master of form), and Milan Kundera.

For now, I think I will give up other interests and devote myself wholly to literature. Surely there will be a lot more things to read, to understand, and to appreciate. I am not sure whether I will ever make it. I’ll have to keep on reading. Meanwhile, I’ll update my blog when I come across something worth putting my mind into words. So see ya around.