Kitty Litter

That I have many bookshelves in my bedroom, both in my lola’s and my mom’s houses, my UP office, and in what used to be my sister’s bedroom here where I live isn’t the proof that I love reading.

Nor is it the many rolls of plastic around the house, ready for when I have my periodic spasms of book-wrapping. I cannot stand a naked book, and friends have slyly lent me their new books knowing that it will come back to them with their covers wrapped in plastic. I even have a friend whom I do writing work for who’s included book wrapping in the services she asks me to provide; if I may say so, I wrap books quite well. I don’t mind wrapping books for others, because I’ve read the Sandman, Mage, Maus, and other brilliant comics novels and many other books this way.

When I’m out, I find myself reading flyers, food labels, posters, anything when I’m at loose ends. In fact, ask me about the notices and warnings at the places I frequent, and I might be able to tell you what they are. I just stop short of tearing open the plastic wrappers of magazines; I find that rude.

I get antsy when I have nothing to read, and have trouble going to sleep if I don’t read something I’ve already read before turning out the lights. (Never read thrilling novels before going to bed; I remember picking up “The Da Vinci Code” past midnight in an attempt to relax before bed; reviled by critics and Catholics worldwide, I thought it would be a fluffy little thriller. It was, but the next thing I knew, it was dawn.)

I’m not a literary snob; the only reason why I don’t read a lot of Tagalog books is because I have trouble following the idioms used…plus, I had a horrid Filipino teacher in high school who forever destroyed the Noli, Fili, and “Florante at Laura” for me because she insisted I play the male parts in class dramatizations, claiming I was big, dark, and masculine enough to do so. If you’ve ever spent half an hour on stage sweltering under a plastic tablecloth “cloak” (under which your lines were hidden) while tied to a potted plant waiting for your buddy Florante to release you, you’d start hating the novel/epic poem too.

Unlike people I consider poseurs, I take no pride in reading the hippest novels; for one, I’ve never read “Bridget Jones’ Diary”, and until I find one priced below P 100 at Booksale or receive one as a gift, I probably never will read it. I have several books by Muriel Spark, which I’ll have to reread now that she’s died and left many paeans behind.

I’m not a reverse snob; it’s only because I want to form a relationship with a book, to discover it myself and not have it forced on me. (This can be a disadvantage; I missed out on the brilliant “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” TV series because I refused to watch it in its first season when an overzealous friend insisted I watch it or be considered an ignorant lout. So sue me, I chose “ignorant lout” until I rediscovered it in its fourth season, after I’d read about it in Time magazine.)

And it wasn’t until I was eighteen that I realized that “Dune” and “The Lord of the Rings” were works that could change lives; I’d received a copy of “Dune” in the fourth or fifth grade from a grade school friend, Jenny Disini, who was adamant that I read and love it as well as she did. An aunt gave me a handsome hardbound set of the Lord of the Rings trilogy at twelve. Both books disappeared when we moved to my lola’s house when I was fifteen…and I never regretted it until I was in college in a writing program. Luckily I got a copy of Dune from Michael Co (whom I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to because of the many things he taught me), and he wound up having to give it to me because I couldn’t, wouldn’t return it.

John Gardner, though I despised his snide and ignorant comments about creative nonfiction in "The Art of Writing" (and a student who borrowed my copy was highly amused to find several passages about creative nonfiction encircled in red, with my rebuttals written along the margins), wrote about something I’ve never forgotten. He speaks of the “fictional dream” and argues essentially that reading well-written work brings the reader to another world.

I know what he means. Whenever I finish a wonderful work, I have to shake myself, because it’s like waking up from a dream. I float around for days on the wings of the words I remember, and when someone recognizes or uses the phrases I enjoyed most, I am ecstatic. Some time ago, I received e-mail from Tata, who quoted from Steven Pressfield’s “Gates of Fire.” Since my beloved Wynn is enamored of the book, I read it, and myself fell in love with it for its narrative. I told her I liked the book too, and we fell about ourselves oohing and ahhing over Pressfield’s narrative gifts.

That’s one of the gifts of reading; when you find someone else who enjoyed a work as much as, if not more than, you did, a connection is made. This person understands part of you completely, if just in the context of that book.

It’s not just fiction that does it for me. I like poetry too, and when colleague Wendell Capili gave me a copy of “Valentine” by Carol Ann Duffy, I was thunderstruck by how her simple words conveyed a wealth of images, none of them conventionally romantic (an onion loop as a wedding ring, and a lover’s scent clinging to a knife) but beautiful nonetheless because they felt true.

And creative nonfiction, otherwise known as essays, have me completely; that’s why I have this blog, to practice the genre I adore. I think I still owe pasigraver for a copy of Umberto Eco’s “How to Travel with a Fish” although he’ll have to defeat me in unarmed combat for that. It’s very memorable for me. When I was interviewed on Studio 23 about two years ago (I was promoting my book; there, you knew I’d drag it in somehow. Buy it!), I had just read that book, and when I was asked what books I’d recommend everyone to read, I pulled a blank and just kept mentioning Eco because his book had blown me away. Manoman did I look like a moron.

I’d like to buy books more often, and one of my fantasies that comes close to unseating that of me alone with Brad Pitt (in his Achilles incarnation) on a tropical island is that of me being locked up in a bookstore that’s magically replenished whenever I finish reading everything. That (the bookstore fantasy, mind you, not the Brad Pitt thing) is why I haunt banzai cat’s and Dean Alfar’s blogs; at least once a month, they write about what they’ve read and loved. Call it vicarious enjoyment, but I really do appreciate their capsule reviews and raves.

But I share a predicament with many other Pinoys who want to read: a tight budget. When it comes to a choice between food for me to take to work (because baon is infinitely cheaper and more palatable than work cafeteria food) and a P 369 book, well, let me tell you what P 369 can buy. One “tali” each of repolyo and other leafy vegetables, a bag of assorted organic salad greens, half a kilo of potatoes, one kilo of liempo, four pieces of boneless bangus, two cans of corned beef, and three apples…food enough for several days for me. I also shoulder household cleaning items, and pay for a few debts, so although the choice pains me, I go for the food and home necessities. I know I’m already lucky because I don’t have to pay for laundry service, water, electricity, and rent as Wynn does. And that makes it a little harder sometimes, so I avoid bookstores when I’m running short.

So it’s Booksale for me every now and then, and the choices there are limited to how patient you are with pawing through the swine to find the pearls, and how willing you are to put up with romance novel fanatics who shove you out of the way to get the latest Fern Michaels potboiler.

But occasionally I will give up the food to buy a good novel, because a truly good novel can be reread an infinite number of times and yet you’ll still find something new there. That’s because we age and accumulate new experiences and perspectives. Reading becomes a more fruitful experience when you have experiences to draw on. I would go so far as to argue that when we first read, we read to learn how to live, to expand our horizons. Armed with this knowledge, we go out and live. Then we come back and read again so that we can better appreciate how we lived and the choices we made and the experiences we’ve had…and so that we can go out, and live again.