Composer Jon Lin treasures reading with her son, believes a child’s love for books starts at home

Who: Composer Jon Lin, 40, is an adjunct lecturer at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts-University of the Arts Singapore (NAFA-UAS), vice-president of the Composers Society of Singapore and a private music teacher. Besides composing music, she also writes concert commentaries and essays for organisations including the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, Lianhe Zaobao and Singapore International Festival of Arts.

Her upcoming projects include Ascent To The Bamboo Forest, a new collaboration with contemporary dance company Arts Fission, which will be at The Arts House on June 5 and 6. She is also producing the Singapore Composers Festival on June 7, a one-day event featuring concerts and discussions centred on contemporary music by Singaporean and South Korean composers. She is married with an eight-year-old son.

“Before I had a child, I had more pockets of time to read on my own. After becoming a parent, much of my reading time became shared time with my son.

Nowadays, my favourite place to read is in bed with him at night. Although he has long been able to read independently, he still asks to read together with me at bedtime, which I find very endearing.

I treasure these moments greatly. It has become a lovely bonding ritual for us at the end of the day.

As a parent, I think it is absolutely vital for my child to see me reading. Modelling that behaviour is far more effective than forcing or rewarding him to read on his own.

Since I was young, my parents had cultivated in me a love of reading. I fondly remember mealtimes when my father would discuss something he had read. That habit fuelled my naturally inquisitive mind and instilled in me a lifelong love of learning.

I feel a mild sense of excitement whenever I see books, and I think I’ve passed that on to my son. We have books in almost every room at home, and my husband and I even installed a bookshelf in the living room to encourage reading.

I think it has worked because I often see my son lounging on the sofa with a book.

I also enjoy putting on audiobooks while driving, and my son and I sometimes listen to them together at bedtime. Audiobooks work especially well for us because we are both auditory learners.

For me, it’s also a practical way to ‘read’ more efficiently now that I have less time to sit down with a physical book.

At the moment, I’m reading A Colette Sequence And Other Poems, which was gifted to me by veteran Singaporean poet Robert Yeo.

I got to know Robert through a mutual friend, arts manager Juliana Lim, sometime in 2025. While I had read some of his poetry as a secondary school student, I did not know the poems in this particular collection.

I enjoy the forward-moving energy in Robert’s writing and the way his poems flow through his use of run-on lines.

Another book I’m reading is Pyramids At The Louvre by musicologist Glenn Watkins. It is a series of essays examining the works of 20th-century composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg, alongside artists from other fields, including Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Vaslav Nijinsky.

Even though many of these artists were active about a century ago, I still find the themes and ideas discussed by Watkins deeply resonant as a composer today.

The third book I’ve been reading is How To Raise A Healthy Gamer by Dr Alok Kanojia. Although the book centres on video games, much of what he writes applies to screen use more broadly.

As a mother raising a young child in this screen age, I think it is far more realistic to navigate healthy boundaries around screen time than to impose outright bans.

Dr Kanojia explores the emotional and psychological reasons children gravitate towards gaming, while also offering advice on how parents can guide them towards becoming more self-directed and responsible screen users.

As a practising composer, I find it not only beneficial, but also necessary to read widely. Reading nourishes my artistic life and constantly exposes me to new ideas and perspectives.

Though the books I read span very different genres, I generally enjoy a wide range of reading material in both English and Chinese, rather than gravitating towards any one specific genre.

I’m not sure if I consider this my favourite book, but I was rather taken with the image of the river as a recurring motif in Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Throughout the book, the river stands as a silent and timeless presence, calmly observing everything.

There is one line describing the river that I find especially vivid and intriguing: ‘With a thousand eyes the river looked at him, with green ones, with white ones, with crystal ones, with sky-blue ones.’”