ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses of how readers respond to pressure or pleasure, and how they read for functional purposes, is located within and across the boundaries of these domains. Non-academic reading seemed to be associated with out-of-school activities and the reading material cut across fiction and non-fiction. Non-academic reading also seemed to be relegated to the periphery of mainstream academic reading, especially when participants talked about their secondary school years. Zee was a conscientious student while in primary and secondary school. Being ethnically Chinese, Zee attended Chinese vernacular primary school. She was, therefore, strongly trilingual and triliterate in Chinese, English and Malay. The pleasure Zee had felt from reading the text was at one and the same time conventional and unconventional. It was conventional in how 'the reader draws on images and feelings and ideas stirred up by the words of the text', how the transaction became a 'lived experience'.
